Navigator of Ignorance

Das Managementmodell “halte dem Esel eine Karotte vor die Nase um ihn in die richtige Richtung zu lotsen” mag nicht sehr wertschätzend für den Mitarbeiter klingen – wer will schon gerne mit einem störrischen Esel verglichen werden – funktioniert aber sehr gut, sofern man die passende Karotte findet. Geld ist, zumindest für einen gewissen Zeitraum, der Joker unter den Karotten. Folgend ein paar Beispiele:

Ken O’Brien was an NFL quarterback in the 1980s and 1990s. Early in his career, he threw a lot of interceptions, so one clever team lawyer wrote a clause into O’Brien’s contract penalizing him for each one he threw. The incentive worked as intended: His interceptions plummeted. But that’s because he stopped throwing the ball.

Years ago, AT&T executives tried to encourage productivity by paying programmers based on the number of lines of code they produced. The result: programs of Proustian length.

In the early 1980s, Bob Beck joined Bank of America as the head of human resources. The B of A was suffering from a lot of bad loans made to countries in Latin America. The source of the problem was soon clear to Bob: Loan officers were compensated on the volume of loans they made — the more loans, the higher their compensation. They would take the money and, in some cases, leave the bank before the loans went bad.

Fannie Mae, during the time it got into trouble by underwriting mortgages that would likely default and — believe it or not, even up this very moment — rewards people on the basis of the volume of loans they underwrite. Just the other day this person complained that she had “wasted” three hours reviewing loans that she had to turn down. The time was wasted because no loans were made, and thus no progress was made on the path to earning bonuses.

Die Beispiele sind folgenden lesenswerten Artikeln entnommen:
Why Incentives Are Irresistible, Effective, and Likely to Backfire
When Will We Ever Learn?

Ich denke ohne neuen Incentives die längerfrisitg orientiert sind, eine gewisse Sustainability ermöglichen, und nicht nur das Individuum belohnen werden wir aus der aktuellen Krise nicht herauskommen.