19世纪俄国的一个犹太人小村庄里住着一个犹太人。
“你用什么喂鸡”，有一天一个哥萨克人跑来问他。
“一些面包屑”，犹太人回答。
“你居然敢用这么低劣的食物喂我们的俄国鸡”，哥萨克人一边说一边给了犹太人一棍子。
第二天哥萨克人又来问犹太人：”现在你用什么喂鸡？”
“嗯，我给它上了三道菜。新鲜的草，上好的鱼子酱，甜点是一小碗奶油洒上进口的法国巧克力粉”
“白痴”，哥萨克人又敲了犹太人一棍子，”你居然用这么高级的食物喂这么低等的鸡”
第三天哥萨克人又来了：”你用什么喂鸡？”
“什么也不用”，犹太人说，”我给他们一个铜板，它们爱吃什么就买什么”
（暂停－等待笑声）
（没有？）
（ba dum dum）
（仍然没有人笑）
（哦，算了）
这里我用的”经济101″只是一个玩笑。为非美国的读者解释一下：绝大多数的美国大学把各种学科的入门课程编号为”101″。经济101管理就是说管理者对经济的一知半解反倒会带来危险。
经济101管理者认为所有人都是为钱工作的，激励员工工作最好的手段就是用金钱刺激或者惩罚。
比如说，AOL（注：美国在线）给能够挽留住用户的客服人员额外奖励。
软件公司给编写程序时、bug最少的程序员奖励。
这些行为就像给鸡铜板，让它们自己去买食物一样可笑。
这种方式的最大问题在于它用外在的激励代替了内在的激励。
内在的激励来自于每个人内心的渴望，他们都希望把事情做好。人们常常具有很强烈的内在激励性，他们希望把工作完成得很出色。比如，客服人员想要用户理解：每月付给AOL公司24美元是值得的；程序员想要写一些bug更少的代码。
外在的激励是来自外部的激励，比如说你因为完成特定的事情而获得报酬。
内在激励的效果比外在激励要强烈得多。人们在做他们想做的事情时，会更加努力地工作。这无可置疑。
但是当你付钱让人们做他们想做的事情时，这会带来过度理由效应（overjustification effect）的问题。”我必须写没有bug的代码，因为我喜欢奖金”，他们这样想的时候，内在激励已经被外在激励所替代了。因为外在激励效果微弱得多，结果他们的工作积极性被实际削弱了。当你停止发奖金，或者他们不再关心奖金的时候，就不会在写代码的同时注意修改bug。
经济101管理的另一个大问题是：人们倾向于寻找局部最大化利益。他们会针对你所提出的指标，找到一些急功近利的方法来完成，但忽视了你真正想让他们做的事情。
比如说你的客服人员，由于他们疯狂地想要留住用户获得奖金，结果被逼疯的用户在纽约时报的头版讲述你们公司令人作呕的服务。你为他付钱这件事上（用户挽留计划得以实施）获得了最大化的利益，但是你真正在意的事情（利润）却受到了损害。如果你想要用公司利润（比如说公司的股票）来奖励他，结果你会发现他的所作所为偏离了正确的方向，这完全是在浪费时间。
当你运用经济101管理，就是在鼓励开发人员耍弄系统。
假如你决定给编写代码时bug最少的开发人员奖励。那么每一次测试人员试图汇报一个bug，就会变成一场争论。通常开发人员说服测试人员这不是一个真正的bug。或者测试人员同意采用一种非正式渠道告诉开发人员，而不是写进bug跟踪系统。这样一来没有人使用bug跟踪系统，所以表面上的bug数量减少了。但是实际上却没什么变化。
开发人员在这方面是很聪明，无论你用什么指标，他们都可以找到一个最大化利益的方法，但却不是你真正想要的。
Robert Austin在他名为《度量与管理组织绩效》一书中提到，当你提出新指标的时候，组织中存在两个阶段。第一个阶段是你真的获得了你想要的，因为还没有人发现欺骗指标的方法。第二个阶段就变糟了，因为所有人都发现了最大化指标的方法，并不顾一切地这么做，甚至搞垮整个公司。
更糟糕的是经济101管理者认为他们足够聪明，调整指标就可以达到目的。Austin博士的结论是不可能，这种方法永远不可能成功。无论你怎么调整指标来反映你想要的东西，总是会有逆效应出现。
经济101管理方法的最大问题在于它根本不是管理。它是管理的退化。它回避寻找真正能把事情做得更好的方法。这意味着管理团队不知道如何教会人们把工作做好，所以他强迫系统中的每个人自己想办法去做。
你没有试图教会开发人员如何把代码写得更稳定可靠，只是在用付钱的方式逃避自己的责任。然后每个开发人员还得自己想办法。
对于比较简单的工作，比如说星巴克的服务员，或者AOL的电话客服，他们通常能找到自己的方法。当你走进一家咖啡店，要了一杯咖啡，然后你会发现这个单子要被一遍一遍地重复：告诉制作咖啡的人一次，如果他忘记了还要催一次，最后给收银员重复一次，好让她知道该收多少钱。这就是因为没有人告诉员工们更好的工作方式。除了星巴克，没有其他的咖啡店解决了此问题。在星巴克，标准的培养方式包含了一整套规范的命名系统，比如把单子写在杯子上，就送出了单子，保证了顾客只需要下一次单子而不必重复。这套系统是星巴克总部发明的，运行得非常好。系统链条上的每一个人永远不需要用自己的方法来解决问题。
你的客服人员整天与顾客对话，他们没有时间、兴趣或者练习机会来找到更好的工作方式。客服人员没有人能够测量并统计出哪种挽留顾客的方式是最好的，同时得罪的博客也最少。他们不关心，他们不够智慧，他们没有足够的信息，他们工作太忙。作为管理者，你的工作就是建立一套良好的系统。这就是星巴克成功的关键。
如果你小时候多读一些安·兰德的作品（AynRand，1905-1982，俄裔美国作家、哲学家。她的客观主义哲学自20纪世50年代起风靡美国校园，影响了几代美国人），或者学习了一个学期的经济学，而学到没有什么东西是不能用钱衡量的，你也许会觉得建立一套奖金制度、按照绩效付钱是很不错的管理手段。但是这是行不通的。把管理工作真正做起来吧，不要只是给鸡付铜板。
“Joel！你昨天还说开发人员应该做所有的决策，今天又说管理者要做所有的决策，到底应该怎样？”你高呼。
恩，不能这么说。昨天我说开发人员就像是树上的叶节点，掌握最详细的信息，事无巨细的命令式管理不能对其产生最优结果。今天我说的是要建立一套系统，不能因为给了钱就逃避培养他们的责任。管理，宽泛地说，就是要建立一套让人们把事情做好的系统。这需要避免用外在激励代替内在激励，也不能单纯地使用恐吓和命令。
