Aaron Bare
Organizational incentives — culture, KPIs, AI, and executive behavior.
Aaron Bare is a strategist, Wall Street Journal-bestselling author, and the founder of The Incentives Lab. He writes and advises on incentive design inside organizations — why culture is the residue of what a company rewards, how KPIs quietly go perverse, and how AI systems inherit the incentives their designers set.
Aaron Bare is a strategist, WSJ-bestselling author, and the founder of The Incentives Lab. He has spent two decades inside boardrooms, growth companies, and institutions watching the same pattern repeat: the strategy is fine, the people are capable, and the incentive system underneath is quietly producing the opposite of what leadership announced.
He runs Cultural Performance Audits for companies, agencies, and institutions, teaches the Incentives Academy certification, and publishes weekly on the payoff structures running organizations, markets, and artificial intelligence.
Full biography and career historyCredentials
What Aaron works on
Culture as residue
Why declared culture loses to revealed culture, and how to read the payoff sheet employees actually follow.
Perverse KPIs
How well-intentioned metrics generate the behavior leadership is trying to eliminate.
AI as an incentive machine
Models optimize the objective you wrote, not the outcome you wanted. Incentive design is now an engineering discipline.
The two-week sprint
Fixing one broken incentive faster than most organizations can schedule a reorg.
Essays by Aaron Bare
Anatomy of a Two-Week Incentive Sprint
Ten working days from a behavior nobody can explain to a structural change with a counter-metric attached.
AI Agents Inherit Your Incentives
An agent optimizes the objective you wrote down — which is usually the one your people were quietly ignoring for good reason.
Goodhart's Law in the Real World
When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Three field cases and the paired-metric fix.
What a Cultural Performance Audit Actually Finds
Not a sentiment score. A reconstruction of what your organization rewards, built from evidence nobody can manage for the survey.
The Comp Plan Is the Strategy
Whatever the strategy deck says, the compensation plan is the version of strategy your company will actually execute.
Your Best People Are Optimizing Against You
Metric gaming is not a discipline problem. It is your highest performers reading the payoff sheet correctly and acting on it faster than everyone else.
Incentive Intelligence: The Executive Skill of the Next Decade
Strategy is commoditizing. Reading the payoff structure in a room is not.
How to Fix One Broken Incentive in Two Weeks
The full-transformation instinct is why nothing changes. Pick one payoff, fix it, prove it.
We Change to Avoid Pain — Design Accordingly
Loss aversion is not a quirk to work around. It is the operating principle of every change program that has ever worked.
AI Is an Incentive Machine, Not an Intelligence Machine
Alignment is the corporate incentive problem with a faster clock. The failure modes are the ones you already know.
The Perverse Incentives Hiding in Your KPIs
Every metric you enforce is a contract with human ingenuity. Most contracts get gamed exactly as written.
Culture Is the Residue of Incentives
Values statements do not create culture. Payoffs do. Here is how to read the culture you actually have.