The incentives running your organization are already writing your strategy.
Essays on incentive design, perverse incentives, behavioral neuroscience, and AI alignment — written from inside the audits.
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.
What Crisis Reveals About Incentives
When time disappears, institutions stop performing their values and start revealing them.
Why Government Transformation Stalls
Public institutions reward the avoidance of blame far more reliably than the delivery of outcomes.
Every Policy Is an Incentive System Wearing a Statute
Governments write intentions. Citizens read payoffs. The gap between the two is where policy fails.
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.