现在我否定了命令式管理和经济101式管理，那么还剩下一种管理可以让人们把事情做好，我称之为同一性方法。我明天会谈一谈它的。
英文原文：
Wanted: Senior Technical Project Manager at Vistaprint. See this and other great job listings at jobs.joelonsoftware.com.
The Econ 101 Management Method
This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Joke: A poor Jew lived in the shtetl in 19th century Russia. A Cossack comes up to him on horseback.
“What are you feeding that chicken?” asks the Cossack.
“Just some bread crumbs,” replies the Jew.
“How dare you feed a fine Russian chicken such lowly food!” says the Cossack, and hits the Jew with a stick.
The next day the Cossack comes back. “Now what are you feeding that chicken?” ask the Jew.
“Well, I give him three courses. There’s freshly cut grass, fine sturgeon caviar, and a small bowl of heavy cream sprinkled with imported French chocolate truffles for dessert.”
“Idiot!” says the Cossack, beating the Jew with a stick. “How dare you waste good food on a lowly chicken!”
On the third day, the Cossack again asks, “What are you feeding that chicken?”
“Nothing!” pleads the Jew. “I give him a kopeck and he buys whatever he wants.”
(pause for laughter)
(no?)
(ba dum dum)
(still no laughter)
(oh well).
I use the term “Econ 101” a little bit tongue-in-cheek. For my non-American readers: most US college departments have a course numbered “101” which is the basic introductory course for any field. Econ 101 management is the style used by people who know just enough economic theory to be dangerous.
The Econ 101 manager assumes that everyone is motivated by money, and that the best way to get people to do what you want them to do is to give them financial rewards and punishments to create incentives.
For example, AOL might pay their call-center people for every customer they persuade not to cancel their subscription.
A software company might give bonuses to programmers who create the fewest bugs.
It works about as well as giving your chickens money to buy their own food.
One big problem is that it replaces intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is your own, natural desire to do things well. People usually start out with a lot of intrinsic motivation. They want to do a good job. They want to help people understand that it’s in their best interest to keep paying AOL $24 a month. They want to write less-buggy code.
Extrinsic motivation is a motivation that comes from outside, like when you’re paid to achieve something specific.
Intrinsic motivation is much stronger than extrinsic motivation. People work much harder at things that they actually want to do. That’s not very controversial.
