Most people know I’m not the biggest morning person. If I have to be somewhere—especially early—I want to get out of bed at the very last possible moment and still arrive on time. And I’m definitely not one of those people who rolls out of bed instantly awake and ready

In the first article in this series, we looked at where today’s compensation systems came from. They weren’t created because someone discovered the perfect way to pay employees. They were designed to solve specific business problems. In the second article, we looked at compensation systems as measurement systems. Hourly pay

Last week, we looked at how today’s compensation systems evolved. Hourly pay wasn’t invented because it was the perfect way to compensate employees. It was created because factories needed people in the building at specific times. That raises an important question. If different compensation systems were designed to solve different

If you ask ten business owners how employees should be paid, you’ll usually hear one of two answers. “They should be hourly.” “They should be salary.” It’s often presented as though one of those options is the “right” way to pay people. But here’s the problem: Neither one was designed

Recently, I spent two months operating at about 20% capacity. A medical issue. A medication that made me feel awful. A doctor who kept saying, “It’s not ideal, but give it another two months.” This isn’t a criticism of my doctor. It’s a description of the system. In our current

I see the same pattern over and over again: business owners trying to make a strategic decision but starting with the wrong question entirely. It’s easy to think that the decision you need to make is the right question, but that fails to account for some critical assumptions and doesn’t