Water the Roots, Not the Leaves

I'm talking about structures - more specifically incentive structures.

Politics, economies, sports teams, companies are all driven by incentives

Those that set up well calibrated incentive structures are the most successful

That's why capitalism (with regulation to account for self-centeredness of humankind) works so well and communism doesn't

Leaders most effectively achieve their objectives by creating structures which incentivise those within the structure to help them achieve their given objective

This could be monetary, status, or mission based incentives.

This is where man management comes in - to correctly calibrate incentive based structure for each individual.

Miscalibration is deadly - it leads to tens of thousands of hours of wasted work, bureaucracy, work produced for the individual not the group.

Get everyone aligned in one direction by calibrating their underlying desire with your objective and it's magic.

This supersedes any policy or decision making process.

With poor incentive structures, even the best policies don't have the necessary speed (or even availability) of a feedback loop to reach the minimum delivery quality required for an effective outcome.

An average policy delivered well will beat a great policy delivered poorly every time.

Ultimately, unidentified incentive misalignment signals the beginning of the end for a company.

Even a cash-rich company who can pump funds to hiring more teams to increase productivity will eventually succumb.

Deliveries slow, quality worsens, missions becomes confused, misalignment grows.

The solution is to return to first principle thinking - what is the underlying thing this person wants and how do I provide it to them in a way that is mutually beneficial.

Water the roots, not the leaves.