The Fast Tech 50 Awards are given to the top 50 companies in terms of greatest percentage revenue growth. Like Canidium, many of the companies competing for these awards are consulting groups. This is the first year Canidium has been eligible to participate in the Fast Tech 50, as the company was founded in 2008.

“Canidium has achieved tremendous growth in revenue over the past three years” said Doug Erb, Canidium CEO. “We are honored to be presented with this esteemed award and look forward to being recognized for years to come.”

Canidium LLC posted $1.72 million in 2009 and $3.35 million in 2010. Doug Erb attributes the company’s success and rapid growth to the expanding consulting team and the growing recognition of the company’s expertise in the field of sales performance and incentive compensation. Canidium uses an unbiased, value added approach to implement and integrate sales incentive and compensation systems, as well as to support business intelligence and analytics in order to achieve optimal results in line with a company’s overall business strategies.

The 2011 Fast Tech 50 Award rankings were announced on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at a luncheon hosted by the Houston Business Journal, Houston Technology Center, Pierpont Communications, PKF Texas, Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, and Wealth Design Group.                       

About Canidium LLC:

Canidium LLC is the leading provider of sales performance and incentive compensation management services that optimize the ratio between compensation and sales. Canidium’s unbiased, value added approach utilizes best practices and the best of breed vendors to implement and integrate sales incentive and compensation systems, as well as supporting business intelligence and analytics in order to achieve optimal results in line with a company’s overall business strategies.

Based in Houston, Texas, Canidium provides hands-on support during the entire project lifecycle to ensure its Fortune 500 clients receive the critical information necessary to execute and obtain outlined sales objectives.

For more information, please visit www.canidium.com. Find Canidium on: Facebook /Twitter /Linkedin.

The webcast, “Behavior Based Coaching: How to put the Performance Management back in Sales Performance Management”, will teach viewers the basics of sales coaching. Sales coaching is a relatively new concept; but can offer important benefits to any organization. It can increase consistency and efficiency, put a process in place that can be easily repeated, and allows visible tracking of change. It also provides a comprehensive approach to sales performance management.  

Doug Erb, Canidium’s president and co-founder, will lead the presentation along with Dave Tharp, Canidium’s director of sales effectiveness. The presenters bring more than 25 years combined experience in the field of sales performance management in several industries, including Banking, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, and Telecommunications.

For anyone who manages a sales team or is currently looking at a SPM system, this session will help identify ways to leverage today’s market-leading SPM technology to manage a sales force more effectively and efficiently. The key lessons will be the best way to determine metrics that fit the company’s needs, best practice to aggregate data and identify gaps, and the most effective way to manage data through the sales coaching lifecycle.

To register for the free webcast please visit www.hr.com, and for more information on Canidium please visit www.canidium.com.

About Canidium LLC: 

Canidium LLC is the leading provider of sales performance and incentive compensation management services that optimize the ratio between compensation and sales. Canidium’s unbiased, value added approach utilizes best practices and the best of breed vendors to implement and integrate sales incentive and compensation systems, as well as supporting business intelligence and analytics in order to achieve optimal results in line with a company’s overall business strategies.

Based in Houston, Texas, Canidium provides hands-on support during the entire project lifecycle to ensure its Fortune 500 clients receive the critical information necessary to execute and obtain outlined sales objectives.

For more information, please visit http://www.canidium.com/. Find Canidium on: Facebook /Twitter /LinkedIn.

Still, I’m a little curious as to why this industry has held on so tightly to this pay mix.  Is it just a matter of tradition?  Or is it a belief that service levels would suffer if their dependence on tips were to lessen?  I have a feeling that most restaurant managers believe strongly in a consumer based incentive.  Treat the customer right and you get paid more.  Do your job quickly and accurately; and get immediate feedback from your customer in the form of a higher tip.  It’s pay for performance in its purest form: an economist’s dream.

