CHAPTER 01 / 03
Words and rewards
Suppose we ask a team to cooperate but award all recognition for individual results. It would be easy to explain a lack of mutual help purely through people’s character. Yet the arrangements we have built are part of the same story.
The official announcement of the 2024 Prize in Economic Sciences highlights Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson’s work on the relationship between social institutions and prosperity. Research at the level of countries cannot serve as a recipe for business success. It does, however, offer a strong starting point for treating rules as part of an explanation rather than as its background. [1]
CHAPTER 02 / 03
What a measure leaves out
A measure need not represent the whole truth to be useful. Trouble begins when we forget its limits. The number of completed tasks tells us something about pace; it does not tell us, by itself, whether those tasks were necessary. Response time matters, but whether the response solves the problem is another question.
The argument here is not to abandon measurement. It is to discuss what each indicator misses alongside what it shows. In our example, a team may need to make contributions to shared work visible as it tracks individual results. There is no single formula for doing that in every institution.
CHAPTER 03 / 03
Redefining success
An old measure of success can give the right answer to the wrong question when conditions change. Before reviewing targets, we might ask: which behaviour would a reasonable person learn to repeat under these arrangements? If the answer is far from the institution’s stated values, a new slogan alone will not be enough.
Redefining success need not mean changing everything at once. It begins with making the reasons for a target, and its side effects, visible. The distance between what we expect people to do and what we reward them for doing is a concrete place to work.
25 September 2026 · Opening text completed and revised.