The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work by Uri Gneezy

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work by Uri Gneezy An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world Incentives send powerful signals that aim to influence behavior. But often there is a conflict between what we say and what we do in response to these incentives. The result: mixed signals. Consider the CEO who urges teamwork but designs incentives for individual success, who invites innovation but punishes failure, who emphasizes quality but pays for quantity. Employing real-world scenarios just like this to illustrate this everyday phenomenon, behavioral economist Uri Gneezy explains why incentives often fail and demonstrates how the right incentives can change behavior by aligning with signals for better results. Drawing on behavioral economics, game theory, psychology, and fieldwork, Gneezy outlines how to be incentive smart, designing rewards that are simple and effective. He highlights how the right combination of economic and psychological incentives can encourage people to drive more fuel-efficient cars, be more innovative at work, and even get to the gym. “Incentives send a signal,” Gneezy writes, “and your objective is to make sure this signal is aligned with your goals.”

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, the Circus Stand in the Sky, my friends, where we invite the greatest minds, the most brilliant people,

the most intelligent authors, CEOs, billionaires, astronauts. God, who else are we on the show? Governors. Let's see, U.S. Ambassador, I think I said that, and something else. But as you can tell, none of those people that are intelligent are me. So that's why we have guests on the show. We have a brilliant mind on the show. His mind is so brilliant that he's going to come here and you're going to listen to the show and you're going to have a glow that's going to be about

you all day. It's going to be like an accented aura where you'll walk around and people will be like, holy shit, you're more intelligent than you've ever been today. And for some of you, that may be a stretch, especially me. Anyway, guys, we'll be talking to him on the show. It's an amazing book. But in the meantime, as always, we cannot forget the plugs because the plugs are so integrable to the show. You know, I was listening to Sam. I think it was the Sam Harris show the other day.

And he charges like $8 a month for his show. If you listen to the podcast, we don't charge anything. So this gives me the point of reference to be able to shame you and guilt you and to please go give the show five stars on iTunes and refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. It's real easy and it's free too as well.

YouTube.com for just Christmas. Goodreads.com for just Christmas. LinkedIn. The big LinkedIn newsletter is pretty cool too, man. That thing grows by a couple hundred people every day. It's freaking insane. Anyway, to get to the most important part of our show, it's Monday, people. I can't say important.

We have Yuri Ginezy on the show. He is the author of the hottest new book out on business and everything else, Mindset. And, well, we'll ask him what the hell is going on with this book. The new book is called Mixed Signals, How Incentives Really Work. Came out March 21st, 2023. Hot off the presses. You can order it still steaming from wherever fine books are sold. Uri Ganesi is on the show with us today and we're really excited if you can't tell to to have him on can you tell that I'm excited I am excited my nipples are hard right now uh Yuri is the Epstein Atkinson and down chair of behavioral economics and professor at the Rady School of Management

at the University of California San Diego see I told you smart he received a BA in economics at Tel Aviv University and PhD in economics at Tilburg University. He joined UC San Diego in 2006. Prior to that, he was a professor at the University of Chicago. Chicago. I'm suddenly hungry for pizza. The Technion and the University of Haifa. Haifa?

Haifa? Haifa. I'm just going to run with that. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Amsterdam. I have some questions there. NHH, Burgen and Burgundy School of Business. Welcome to the show, Yuri. How are you? I'm great. Thank you. Great to be here. I hope we're not going to talk about my needles, but other than that, I'm looking forward to it. Sounds good. Sounds like a deal. Sounds like a deal. So give us a.coms, wherever you want

people to get to know you better on the interwebs, maybe stalk you a little bit there. Just, so I'm not that much on social media, but you can definitely Google my name, find my webpage, and I'm always happy to receive emails from people. There you go. Is this

your first book? I imagine you've written some other ones, right? It's my second one. I have one with John List that was published 10 years ago. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this current book? So I'm 55 and, you know, at this age you can, you need to make a change. You need to make life interesting. So I could have had, you know, a new red Ferrari maybe or marry a 25 year old. This sounds, you know, it's not for me. So I try to write a book and try to spread the word about what I'm doing. There you go. So give us a 30,000-foot overview of what the book Mixed Signals,

How Incentives Really Work, is about. We're all driven by incentives. Whether we know it or not, incentives are motivating us. And, you know, so I'm here. I'm trying to sell my book. You are trying to sell your podcast, your listeners trying to become smarter, whatever, entertained. We all have some kind of incentive to do it.

