Your Company’s Reflexes

I’ve discussed this before – incentives and reward programs provide companies with a way to focus energy and effort without disrupting overall compensation and pricing systems. 

Properly designed, incentive programs give a company flexibility.  Those that comprehend the power of a well-designed incentive and reward strategy will be able to react quicker to market changes, address competitive innovation quicker, and change the entire direction of a company with less angst within their employee base or their distribution channel.

And this is critical today.  Change comes faster.  Change is more disruptive. 

As we move from a production-based economy to a knowledge-based economy the barriers to entry for companies have crumbled.  With component manufacturing widely available off-shore at significantly reduced costs – and the ubiquitousness of communication – a new company can form, produce, market and sell at blinding speeds.  Creating a reward platform within a company that allows management to redirect focus as the market changes will be a competitive advantage. 

Imagine having the ability to focus all of your sales people on a specific market tomorrow – and give them a reason to do it – without changing their compensation system.  Imagine getting all your Distributors to adopt a new product and sell it through their channel without a price change.  Imagine getting your top Dealers together so you can hear what the market is asking for and demanding – and the Dealers happy to do it.

Incentive and reward strategies allow a company to have the ability to change quickly – to react – to test and adapt – to be successful.

The thing that precipitated this post was an article on Yahoo News – Apple plans cheaper, Nano-based phone – from July 9, 2007.

Within 10 days of launching what is arguably the most hyped product introduction in recent memory – there is an innovation to it!

In the past it would be months or even years before a new innovation was announced.  Now it is only days!  And the product will be available in the 4th quarter of this year.  Only months away.  There are some skeptics that say the iPhone Nano won’t exist due to usability problems – but the concept is the same.

How would your business react?  How could you focus your resources given this kind of speed-to-market?