Steve Kerr, former chief learning officer for General Electric and Goldman Sachs, has written a short book on Reward Systems: Does Yours Measure Up? The book is in the Harvard Business Press Memo to the CEO series. However, any employee at any level can learn valuable lessons from the enjoyable book.
I find a lot of short, popular books like this — it clocks in at less than 136 pages — are relatively short on content. Many can be summarized in a couple of pages or paragraphs. But not this book by Steve Kerr. Kerr has had a long career in acadame and industry; he is also an excellent story teller. As a result, the book provides a wealth of information on what goes wrong, and what can go right, with reward and compensation systems.
The book contains a number of checklists and guiding principles. The major organizational principles are:
- Define performance in actionable terms
- Measure the right things
- Reward the right things
This may sound simple. Of course, the devil is in the details. The book provides a great deal of information on how you can attempt to follow the three principles.