And one thing that many people ignore when they design incentives is the signal that they send. When you give someone incentives, you send a signal about what's going on. And that's really, this signal is what I'm studying, to see how you can improve the way incentives work by actually understanding the signals and managing them. Now, is the book largely in a business format, or is it also incentives like, I don't know, maybe how to get your kids to clean their room? The last one is hard.

You know, I have three kids. I was never successful with that, but yes. That's why I sent mine out for adoption. It's definitely not just business. We have incentives everywhere we go, right? It's definitely not just the business world. So if you employ people and you want to incentivize, clearly that's for you. But also if you're just interested in why, you know, some things happen in the world,

you look at the news, you see someone getting half a million dollar vacation paid by someone someone else how does this influence their decision those are the kind of things that we discuss there you go so you get into behavioral economics game theory psychology and field work jesus is ceo my uh basically my incentives were like do your shit or i'll fire you no i'm just kidding i wasn't that mean. I wasn't like that folks. Although a couple of employees I might've been with, uh, don't quote me anyway. Uh, so, uh, you know, what, what, what are incentives? I mean, when we, when we, you mentioned that we all live, you know, for incentives, like, you know, I mean, you know, as a young man, I, I did everything possible to, to gain the favor of, of the favor of women that would be interested in me,

fast cars, money, and all that sort of stuff. Is that kind of what you talk about in this book a little bit? That's definitely incentives, right? Yeah. That's absolutely incentives. The boring definition is something that will make you do, to act in a way that you wouldn't otherwise right that's that's the so if you have sponsors that you that you talk about you wouldn't have talked about them if they weren't paying you something right so all of this good stuff that's uh something that will

make you change your ways now it could be for to buy my stuff or it could be incentives to exercise more so if you are you go to the doctor and the doctor can offer you some kind of incentives to to exercise more that's also incentive so you call the book mixed signals why and i noticed on the cover of the book you have green yellow and red and what's interesting about that is the green is in the form of stop sign. The yellow is in the, I think the signal of what would normally be green. And I'm, and I think the red triangle is in,

you know, stop or slow or slow, slow down or something. I'm not sure if I have that correctly as my interpretation. What does that mean? So the idea is that, like i said that incentives send signals and if the signal is not aligned with what you want to to have that's

that's a problem so if you tell your people look i really want you to concentrate on quality but then you incentivize them to for quantity to do to make more then quality is going to suffer and you need to understand this if you tell people you need to be creative, right? And being creative means that sometimes you're going to fail. You're increasing the variance. You're more likely to produce very good shows. Let's say, let's say with you or papers in my case, but you're also more likely to fail,

to do something that will just bump. So if you have the same people that all other podcasts have on, it's going to be safe. But if you try to find interesting people, some of them are going to be much better. Some of them are going to be worse. Now, if you're going to be punished for the failure, you'll go with the first one. You'll take the safer options, safer people to talk with. But if you'll be said, look, you tried.

It turns out that this guy looks interesting, but he's really boring. That's fine. Let's move on. That would encourage you to actually look for more. But if my incentives is firing you or punishing you or not giving you a bonus if sometimes you fail, that's bad, right? I would rather listen to a podcast in which sometimes you have brilliant people and sometimes it doesn't work. I can just move on. There you go.

Yeah, some people do that with my comedy on the show sometimes the jokes kill and sometimes they die and then i i just kind of always hope that if they die that they're still funny that if i die then they kill uh and there's really art to it when you really study comedy but uh some people are good at dying and then and they kill with it. But I think most of my audience just thinks I'm funny because I'm stupid. So there's that. You have to work with your hand. Yeah, I don't know. They tolerate me. So anyway, so give us some examples.

