Making A Difference:

Abstract

Many times, companies impose an incentive plan without making the effort to understand the realities of how the organization operates-and the plan fails. This article describes four complex "realities"-financial/strategic, behavioral, organizational, and technical-and how they influence the potential for success in designing and implementing incentive plans. Maintaining that the design procedure itself is now as important to a plan's success as is the design's technical soundness, the author uses case studies to illustrate how these complex realities have influenced both successes and failures in incentive plans.