[donw]

It... really doesn't.

Sales is a great example.

In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time!

Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals.

But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all.

Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.

[WalterBright]

Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.

[donw]

That only applies to small companies.

Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.

Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.

This problem can't be.

[WalterBright]

Large companies still have plenty of incentive pay.

Currently, teachers have zero incentive to get results. I bet you'll see results that follow incentives. Of course it won't be perfect - but I bet it'll be much better than the current disaster.

People like money. Especially the people who say they aren't motivated by money :-)

[saagarjha]

I work for a large company notorious for shooting itself in the foot because someone’s personal incentives to ship a shiny new thing and get promoted causes long-term repetitional harm as older things get abandoned. We pay for performance too, and quite well at that :)

[wcarey]

Have you thought out the perverse incentives your pay scheme would create?

[viraptor]

Like teachers giving answers to students because higher grades / more passing means more money...

[WalterBright]

Have a third party do the testing.

[bandrami]

You really need to see more of the actual economy, because this is embarrassingly naive.

[condwanaland]

You have another comment somewhere here saying that 80% of companies close within 5 years. You may be making the other sides point...