What's an example of an incentive that maybe goes wrong? So let me tell you a story. Imagine that you live in a cold place. In the morning, you see your neighbor going to the recycle center with a large bag of soda cans. What are you going to think about her? She drinks a lot of Mountain Dew. That's one thing.

And she's a great person also, no? Yeah, sure. Recycling, you know, up in the universe. Yeah, exactly. She could have thrown it to the trash. She is trying. She might think the same about herself, right? Oh, I'm a great person.

I could have just... Now imagine that you live in a place where they give you five cents for each soda can. Probably, yeah. Again, you see her walking in the morning to the recycle center with a hundred soda cans. Now you're going to say, oh, she is cheap, right five dollars really you might think that about herself right she might

change their view so what we did we just added incentives that in principle if you're an economist you would say everything else should be the same and now you're also giving her five dollars what can go wrong well the signal that you're sending goes wrong. And it goes wrong and give it to me again. It goes wrong in what way? It goes wrong that instead of thinking, oh, she's a great person, now you think she's actually a cheap person. That's an interpretation. You don't really know her well enough. You try to interpret who she is by looking at her

actions there you go this reminds me of the rush album signals um so you know you talk about something like visible tattoos and hell's angels uh and and sometimes why they get uh tattoos on their neck etc etc talk to us a little bit what that signals so the story goes with this i started thinking about it with my accountant. He's a nice guy, but, you know, being an accountant in April, it's hell, right? You see one more. So I asked him what drives him. He showed me a picture on the wall with him on his bike.

Now him and his buddies go on a bike tour in June. Everything is great. He gets all the gear, right? He has money. He can buy the jacket. He can buy has money, he can buy the jacket, he can buy everything. But when they'll enter the bar, you'll know that they are not the real deal because they will not have tattoos. So if you are the real deal, you'll go and have these big neck tattoos that show that that's a commitment. Why? Because you can't,

if my accountant would have a neck tattoo and I'll show up in his office with the nectar too i'll be scared i don't want you know that kind of person maybe to to run my stuff i maybe won't have problems with this but these bosses will not like it right so that's why it's really credible if you go for the nectar tools you go for all these kind of credible signals that that means look i'm the real deal i'm not just it on my spring break i'm owning it is that is that psychologically typical of people that use tattoos they're they're using it for signaling i think so right so think about um why you do you really want to show again i can tell you look i'm a funny guy i i do stand up i can do i can tell you, look, I'm a funny guy. I do stand-up. I can tell you many things. It's very cheap.

But once you have a tattoo, that's a commitment. There you go. That's why it's a valuable signal. Me just telling you, look, I'm whatever is very cheap. If I go and send a very costly signal, that's important. And the same you can think about going to college. That's also a signal. Even if you don't learn anything, the fact that you were able to finish college,

that's a signal that whatever, you have a certain IQ, you have a certain determination. Think about being in the Navy SEALs. Imagine that I want to hire someone to work for me, and I know that that person was a Navy SEAL. The job I need him for has nothing to do with being a Navy SEAL. But I do know that this guy is tough. I won't be able to stay in the water for hours in the cold water.

That's kind of very costly signals. There you go. So what are some other examples of signals that people use in everyday life or something? Can you give us kind of a run through maybe of some? So think about this podcast, right? So imagine that we would talk about how much money you're paying me. So you can think about this as you'll pay me, I don't know, $10,000 for being on your show because you want interesting people. And I'm clearly very interesting.

Or I can pay you $10,000 because I want to be on the show. I want to sell books, right? Or something else. Each one of them will have a very different interpretation of the situation. If you would have paid me, you would have looked at it very differently than if I would have paid you to be here. Right? And the same goes for everything. You mentioned at the start that your colleague is charging $8 a month for a podcast.

Then, you know, if he's boring, his listeners are going to be more pissed at him than with you, right? That's true. So you expect something different, right? So he cannot come and say, oh, it's Monday morning, I'm still waking up, right? He'll have to be maybe more, although I guess it's part of the charm. Yeah. So are we always signaling in life when we go through life?

