More wisdom from Hard Facts:

Harvard Business Review has published at least three articles on incentive pay and organizational performance in the past decade.  … Each makes a similar point: compensating people for only individual performance creates more problems than it solves, so rewards should emphasize organizational, not just individual, performance. … Not one of these articles refers to the prior article, because HBR precludes footnotes and … discourages references to prior work. (pp.43,44)

James March … put it “Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance, and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.” … Knowledge isn’t generated by lone geniuses who magically produce brilliant new ideas in their gigantic brains.  This is a dangerous fiction. … Hackman was troubled because he could only find published success stories about companies that had redesigned work to be more motivating and meaningful.  Yet in his experience most redesign efforts were failing. … a study found no significant performance differences between Peters and Waterman’s “excellent” companies and a representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies.  (pp.46-48)