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! 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 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 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! VERNE HARNISH is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 18,000 members world-wide, and founded and chaired for fi fteen 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 290 partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past four decades helping companies scaleup. The Global Scaleup Fellow at The Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, he’s the author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits ; authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times , for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword; wrote Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) , which has been translated into 26 languages and has won eight major international book awards including the International Book Award for Best General Business book; and is the co-author of Scaling Up Compensation . His latest book is Start to Scale . Verne serves on several boards including vice chair of The Riordan Clinic; co-founde