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Encouraging rewarded behavior...
Jan. 16th, 2002 10:11 amSomewhere in my reading, I recall encountering a management principle along the lines of: you get the behavior you reward. It is applicable beyond the bounds of the business environment, of course, but I have found this principle to be true.
Most people, in fact, if they think about this one for a bit will tend to agree to its truth. Who hasn't witnessed kids who latch on to an annoying behavior, knowing that they'll get what they want as a result of it?
Yet despite what one might imagine as a general consensus regarding the truth of the proposition, we - both individually and institutionally - tend to ignore it when faced with poor behavior.
Take the post office, for instance. When I was a kid playing correspondence chess via postcard, a round trip between New York and Chicago would take 4-5 days. Today, a postcard is lucky to make the trip in one direction in that amount of time. I am almost daily confronted by people who are angry that their correspondence arrived inordinately late or not at all using the USPS.
The volume of mail going through the system fell as the result of the anthrax panic in the wake of September 11. The post office lost a bunch of money, and stands to have to invest billions to attempt to make the postal mail safe from bioterrorism attacks.
A rate increase is therefore in the works. As the size of the increase is dependent on the size of the crisis, and as the size of the crisis is dependent on how inconvenienced people are, it follows - to me at least - that this is a prime example of encouraging poor performance.
The public education system seems to me to be a similarly blighted arena. The more money that politicians pour into the budgets of educrats, the greater the erosion of educational standards. Here, too, public policy rewards poor performance.
What is to blame for this tendency to ignore common sense? I think it is the idea that "government knows best."
Cheers...
Most people, in fact, if they think about this one for a bit will tend to agree to its truth. Who hasn't witnessed kids who latch on to an annoying behavior, knowing that they'll get what they want as a result of it?
Yet despite what one might imagine as a general consensus regarding the truth of the proposition, we - both individually and institutionally - tend to ignore it when faced with poor behavior.
Take the post office, for instance. When I was a kid playing correspondence chess via postcard, a round trip between New York and Chicago would take 4-5 days. Today, a postcard is lucky to make the trip in one direction in that amount of time. I am almost daily confronted by people who are angry that their correspondence arrived inordinately late or not at all using the USPS.
The volume of mail going through the system fell as the result of the anthrax panic in the wake of September 11. The post office lost a bunch of money, and stands to have to invest billions to attempt to make the postal mail safe from bioterrorism attacks.
A rate increase is therefore in the works. As the size of the increase is dependent on the size of the crisis, and as the size of the crisis is dependent on how inconvenienced people are, it follows - to me at least - that this is a prime example of encouraging poor performance.
The public education system seems to me to be a similarly blighted arena. The more money that politicians pour into the budgets of educrats, the greater the erosion of educational standards. Here, too, public policy rewards poor performance.
What is to blame for this tendency to ignore common sense? I think it is the idea that "government knows best."
Cheers...
