FIELD MANUAL DISPATCH | SUBJECT: INCENTIVES
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear
Survival Fact
When Netflix eliminated late fees, it didn’t just make customers happier. It fundamentally changed the game.
For years, video rental stores treated late fees as a necessary part of the business. Customers hated them. Stores depended on them. Everyone complained, and nothing changed.
Then Netflix asked a different question: What if the problem wasn’t the customer? What if the problem was the system?
By removing late fees entirely, Netflix eliminated one of the biggest frustrations in home entertainment and helped redefine consumer expectations. Blockbuster spent years trying to enforce the rules. Netflix changed the rules.
One company became an entertainment giant. The other became a documentary.
The lesson? Sometimes the smartest solution isn’t fighting behavior. It’s redesigning the environment that creates it.
The Bigger Fence Problem
Every zombie movie eventually produces the same idea: “We need a bigger wall.”
It’s understandable. A wall feels like action. It’s visible. It’s measurable. It gives everyone something to point at during meetings.
The problem is that walls require constant maintenance. And zombies only need one opening.
The corporate zombie world has its own version of bigger walls:
- More rules and stricter policies
- Multi-layered approval chains
- Extra procedures and mandatory training
- More meetings to discuss why there are too many meetings
Whenever a problem appears, the instinct is often the same: build a bigger fence. But survivors know something important. The strongest defense isn’t always a bigger barrier. Sometimes it’s a better path.
The Capital Herd
Whether we’re talking about money, customers, employees, readers, voters, investors, or social media users, one truth remains remarkably consistent: People move toward incentives.
Capital behaves this way. Attention behaves this way. Organizations behave this way. Humans behave this way.
We like to believe people make decisions through pure, detached logic. Most of the time, they simply follow the path that appears easiest, safest, most rewarding, or most convenient.
Survivors understand this. The horde tries to force behavior; survivors design environments that encourage it. That’s the difference between fighting a current and steering a river.
Rule #1: Build Infrastructure Shelters
In a zombie apocalypse, smart survivors don’t just build walls. They build shelters people actually want to stay inside—places with food, water, security, and purpose.
The same principle applies in business.
Many organizations spend enormous amounts of energy trying to prevent employees from leaving. Far fewer spend that same energy creating places employees actually want to remain. The best organizations don’t rely entirely on fear, ironclad contracts, rigid policies, or retention bonuses. They create environments that naturally attract talent.
The same principle applies everywhere:
- If you want customers to stay, create frictionless value.
- If you want readers to return, publish useful content.
- If you want employees to engage, give them meaningful ownership.
If your only strategy involves a bigger stick, eventually you’ll just need a bigger stick.
Rule #2: Install Electric Fences
Of course, not every problem can be solved with incentives alone. Trust is wonderful, but fences are still useful. Good systems combine encouragement with accountability.
Building codes exist for a reason. Quality standards exist for a reason. Spam filters and security protocols exist for a reason.
The goal isn’t to eliminate consequences; the goal is to use consequences strategically. The horde often starts with punishment. Survivors start with design, and then they add guardrails where necessary. There is a difference.
Rule #3: Lay Down Spike Strips
Every system eventually encounters the same problem: somebody tries to game it. Every rule eventually meets someone whose full-time hobby is finding ways around it.
That’s why survivors think beyond baseline incentives—they anticipate exploitation.
Every zombie movie eventually introduces that one survivor who decides stealing supplies from the group is a brilliant strategy. It never ends well. Neither does organizational gaming.
When systems are poorly built:
- Metrics get manipulated.
- Bonuses get exploited.
- Policies get twisted.
- Algorithms get hacked.
The lesson isn’t that systems don’t work. The lesson is that systems require active maintenance. Good survivors don’t just build roads; they think about where those roads might lead.
Diagnostic: Are You Solving the Wrong Problem?
Before launching another initiative, policy, training program, or organizational restructuring effort, analyze your situation using this strategic alignment chart:
| Challenge | The Horde Response (Force) | The Survivor Response (System Design) |
|---|---|---|
| Low productivity | Force people to work harder and monitor them closer | Examine hidden incentives and remove friction |
| High turnover | Blame employee loyalty or workforce work ethic | Deeply examine internal culture and leadership |
| Falling sales | Spend more on advertising to scream louder | Improve core value and customer experience |
| Low engagement | Mandate more meetings to find out why | Remove red tape and grant true project ownership |
| Publishing struggles | Crank out more volume to flood the feed | Improve discoverability and content depth |
The horde asks: “How do we make people do this?”
Survivors ask: “What system is encouraging the opposite behavior?”
That single shift in framing changes everything.
The Pump Handle Principle
One of the most important lessons in systemic problem-solving comes from physician John Snow during London’s devastating cholera outbreak of 1854.
While others argued endlessly about competing medical theories and airborne vapors, Snow meticulously mapped the cases and identified a contaminated public water pump on Broad Street as the likely source of the outbreak.
He didn’t cure cholera on the spot. He didn’t waste time winning an academic debate. Instead, he took his data to the local Board of Guardians and convinced them to remove the pump handle.
Once the handle was gone, people could no longer easily access the poisoned water. The outbreak rapidly declined.
Sometimes the fastest way to solve a problem isn’t attacking the symptoms. It’s removing the environmental source that’s feeding them. In business, we often spend years treating symptoms.
The survivor always asks: “Where is the pump handle?”
History’s Greatest Survivors
Many of history’s most successful innovators didn’t force behavior. They redesigned systems to leverage natural human momentum.
- Netflix removed late fees, switching the environment to a friction-free subscription.
- Amazon patented one-click purchasing, removing the systemic barrier between wanting an item and buying it.
- Southwest Airlines simplified air travel by using a single aircraft type (the Boeing 737) to eliminate maintenance and training obstacles.
- Wikipedia removed traditional gatekeepers, creating an open-source framework where knowledge could accumulate naturally.
These organizations didn’t succeed because they fought harder against the current. They succeeded because they made desired behaviors the path of least resistance. That’s where real leverage lives.
A Note for Recent Graduates
If you’re early in your career, pay close attention to incentives.
Organizations will always tell you what they value in their mission statements. Their incentives reveal what they actually value.
Watch what gets rewarded. Watch what gets promoted. Watch where resources flow. The gap between official priorities and actual priorities is where the most important career lessons live.
Survival Tip
The next time you encounter a persistent problem, resist the urge to immediately build a bigger fence. Instead, pause and ask:
- “What system is actively producing this behavior?”
- “What incentive is driving it?”
- “What would happen if we changed the path instead of increasing the pressure?”
Because in both a zombie apocalypse and the corporate zombie world, the smartest survivors don’t spend all day chasing the herd.
They learn how to steer it.
References
- Clear, James. Atomic Habits (2018).
- Thaler, Richard H., and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
- Snow, John. On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855).
- Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.
- Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow.
- Harvard Business Review. Articles on incentives, organizational design, and employee engagement.
- MIT Sloan Management Review. Articles on systems thinking and organizational behavior.
- The Netflix and Blockbuster business case studies as documented by Harvard Business School.