But when you offer people money to do things that they wanted to do, anyway, they suffer from something called the Overjustification Effect. “I must be writing bug-free code because I like the money I get for it,” they think, and the extrinsic motivation displaces the intrinsic motivation. Since extrinsic motivation is a much weaker effect, the net result is that you’ve actually reduced their desire to do a good job. When you stop paying the bonus, or when they decide they don’t care that much about the money, they no longer think that they care about bug free code.
Another big problem with Econ 101 management is the tendency for people to find local maxima. They’ll find some way to optimize for the specific thing you’re paying them, without actually achieving the thing you really want.
So for example your customer retention specialist, in his desire to earn the bonus associated with maintaining a customer, will drive the customer so crazy that the New York Times will run a big front page story about how nasty your customer “service” is. Although his behavior maximizes the thing you’re paying him for (customer retention) it doesn’t maximize the thing you really care about (profit). And then you try to reward him for the company profit, say, by giving him 13 shares of stock, and you realize that it’s not really something he controls, so it’s a waste of time.
When you use Econ 101 management, you’re encouraging developers to game the system.
Suppose you decide to pay a bonus to the developer with the fewest bugs. Now every time a tester tries to report a bug, it becomes a big argument, and usually the developer convinces the tester that it’s not really a bug. Or the tester agrees to report the bug “informally” to the developer before writing it up in the bug tracking system. And now nobody uses the bug tracking system. The bug count goes way down, but the number of bugs stays the same.
Developers are clever this way. Whatever you try to measure, they’ll find a way to maximize, and you’ll never quite get what you want.
Robert Austin, in his book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, says there are two phases when you introduce new performance metrics. At first, you actually get what you wanted, because nobody has figured out how to cheat. In the second phase, you actually get something worse, as everyone figures out the trick to maximizing the thing that you’re measuring, even at the cost of ruining the company.
Worse, Econ 101 managers think that they can somehow avoid this situation just by tweaking the metrics. Dr. Austin’s conclusion is that you just can’t. It never works. No matter how much you try to adjust the metrics to reflect what you think you want, it always backfires.
The biggest problem with Econ 101 management, though, is that it’s not management at all: it’s really more of an abdication of management. A deliberate refusal to figure out how things can be made better. It’s a sign that management simply doesn’t know how to teach people to do better work, so they force everybody in the system to come up with their own way of doing it.
Instead of training developers on techniques of writing reliable code, you just absolve yourself of responsibility by paying them if they do. Now every developer has to figure it out on their own.
For more mundane tasks, working the counter at Starbucks or answering phone calls at AOL, it’s pretty unlikely that the average worker will figure out a better way of doing things on their own. You can go into any coffee shop in the country and order a short soy caramel latte extra-hot, and you’ll find that you have to keep repeating your order again and again: once to the coffee maker, again to the coffee maker when they forgot what you said, and finally to the cashier so they can figure out what to charge you. That’s the result of nobody telling the workers a better way. Nobody figures it out, except Starbucks, where the standard training involves a complete system of naming, writing things on cups, and calling out orders which insures that customers only have to specify their drink orders once. The system, invented by Starbucks HQ, works great, but workers at the other chains never, ever come up with it on their own.
Your customer service people spend most of the day talking to customers. They don’t have the time, the inclination, or the training to figure out better ways to do things. Nobody in the customer retention crew is going to be able to keep statistics and measure which customer retention techniques work best while pissing off the fewest bloggers. They just don’t care enough, they’re not smart enough, they don’t have enough information, and they are too busy with their real job.
As a manager it’s your job to figure out a system. That’s Why You Get The Big Bucks.
If you read a little bit too much Ayn Rand as a kid, or if you took one semester of Economics, before they explained that utility is not measured in dollars, you may think that setting up simplified bonus schemes and Pay For Performance is a pretty neat way to manage. But it doesn’t work. Start doing your job managing and stop feeding your chickens kopecks.
“Joel!” you yell. “Yesterday you told us that the developers should make all the decisions. Today you’re telling us that the managers should make all the decisions. What’s up with that?”
Mmm, not exactly. Yesterday I told you that your developers, the leaves in the tree, have the most information; micromanagement or Command and Control barking out orders is likely to cause non-optimal results. Today I’m telling you that when you’re creating a system, you can’t abdicate your responsibility to train your people by bribing them. Management, in general, needs to set up the system so that people can get things done, it needs to avoid displacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation, and it won’t get very far using fear and barking out specific orders.
Now that I’ve shot down Command and Control management and Econ 101 management, there’s one more method managers can use to get people moving in the right direction. I call it the Identity method and I’ll talk about it more tomorrow.
Joel is on vacation. This episode was pre-recorded.
About the Author: Im your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, Ive been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz - the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot - the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.
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