Every Leader Is an Artist: How the World’s Greatest Artists Can Make You a More Creative Leader

Chapter 13

Do We Really Not Care About Leadership?

We have done a fair amount of consulting with companies in the area of compensation. One of the things that executives hate most in this arena is incentive plans that pay out for qualitative results when there isn’t sufficient funding—basically having to pay for something that isn’t affordable. We understand this opposition and agree. In response, however, some companies have thrown out the proverbial baby with the bathwater and have rejected the use of qualitative metrics altogether in sole favor of monetary measurements. That, in turn, creates the problem that we hate: paying executives for long-term performance, as almost always measured by stock price, when there has been no noticeable short-term ...