QOTD: People do almost precisely what they are incentivized to do.

Incentives Are Everything. While Joe Stiglitz and other intellectuals are now openly questioning the neoliberal school of economics from which they so greatly benefitted, it strikes me that few of these types have ever signed the front side of a paycheck. Ten years in business has taught all of us that people do almost precisely what they are incentivized to do. Get the incentives right, and wonderful outcomes will follow that require little management oversight. Get them wrong, and people will give you exactly what you asked for regardless of whether it's in the long-term interest of the company. Even if there were someone smart enough to try to "fix" this universally human reality (and I sincerely doubt such a person exists here on Earth), management would find their time much more efficiently allocated to creating the correct incentives in the first place.

- Jason Trennert