Incentive Compensation Doesn’t Work, or Does It? Discoveries Revealed in "Alice in Corporate Wonderland"

As Alice explores Wonderland Industries, she finds people doing exactly what their incentives reward them for doing, but not necessarily what the incentives were intended to promote. Profit sharing motivates line workers to do nothing, bonus structures motivate managers to build silos, and stock options motivate executives to artificially inflate stock prices, to the detriment of the company’s long term success.

(PRWEB) October 19, 2005 -- Long-time semiconductor industry executive R.T. Talasek compares the similarities of our daily grind in business to the world of fantasy in Alice in Corporate Wonderland: Down the Long Hallway (PublishAmerica ISBN 1-4137-9681-8). What he observes is that the story of old is frighteningly similar to today’s corporate culture. Despite compensation schemes designed to motivate employees, quality initiatives, and marketing strategies, the world of corporate America is still more like a fairy tale than reality.

More than 150 years after Lewis Carroll created the character we all know and love in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, Talasek tells a story thought to be the world’s first corporate fairy tale, Alice in Corporate Wonderland. The title character is all grown up, a freshly minted Ivy League MBA, and ready for the real world, or so she thinks. Alice is thrust into the world of corporate America, much to her own surprise and chagrin. Still wide-eyed, idealistic, and a little spoiled, she quickly finds out that the real world is nothing like what she learned about in school.

Alice in Corporate Wonderland follows Alice as she explores this new, fantastic, and somewhat insane world of corporate programs, policies, and self-aggrandizing executives, manifested as a menagerie of familiar characters from the original work of her childhood. A few surprise guests unknown to Carroll also appear, although they seem quite at home in the world of a global conglomerate.

R.T. (Tom) Talasek has spent the last 25 years in various technical, sales, and general management roles in the semiconductor industry for various companies, ranging from multibillion dollar international conglomerates to small start-ups. Talasek received his Ph. D. in 1993 from the University of North Texas. While he has published extensively in technology, Alice represents his first business effort, a product of many years of experiencing Wonderland first-hand. Talasek has lived almost everywhere someone makes computer chips in the US, but is a proud native Texan, and happy to be home again in the Texas hill country where he participates in various business interests inside and outside the semiconductor industry.

For more information concerning Alice in Corporate Wonderland, contact Talasek or visit www.aliceincorporatewonderland.com.

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