Performance Pay As a Competitive Weapon, Winning Results from Compensation Policy

This book sets a new course for those who are frustrated trying to force fit executive compensation programs from the archives of conventional practice to their companies’ unique situations. It provides diagnostics as well as prescriptions for creating a compensation system based on business analysis, rather than peer imitation. What’s more, it sets forth a new language of compensation policy that will open the communication channel between senior executives and human resources professionals, elevate incentive compensation to fundamental strategic concern, and clear a new path to competitive advantage. In short, this book replaces the old touchstones of conformity with a powerful incentive-compensation theory that can embolden management to set its own course in uniting pay and performance.


Written by two top compensation specialists who’ve worked with both Fortune 500 and emerging entrepreneurial companies, Performance Pay as a Competitive Weapon, demonstrates how and why an “achievement pay” policy, when properly implemented, positively affects individual and company performance at every level of the organization. Rather than repackaging long-standing conventions, as so many articles and research findings in the daily press do, this unique work adopts a fresh pattern of analysis for fusing the disciplines of business strategy, organization, and compensation. The authors zero in on key middle- and senior-management compensation questions, such as:

• Should base salary or total compensation anchor a company’s pay hierarchy?

• How can incentive-policy groups be configured to break down provincialism imbedded in a company’s departmental silos and chain of command?

• How can performance metrics be designed to embody a manager’s sphere of authority and critical decision trade-offs?



Entire chapters are also devoted to solutions that aggressively challenge conventional practice, while constructing new techniques for bringing pay and “real” performance closer together. The book never raises a question for which it does not offer a “how-to” prescription and, in turn, create a solid bond between each facet of compensation policy and the competitive strategy of a business, its organization, and its leadership style.


The clouds of complexity and controversy, even on the political stage, surrounding the abuses and discontinuities in executive-compensation practice won’t be settled by this book alone. But, Performance Pay as a Competitive Weapon does offer new perspectives and ideas to awaken all critics and practitioners of the compensation discipline from their slumber – compensation committees, human-resources managers, CEO’s, academics and members of the business press – and give them some real substance, rather than sound bites, to debate.