Like I make Facebook posts that say, don't tread on me, don't screw with me. Is that signaling when we use social media to post stuff like you know we're posting you know we're eating for breakfast in the morning and posting our vacations on social media is social media a form of signaling i think so it's a very strong form of signaling that i completely don't understand right so i don't understand young people i feel really old but you but, you know, people that just, when they get the food, they just take pictures of the food.

Why would someone want to see your breakfast? I have no clue. I don't understand it. But, yes, it is signaling, look, I'm having a good time. I'm so successful that I can go to whatever, to Hawaii. And everyone is happy in this, right? They're making at least happy faces, right? So it's kind of signaling, look, everything is great with me.

Yeah. I share my really nice food, like if it's a really nice burger or something. If it's really a nice meal, you know, I'm out at a nice restaurant and stuff, I'll share it. But I usually, I do it because I'm a narcissistic sadist and I usually don't share it until like about 10 o'clock at night I do it because I'm a narcissistic sadist. And I usually don't share it until like about 10 o'clock at night when people are climbing into bed. And they're going to see like a nice slice of pie or a nice burger.

And they're going to fall off their diet. And so basically it's sharing the misery loves company concept of like if I have to be fat and have my diet ruined, you're going to share in the misery with me. So that's my plan. That's really what I want to do. Well, I guess that's part of why people like you, right? You have a certain kind of people. So I'd be very happy to see it because I also need a diet and if I see that you were first in me,

that makes me happy. Well, if we all see that we're all eating shitty food and getting fat and stuff, then we feel less shamed. There's less shaming that goes on. It's a kind of reverse shaming, if you will. It's kind of like people write me and be like, how come you post that shit at 11 o'clock at night

when I'm crawling out of bed, you jerk? And I'm like, that's the reason I post it. Exactly, right. Misery of love company is my policy. I'm not sharing that pie to make people get different stuff i smoke cigars for example right too many cigars and they share it and i'm sure that 95 percent of the people that i know think that i'm an idiot for doing this because i'm going to die from horrible death and the other five percent that are the people i care about so yeah well you know i mean mean, who was it?

Burns? Who was the comedian, George Burns? He lived till he was like 90, smoking cigars. So, you know, hopefully you got the good check. It's not smart to eat burgers like you or me or to smoke cigars. It's not smart. Yeah. Yeah, that's why I'm kind of vegan-y now in my old age.

My body's like, we're not doing this shit with you anymore no more booze no more eating badly uh and all that good stuff so you know we we go through life and i we signal who we are you know i learned this it tell me if i'm interpreting the your book correctly we go through life sending out interpretations who we are like there's that scene in fight club like you know the guy goes hey man i i had all the things i had all the furniture i had that couch forever and and we do a lot of things to signal you know what i need to do like one of the things i learned in advertising very early on especially owning a modeling agency back in the day was that when women look at advertisements, you know, like in Vogue or something, they see the

beautiful woman who's in there, and they see the clothes, and they want those clothes, and they're like, they see the woman, they go, hey, how do I, how do I, where do I go to buy those clothes? Men look at the man in the background of most of those advertisements and go how do i got a dress to signal to get that woman and that's what a lot of men do you know the watches we buy the clothes we wear the cars we buy we do that to signal kind of like a breeding sort of thing and maybe you can equate this to nature when nature does that i was watching a tiktok the other day and this bird was flapping his wings around a female to try and impress her for breeding and so that's kind of like the signaling that we do right in uh in telling people hey here i am and maybe you want to mate with me or something you know stuff like that right so

basically the two of us gave up we just have our our black t-shirts. How are you going to vlog? No, I think it's absolutely true, but it's more than that. So even about myself, but definitely about others, I get signals. I see you now. I see your cap. I see your t-shirt. I see your background. And they build a story around this, right? I'm trying to see who you are, right?

