A Quote by Ramez Naam
When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.
It doesn't matter if you mean to do the right thing - if you only do bad things. You need to learn how to do right things. Doing is what affects people.
People ask me, how is managing in the New Economy different from managing in the Old Economy? Actually, it's a lot the same. It's about the financial discipline of the bottom line, understanding your customers, segmenting your customers by their needs, and building a world-class management team.
I've never really been into doing a lot of social media, but it's a great way for people to talk amongst themselves on a large platform and to have a large conversation with people who also enjoy the same thing.
If your incentives are set up wrong - if for some reason you reward people for behavior that's actually bad for your customers or your organization - then you're going to encourage that behavior.
If you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part.
Often people say they can't base their strategies on customers because customers make unreasonable requests and because customers vary too much. Such opinions reveal serious misconceptions. The truly outside-in company definitely does not try to serve all the needs of its customers. Instead, its managers are clear about what their organization can and should do for customers, and whatever they do they do well. They focus.
Success is a learnable skill. You can learn to succeed at anything. If you want to be a great golfer, you can learn how to do it. If you want to be a great piano player, you can learn how to do it. If you want to be truly happy, you can learn how to do it. If you want to be rich, you can learn how to do it. It doesn't matter where you are right now. It doesn't matter where you're starting from. What matters is that you are willing to learn.
What I really want are students who want to partner with other people, to be part of an organization and to influence people so that they can accomplish things that the organization would not have accomplished otherwise.
The thing that still somehow surprises me, and I have come to this realization over and over again, is this nonsense that gets peddled regarding, 'Just work really hard, be really smart, do the right thing, and you'll get rewarded.' No, you don't. You don't get rewarded for those things in this society.
Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.
The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed.
They said, "You know, this issue doesn't seem to resignate with the people." And I said, you know something? Whether it resignates or not doesn't matter to me, because I stand for doing what's the right thing, and what the right thing is hearing the voices of people who work.
The pre-owned market allows us to reach customers who really want an Apple device but can't really reach that point. I think it is great for people, or otherwise, we wouldn't we doing it. If we were not proud of the product, we wouldn't be doing it.
There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don't know what that is, I'm really curious about that. I'm really curious about what people think they're doing when they're doing something evil, casually. I think it's really interesting, that we benefit from suffering so much, and we excuse ourselves from it.
Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.
Related Authors
Ayn Rand Quotes
Russian
Writer
C. S. Lewis Quotes
British
Writer
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes
French
Writer
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
English
Writer
H. L. Mencken Quotes
American
Writer
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Japanese
Writer
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
American
Writer
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Russian
Writer
Mark Twain Quotes
American
Writer
Mason Cooley Quotes
American
Writer
Ray Bradbury Quotes
American
Writer
Samuel Johnson Quotes
English
Writer
Seth Godin Quotes
American
Writer
Sherrilyn Kenyon Quotes
American
Writer
Suzanne Collins Quotes
American
Writer