I enjoyed Don's article on firefighting and it reminded me of something so true we forget it all the time: be careful what you ask for. Or, put differently, people will do what they're incented to do.

Y2K

Back in the days when Cobol breathing dinosaurs roamed the earth there was this problem we were trying to fix and verify all the issues. I had a fat juicy consulting contract to ensure that not only was everything inside a company remediated but that they had failover plans.

One day I was in a plant and I was going through their operations manuals when the plant manager bragged that they'd thought of everything, written it down (early ISO-itis, clearly) and that there was nothing I or an "act of god" could do to shut down the plant.

As I was gazing at this pompous combed over windbag I could see the emergency cutoff swtich for the computer room power. So I walked over, opened the cover, and pushed it.

The entire plant shut down, idling 200+ workers for hours. But in all our planning we'd never thought to test that particular item. I went to eight more factories to test their failover - by the second one they'd all tested and it worked.

I got in exactly no trouble whatsoever because I was being paid to find problems that'd been over looked.

Sales

Sales people may fail to make sales no matter how you try to pay them, but they'll always focus on the shortest line between them and a paycheck.

You want to pay a guy more on new customers? Perpare to lose sales nto your install base.

Pay them to have face-to-face meetings? Watch out for those expense reports because your guys will stack up so-called qualified prospects from morning until night.

You want deals closed? Be sure to specify margin.

So when you tell a sales guy he'll get paid for X, make sure you really want X because you'll get a lot of it.