I'm trying to guess who you are. And then you're telling me that you're too fat. Then you're telling me that you like to annoy people you're saying that you know all these things and they build a story around it and the incentive is part of the story the incentive tells me more about you than you might imagine there you go and people go Chris Voss is an asshole I'm just kidding people I just have a wife yeah there you go I'm signaling again right um so uh just So I don't know if you're ever a Rush fan, but there was an album they had called Signals.

And I believe there's something on the album that refers to that. But this falls in line with some of the things we're still doing. In business, how is signaling and sending incentives or incentivizing employees and stuff to work better? What are some different ways we can talk about that that you have in your book? So think, for example, of let's start with the top, a CEO, right? You want to hire a CEO and you tell that person, look, I really cared for the loan grant. So I ask you to work hard and get our company in 10 years to where we go, right?

But then you incentivize her based on quarterly earnings. What is she going to do, right? What is she going to think about 10 years from now? Or is she going to think about the next quarter, right? Think about our governor and any governor. So in California, we need maybe a fast train from San Diego all the way to San Francisco. If you go and invest in it now, you'll have to take resources from other places. Everyone will hate him for that. And 20, 30 years from now is when the train is going to run. It's going to be long gone by then.

So the same with the CEO or the governor or many other things. We tell them, look, we really want you to care about the long run, but then we give them incentives for the short run. So if I would have owned a company, if I would have been one of the billionaires that you're interviewing at my company, head to hire a CEO, I would tell that person, look, I'm not going to judge you based on the quarterly earnings. If you need to invest in new computer network, go for it. Make the investment now. I know that the quarterly earnings are going to go down, but I trust you to think about the long run.

There you go. You know, we had, I think it was Sam, I'd have to pull up the name, but I had a CEO on a major company, and he got really honest with me about how one of the biggest problems with CEOs is they, they overturn about every, uh, four years or so. And so they don't really get a chance. We see the same thing with presidents and politicians. They don't really sometimes get a chance to, uh, uh, see the

fruition of the visions and stuff that they outline. And sometimes it's good. And sometimes it's bad. Jay Samet was on the show with us today in his book, Future Proofing You. And we talked about that and it was kind of interesting. In my book, Beacons of Leadership, I use the reference of a lighthouse that a leader signals through that lighthouse. He signals his morals, his intent, his trust. Everything comes from that, whether leaders realize or not. And even leadership as a parent, what you're signaling to your children

and stuff of who you truly are. And you can't bullshit people through that. You know, as a child, I grew up with my parents, and sometimes they were trying to do the right thing, but they would tell me stuff to keep me in line. And I'd be like, yeah, but you don't do as you say or do as you walk or walk the talk. And so, you know, that's really important. This, the signaling you send to people and also, uh, truth, trust, intent, uh, whether you're a hypocrite, whether you're true to your nature, et cetera, et cetera. I hope everything I always signal, whether people like me or not,

is authentic and straightforward and people still get a sense of me, even though I'm an asshole. Right. But we all do. So think about when my son turned three. I love this age. You start communicating with you. Everything is good.

And then they also start lying because that's what kids do. We told him, look, you shouldn't lie. Only bad people lie. Took him to Disney World a couple of months after his birthday. Get to the cashier. We see that, you know, under three, it's free. Over three, rolled $117. No hesitation.

I said, it's almost three. Which is, you know, just from the wrong direction, right? So he's talking about this. Then, you know, half an hour later, he pulled my hand and said, Daddy, Daddy, you told me that only bad people die. Busted. So

it's very hard to juggle everything, right? Busted. There you go. This is an important aspect in business as it is in personal life and really thinking about how we signal. So in writing the book, is your hope to give us more thinking about who we are, what we're signaling, and the effect that that might have, good, bad, or evil? Look, everyone has their fun in life. For me, it's looking at incentive.

What motivates people? Why do we do what we do? And I think that that's my goal. My goal is to try and share this, what you think is fun. I can understand why do incentives go wrong. So many people tell me, many companies I try to work with, tell me, oh, we tried incentives, it it didn't work the analogy that i like is imagine that you go to a bad japanese restaurant and your conclusion is that japanese food is bad no just you were unlucky with the restaurant same

is true for incentives there are many ways of running the incentives and if you don't do it well that's uh that's going to not work but you do it well, you can get too much more. So that's that. Definitely. I mean, it makes all the difference in the world. But, you know, it's interesting. Like I say, social media is a big thing of signalers, where people are signaling all sorts of stuff.

