Critical to the success of every organization, strategy is not a long planning exercise or document. Strategy can be simple, fun and effective and is founded on a set of five interrelated and powerful choices that positions an organization to win.

ON Strategy

Playing To win
At best, Management Models help managers make better choices faster, without having to go back to first principles to build their decisions from the ground up. However, at their worst, they perpetuate the making of bad decisions. That is why when it comes to Management Models, quality is key.

ON Management Models

A New Way to Think

Integrative thinking is a form of reasoning which allows you to constructively face the tensions of opposing models. Instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, you generate a creative solution. Your solution contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.

ON Integrative Thinking

Creating Great Choices

Organizations need to incorporate the best of design thinking into their ways of working to unleash innovation and creativity. An organization will be able to counter-balance analytical thinking with intuitive thinking – to enable it to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge. 

ON Design of Business

The Design Of Business

While prevailing theory holds that stock-based compensation perfectly aligns corporate executives’ incentives with those of shareholders, it does the opposite. As a consequence, executives have done brilliantly while shareholders have become increasingly frustrated. Incentives and governance practice needs to be transformed to enable corporations to prosper in a way that better serves society.

ON Incentives & Governance

Fixing the Game

The combination of the stagnation of medium incomes and the rapid rise of high incomes is threatening the future of democratic capitalism. Its predictive future requires building a more robust knowledge, transactional and physical infrastructure for broadly shared prosperity.

ON Democratic Capitalism

When More is Not Better

For both social entrepreneurs and corporations, the key tenet of social innovation is finding ways to make the world a better place. My work focuses on building tools for social entrepreneurs to create more powerful models for creating value for society and developing models to guide corporations on a path of productive corporate citizenship.

ON Social Innovation

Getting Beyond Better

INCENTIVES & GOVERNANCE

There is a crisis in the governance of modern organizations, especially publicly traded corporations. Prevailing executive compensation theory holds that stock-based compensation for corporate executives perfectly aligns their incentives with those of shareholders.  That theory notwithstanding, the fates of corporate executives and of shareholders have diverged dramatically with the former doing brilliantly and the latter becoming increasingly frustrated. 

In 2011, I published a book Fixing the Game:  Bubbles, Crashes and What Capitalism can Learn from the NFL that explained why this schism exists and how Incentives & Governance theory and practice needs to change to enable corporations to prosper in a way that better serves society.

My work and writing on Incentives & Governance spans a variety of themes:

  1. Executive Compensation – The theory of alignment through stock-based compensation, the inherent fallacies in that view and the ways it can be transformed to improve corporate and capital markets performance.
  2. Corporate Governance – The limitations of the prevailing views on the effectiveness of corporate governance and the ways boards can be structured and organized to perform better for shareholders and society.
  3. Capital vs. Talent – The modern economic battle between capital and talent which has replaced the 20th century battle between capital and labor, how the battle shifted and took shape, and what are the implications for capital, talent and labor in the modern environment.
  4. Incentives and Smart Regulation – Why the regulation of inputs – like the regulation of level of domestic television content – is much less effective than the regulation of outputs – the regulation by setting domestic television viewership performance targets, and how policy makers can utilize output-oriented regulation to improve performance
Human Nature and Incentive Systems – How we often fail to understand fundamental aspects of human nature when we design incentive systems, in particular by over-estimating the power of monetary incentives and under-estimating the power of social factors.

on incentives governance

Articles

Harvard Business Review
The Age of Customer Capitalism 
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Interviews

Forbes
Fighting The Kool-Aid Of Stock-Based Compensation: Q&A With Roger Martin 
LISTEN
Watch "A Plan is Not a Strategy" from Harvard Business Review