Description

By (author) Harnish Verne; By (author) Ross, Sebastian

How you compensate people is one of the most important strategic decisions your company will make – but few “get it right and out of sight.” Nail it and you can add hundreds of percentage points to the bottom line while driving up the energy in the organization. Make the wrong call (or piecemeal the decision together), and the results will create needless drama throughout the organization. Do any of these challenges sound familiar? • “I gave a star performer a raise, and now everyone else is marching into my office, demanding one, too.” • “If anyone looked closely at our payroll, it would be hard to rationalize why we”re paying certain people what we do.” • “I”m tired of losing our best people to the Googles of the world because we can”t match their salaries.”
Compensation is one of your largest expenses, one you can turn it into a strategic advantage in attracting, retaining, and motivating talent (or not accidentally demotivating them). In this highly practical book, the authors share 5 principles for designing effective compensation systems along with plenty of examples from leading small, medium, and large firms across various industries. You”ll learn: 1. The #1 mistake business leaders make in setting up their compensation plans 2. The psychological aspects of compensation underpinning successful plans 3. How individual bonuses can backfire 4. The power of gamifying gains to drive up energy and engagement 5. Whether you want to be queen/king or rich!

Table of contents:

Overview – Five Principles for Effective Compensation Design Be Different: Aligning Compensation with Culture and Strategy Fairness Not Sameness: Creating a Coherent and Flexible Pay Structure Easy on the Carrots: Using Individual Incentives Effectively Gamify Gains: Driving Critical Numbers Through P(l)ay Sharing Is Caring: Getting Employees to Think Like Owners Closing: Get Pay Right and Out of Sight Appendix About the Authors

Review quote:

Doing everything differently is a hallmark of great firms – and that includes a company’s approach to compensation. This easy-to-read book is an essential primer in getting you to ask the right questions in designing a compensation plan that is right for your organization.

— Shari Conaway, Senior Director, People Department, Southwest Airlines

Review quote:

Scaling Up Compensation is an excellent resource for management and boards working to scale their companies or making changes to their business strategy and ways of working. Verne and Sebastian, through their interrelated 5 Design Principles, masterfully illustrate how to design effective and tailored compensation plans. I fully concur that the end goal of any successful compensation design is to increase the total energy within employees so that they collectively achieve the right results the right way. An insightful, engaging and pragmatic read!

— Cynthia Trudell, Retired Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, PepsiCo

Biographical note:
VERNE HARNISH is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 18,000 members worldwide, and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program held at MIT, a program in which he still teaches today. Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 260 partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past four decades helping companies scaleup. He’s the author of the bestseller Mastering the Rockefeller Habits; authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times, for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword; and wrote Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0), which has been translated into 26 languages and has won eight major international book awards including the prestigious International Book Award for Best General Business book. His latest