You know, everything goes into what we're doing. We're kind of signaling, I guess, who we are in the workplace and incentivizing and trying to go different ways. Why would a bad incentive might be worse than no incentives at all when we're trying to incentivize people? Think about the wells fargo that's already a decade ago i think but the CEO over there had a great idea he said let's let's give people our workers incentive to so if you have a bank account also to have a credit card

and eight other products whatever they're selling yeah and they have huge incentives for this and if you didn't meet it, they would fire you. So there were thousands of people at the end. They fired, if I remember correctly, like 5,000 workers. They had to fire. They just came to the office in the morning, had their morning coffee,

sat at their computer terminal and just made up accounts, made up credit cards and canceled them. Yeah. Right. So the incentive itself wasn't bad. You know, you want to have more pay for it, but then you must have some kind of audit to make sure incentive itself wasn't bad. You want to have more, pay for it. But then you must have some kind of

audit to make sure that they don't cheat. That's not what you want. So in this case, it would have been much better not to give incentives to create it. If you cannot find a way to balance it with some kind of audit, just don't do it. I remember back in the day,

one of my first things I did when I was young, before I really got my entrepreneur down, is I worked for a company where we would sell industrial products. It was called Car Industries. I think they're still around out of Indiana. And so we would sell, like, shop supplies, welding, you know, anything you needed in a shop.

And I remember working with, um, uh, government agencies, like city government agencies. I go into their shops and sell and they have my accounts. And I remember working with them and it was funny. They, that was the first time I learned that these, these, uh, companies would, um, they would have budgets in city government or in any government, I think nowadays. Um, but they would have budgets in city government or in any government i think nowadays um but they would have these budgets they'd be given every year and every year when they would come to the end of the year on their budgets they would call me up and say hey chris bring the catalog down we need to buy a bunch of shit right and i would come in and i'd be like i'd be like hey what's going on they're like oh see there's this thing ch, where we have a budget we're given every year.

And if we don't spend all the money in the budget that year, they claw back that amount of money that's left over because we figure we don't need it. So we just got to buy a bunch of crap. Right, right, right, right, right. Here we go. That's a definitely bad incentive, right? So if you don't roll it over, so, you know, it's not, I have a research budget every year. If I don't spend it, it doesn't roll over to the next year. Guess what I'm doing, you know, just before the end of the year, I buy stuff I don't need, right?

Clearly a bad incentive. Clearly not the smart way of incentivizing. Yeah, and then we wonder why governments, you know, and military budgets and different things get out of control. And, you know, what's that old line? It's even worse than that because if you don't use it next year, they're going to reduce your budget.

And your status in the company and the government is very strongly linked to how much budget you're controlling. And they would just buy up all stupid crap they would never buy. And it's like, just give us that. I'm like, you don't use this. And they would just buy up like all stupid crap they would never buy. And it's like, just give us that.

I'm like, you don't use this. And they're like, yeah, well just, just give it to us. We have to, we have to spend this money and we, we,

we really didn't spend enough this year. And so we've got to load it up. And I would say that across all my government things. I was just like, I was like really crazy. It's our money, right? It's the taxpayer.

