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Not going to belabor this point: until automation is fully at scale (decades or more), you need good people to get good results. Most executives miss this and think everything is about product and process, but that’s not true. People design those products. People market those products. Those processes are carried out by people.
People do matter. That’s important to understand. Any issues with “employee engagement,” fluffy bullshit though it is to many, begin with that: executives who don’t get that people matter.
Once you realize that people matter, you need a way to keep the good ones.
This gets tricky.
Unless you’re a bank, you can’t make everyone a VP and mint their salary. It’s not possible. It barely even works for banks, honestly.
So over time we got guys like Daniel Pink coming along saying “Oh, people don’t care about money! Intrinsic rewards!”
Complete bullshit. A ping pong table doesn’t pay for my fucking car. I want money. We all do it. We’re just not supposed to discuss it, then show outrage when everyone else is chasing the cheddar too.
But only about 10–20% of a given company is gonna really get “minted” money (varies by profession, obviously).
