Change the Incentive, Change the Outcome
By seeking a meaningful life above all else we find happiness and even joy
I spent a number of years working in sales and a couple managing a sales team. Sales, in the era in which I was taught, was about incentives and motivation, as through incentives and motivation (it is assumed) activity will be stimulated and sales will flourish.
Sales is hard when you face rejection on a daily basis. To pick up the phone immediately following a rejection takes grit and perseverance. Therefore, the focus on incentives and motivation is paramount to the success of any sales organization. But it also requires sales reps who individually feel strongly motivated by the kinds of incentives offered.
In other words, money.
Sales results are not motivated so much by pizza Fridays or three-day cruises to Baja California, but rather by financial bonuses and commissions. The more professional sales jobs offer base salaries that take care of a person’s basic needs, while keeping them hungry enough to push for more sales to make a healthier income than their base. And, of course, if they cruise along on their base for any length of time they lose their jobs.
But there are a growing number of sales professionals who are motivated only partially by financial incentives. Instead they need to fully believe in what they’re selling and feel a strong sense of alignment with the values of the company so that selling for the company can feel at least minimally meaningful.
Back in the mid 90s I was working a phone sales job, business-to-business office supplies. After an hour or so on the phone on my first day I encountered an objection I didn’t know how to handle. I walked to the front of the room where there were two sales managers sitting behind desks on an elevated platform. I asked them how to handle the objection, and without hesitation the lead sales manager rattled off a smooth sounding response that seemed compelling.
And so I asked, “That sounds great, but is it true?” What followed felt surreal, as though it could have been scripted for a Jim Carrey comedy. The two sales managers looked at each other, then back at me, and then burst into laughter. Then he said, “You’re not going to make it here if you’re worried about that.”
Capitalism is all about incentives. While sales reps are provided with financial incentives to drive for more sales, CEOs and C-Suite executives are provided with various forms of financial incentives collectively known as the golden parachute, coming in the form of stock options and bonuses. And what are they being driven toward? Increasing the profitability of the company.
CEOs have a fiduciary responsibility to deliver ever increasing profits, which is why corporate boards seek CEOs with sociopathic tendencies, because they want CEOs who can lay off thousands of people without losing any sleep over it should it become necessary to maintain the share price.
And why do corporate boards relentlessly incentivize their executive team to drive for ever increasing profits? Because they themselves hold a sizable amount of stock in the company and increased profits means their stock holdings are more valuable, and because they answer to the shareholders who have the same motivation to increase their wealth.
And who are the shareholders? Most of them are referred to as “institutional investors.” Meaning investment banks, University endowments, insurance companies, hedge funds, and pensions plans.
And (and this is a big and), mutual funds. Which translates to the majority of all people who seek to build a retirement fund by investing in highly diversified vehicles that will protect them from market volatility. In other words, people like you and me putting away a small percentage of our income year in and year out.
These funds contain holdings in hundreds, if not thousands of individual stocks. Which means short of an enormous amount of research we have no idea how our dollars are being utilized, or what kind of ethics or environmental practices are being carried out by the companies we’re invested in.
We are individually incentivized to build for retirement, so we go with the safe bet. Pension funds are required to wisely invest in companies that will appreciate over time. Insurance companies are required to hold vast sums of money in near liquid form to cover payouts and therefore invest those sums in safe bets. And on it goes.
We all seek to grow the nest egg and the method of growth is to financially incentivize, all the way down to the guy on the phone pushing for the sale. And the only thing holding it together is the strength of individuals to balance the drive for financial gain with the ethics of doing the right thing.
A sales rep willing to resign over ethical conflicts, or at a minimum to push back against questionable policies. A CEO pushing back against her board over tactics that will hurt large numbers of people. A couple nearing retirement deciding to divest their portfolio of chemical and oil companies. A scientist courted by defense contractors instead joins a non-profit at a fraction of the income to do work that feels meaningful.
We’ve all been sold a product that we’ve bought into. That product is money. We seek it at every stage of life beyond adolescence. And yet seeking it to the exclusion of meaning makes us feel empty and hollow.
There is a reason Hollywood keeps cranking out futuristic dystopian dramas, because it’s a trajectory many people perceive we’re on. And we consume this content like we can’t get enough. But to change the trajectory we have only to do one very simple thing: change the incentive.
If the incentive was meaning the whole game would change.
Meaning comes from doing meaningful things — like helping people, creating art, music, beauty. Not the kind of beauty the fashion industry mistakenly defines as such, but actual beauty. As in the beauty of kindness, interdependence in action, and love for the sake of love. Again, not the kind of cheapened love as defined by the sex industry, but authentic and wholesome love. These things bring meaning and joy.
In our journey of gradually building a cabin and homestead on our land there are many physical tasks that could easily be delegated, but that I find strangely satisfying. Like digging for example. Who would have thunk? It’s hard. It strains my back at times. I feel exhausted after digging for more than an hour. But I strangely come away from the experience feeling like I had fun, as there is something so basically satisfying about digging a foundation hole or a trench for conduit.
Many people find weeding to be very satisfying. Not me, but others do. We are currently loving our new chickens. They are funny creatures. We care for them, and they give us more eggs than we know what to do with.
We regularly give money, food, and blessings to homeless people on our trips into town. There is the argument that they will just spend the money on drugs or alcohol, or that they’re too lazy to work, or too dirty. Maybe some. Maybe many. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the giving of not just money, but blessings. Because it’s meaningful to us.
Helping family is great. Helping a stranger is even better, because it reduces our intention to something so basic — help merely for the sake of helping.
Is it truly necessary for us to pursue a larger home, a newer car, or a more extravagant vacation? Must we strive for a six or seven-figure income and the associated social status that wealth brings? Or perhaps, what we genuinely require is something far simpler: meaning.
“Yeah but,” you say, “we all need to make money to live.”
Of course we do, as it’s the universal medium of exchange we’ve adopted, but making money our God leaves us feeling empty and hollow and directs us toward the theorized dystopian future we’ve seen in hundreds of movies.
Making meaning our God, or to put it more elegantly, seeking a meaningful life above all else, we find happiness and even joy. We fill the hole of despair and monotony with the beauty of doing work that feels deeply satisfying.
Changing this one incentive will change the trajectory of humanity. It will transform business, politics, government, retirement, child rearing, education, sports, entertainment, and so much more.
It’s so simple. We just take a small step back from the money orientation and do something for the sake of meaning. One small step each day of our lives. We can do this.
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Brilliant! Thank you!!!