Exactly. Here in, here in Utahah they have a law or something where all the road construction crews have to all get jobs it's like socialism or communism everybody has to get a job and so they have to make it so that everybody who's a road construction crew gets work you know and part of the problem is in utah there's only a limited amount of time they can work on roads and and do traffic work, and part of the problem is in Utah, there's only a limited amount of time they can work on roads and do traffic work and stuff because of the snow. So you have a very

small window of time. I don't know what is six months, maybe nine, um, where you can do this work on the roads before snow comes and you know, it's impossible to doing this work. So everyone's got a cram. And so it's like a big cram session and uh it's interesting you know just the amount of money that gets blown out for these things and stuff so there you go uh anything more you want to touch on about uh sending signals mixed signals what you hope people learn from your book that like i said that incentive send signals and if you learn how to manage them if you learn that paying five cents for silicon is a bad idea so that paying your workers for quantity will get you lots of quantity with bad quality yeah just think about it before that so in many cases you see that companies don't have

what i like to call a common sense officer so they have a ceo cfo all the good stuff but not common sense right so they don't have someone over there who can say, guys, are you stupid? And it's usually, you know, think about engineers, for example, or economists for that matter, right? They are really good. They find a solution. They invest hundreds of millions of dollars in finding the solution. And then no one uses it because they don't have the common sense

in many cases, in too many cases, right? So have someone with common sense that will tell you, look, guys, that's a bad idea. idea or look here's how you can make it better maybe that's what we maybe that's what we really need to have we need to have common sense officers i kind of like that idea because we have we have so much other things we have inclusion officers and all this new things that are coming about. We need to have a common sense officer. We should start a movement. Let's make it a thing. Because one of the things that made me successful

at being an entrepreneur and being an entrepreneur when I worked for other companies was being that common sense officer. I'd walk into apartments and go, why do we do it this way? And people would say, I don't know. We always did it this way. Yeah, exactly. We always did it. That's's a good right well they would say to me uh i don't know chris

you told us to do it this way so we do it this way um and i'm like well i don't know i'm looking at it now it seems kind of dumb like this doesn't seem like it really works and so by the way that's a great uh example of failing right so if you would be punished for having a bad idea, you would never say it was bad. You would keep pushing it. But you were fortunate enough to work in a place in which you said, maybe it was my idea, but it's still a dumb idea. Let's do it better. That's the right way. That's the right incentives.

That's the way I always worked. I was always like, you know, there has to be a better way. There's always something you can prove on and whatever you've innovated, whenever you've made something better, there's, there's still a better way that you can make that better. And, uh, that's, that, that was one of the cruxes of, of what I was always doing with my business. I was always looking, you know, like I always use the example, like I, when I was younger, I thought pretty much with paperclips, everything, you know, you, you, you built the perfect thing or staples, you built the perfect thing. And then people came out with all these innovations. Well, you can paint them while you

can design them just a little bit differently, whether you can put some edges on them so that they claw to the paper a little bit better. Um, you know, it, it seems like there's a never ending cycle of anything that can be approved. It's kind of like Moore's law, I suppose. And so, um, it seems like there's a never-ending cycle of anything that can be approved, kind of like Moore's Law, I suppose. And so it's great that people do that. But yeah, there needs to be common sense in companies where somebody goes, hey, you know what, did somebody think this through? And I like your concept of where, you know, we should really look at incentives. You know, what's the good part about this? What is this going to motivate?

Or how can this really backfire or demotivate sometimes? People are really creative at gaming incentives. If you're not smart enough, so that's the second part of it, maybe. Even if you come up with incentives that look good to you, look at data. Try it for a while before you make it a fixed feature

of what you have, right? So people are really creative at gaming incentives. There you go. There you go. Well, this has been really insightful, Yuri. It's been wonderful to have you on and brilliant insights and life and everything else and all that good stuff. I love the cover of the book, too.

I've got the signals there. I'm going to have to go back to the Rush album, Signals. It was a great album that had subdivisions on that album? No, maybe that might have been another one. But, you know, New World Man, there's a lot of great stuff on there, but I think you talked about Signals in the album and so I'll have to go back to that. I don't know why

I'm plugging Rush albums at this point, but I'm a big fan. Anyway, thank you very much Yuri for coming on. Give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs, please. It was a lot of fun. My.com, so it's a good question. LinkedIn,

Uri Gnisi, and so it's also on Twitter. That's my social media. I told you I'm old. It's all the places you signal. Alright, well, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you.

Thanks, Moniz, for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss, YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Foss, and LinkedIn and the big LinkedIn newsletter where we do all our signaling, if you will. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.