Can we really pay for performance—and if we can, should we?
I’ve spent years watching companies pour enormous amounts of time, energy, and money into pay systems. Individualized bonus structures, performance ratings, job architecture, leveling guides, even skills-based pay—all built on the assumption that if we tweak the right levers, we’ll unlock motivation, performance, and ultimately, business results.
History—and experience—tell a different story. From cobras in colonial India to global financial disasters, incentives have shaped human behavior in powerful and often unintended ways. The same patterns play out inside organizations. Pay is meant to motivate, but too often it splinters into bonuses, targets, and narrow metrics that add complexity, fuel bureaucracy, and drive the wrong outcomes.
Most of the systems we use today were designed for the industrial age—for factories, farms, and work built on repetition and control. Today, most of us are “knowledge workers,” solving unpredictable problems in creative, collaborative ways. Innovation is no longer the domain of a few; it’s a strategic imperative for everyone. Breakthroughs often come from unexpected minds: junior employees, outsiders, or those closest to the work.
That kind of innovation depends on trust, autonomy, and curiosity. Overbearing pay systems can suppress those very traits.
In What Pay Costs, I set out to trace where our current assumptions about pay and motivation came from, to examine the research on what truly drives people, to highlight companies that succeeded (and failed), and to outline an alternative path forward—one that embraces how work is really changing.
If you, like me, want to simplify pay and find more effective ways to unlock human potential, I hope this book provides the research and real-world stories to help you make your case. And if you believe that pay is the best way to motivate, and that performance management creates the competition needed for growth, I hope this book sparks a healthy debate about the role of rewards in the workplace.
Drawing on research, stories, and years of experience inside organizations, I’ve written What Pay Costs to offer a perspective on how to use pay effectively—not as the sole lever of performance, but as part of a coherent system that strengthens culture and helps companies thrive.
What Pay Costs is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle (affiliate link).