Excellent article. I remember many heated arguments in Deming seminars (and other seminars we taught in the Navy, based on Deming) when people found that most of their reward programs were actually barriers to productivity and joy in work. This is something that we've known (in the sense that there has been plenty of research to back it up), but putting it into practice has been very difficult. Free, Perfect and Now by Rob Rodin tells about how he got rid of incentive schemes for his sales force at Marshall Industries. On the day he implemented that, some of his competitors gave their people a day off to celebrate the coming demise of Marshall, but a year later, they were the industry leader.

I have to ask, though...pants? Aiken-Drum? Is there a particularly bad pun's punchline lurking somewhere? It sounds like a setup for one of those jokes like "the Beer that made Milt Famey walk us."