Incentives are a Poor Substitute for Courageous Management

The limitation of incentives as a management tool is that it presumes that people already have the knowledge, the tools, the skills and the ambition to achieve, and are lacking only a tangible motive to put it all to use. In some circumstances this may be true, but the fact is in many cases incentives are the icing on a cake that is not there. Great managers give their people the confidence that, individually and collectively, greater success, fulfillment, accomplishment and profits are indeed attainable.