So if it’s so effective, why don’t all personal service providers use this type of compensation plan? Think of the possibilities.

Personal Trainers – PTs (as they refer to themselves in the industry) generally get paid per hour of service.  The rates vary usually based on the clientele.  I’m sure some would argue that they do receive a de facto incentive pay because most PTs build their own client base and maintain that themselves.  It stands to reason that if they aren’t very good they’ll lose clients.  But what if you could take it a step further and pay them based on results instead of usage?  It could be something measurable such as weight loss or waist size reduction.  If you aren’t really looking to lose weight, maybe it’s a measure of your cholesterol levels or oxygen absorption ratio (If that exists).  Or maybe you just want to pay an incentive to your PT for getting you to the gym in the first place.  A great PT would take a personal interest in your health and monitor more than just your squatting technique.  If you skip a day they should be calling or coming by to snatch your Oreos and pull you off the couch.  The possibilities are endless.

Doctors – Physicians of all disciplines are constantly balancing the social and technical aspects of job; and many struggle mightily.  The perfect doctor would be someone who was first in their class in medical school and also reads Jodi Picoult.  The technical ability is what we respect most about doctors and most of us believe that’s what we’re paying for when we visit.  However, it’s the personal touch (or lack thereof) that determines whether or not we’re happy with the outcome.  Doctors who have mastered both aspects should get paid more., while doctors who fall short in either aspect should be encouraged to improve.  On the technical front, the incentive to perform is there in the form of possible litigation.  If that doesn’t motivate a physician to study the latest techniques then nothing will.  On the soft (or patient care) side, incentives could be a solution.  I would love to simply have a tip line on my exit bill (similar to my restaurant check).  That would give me the avenue for providing immediate and meaningful feedback to the doctor who just serviced my needs.  I think we often forget that doctors and nurses are service providers; many of them lose sight of that as well.

Mechanics – Auto service technicians, the doctors to our vehicles.  Is there an industry with a broader range of performance amongst providers?  I’ve seen good and bad technicians.  I’ve seen honest and dishonest.  They run the gamut.  Everybody I know says the same thing: if you find a good mechanic, one who knows their stuff and won’t scam you… hold onto them forever.  That’s really a sad statement when you think about it, sad but true.  So how great would it be to have incentives built into every job?  What if you could hold back fees if the car took an extra day or ten to have the carburetor rebuilt?  Too often right now we feel powerless.  It would be nice to have some assurance that the mechanic has a real incentive to follow through on their promises.     

Airlines – Taxi drivers get tips.  Why don’t pilots?  I know there’s a full team involved in delivering a plane full of passengers from one place to another. I know there are weather and mechanical problems and terrorist threats.  But still, aren’t airlines supposed to be a service industry?  They’re not delivery companies, they transport humans and they should try to make that experience as pleasurable as possible.  I’d be in favor of allocating a portion of my fare to a tip pool that gets held back until I’ve arrived satisfied.

So what is “Analytics”?

Analytics (according to Webster’s)

[An-l-it-iks] noun. The science of logical analysis.

Clear?  So it turns out that the term analytics is more of a discipline than a destination.  More specific to sales compensation:

Sales Compensation Analytics (my definition)

The science of dissecting sales compensation data in an effort to forecast, model and detect patterns with the ultimate goal of discovering methods for optimizing the ratio between sales and compensation.

Analysis is done everywhere.  I suppose there is a critical point at which analysis becomes “analytics”.  It’s the scale, granularity and robustness that vary from organization to organization.

At one end of the spectrum you might have The Stone Company; they operate in the proverbial dark ages of compensation management.  They manually calculate commissions and pass them around on spreadsheets.  HR does pay analysis by requesting a dump of data from the payroll system.  The only reports upper management have is very high level.  They basically have payroll history in a sort able spreadsheet.  They can tell you how many sales reps made more money than the CEO, but they can’t tell you why.  They’re forced to manage by gut and not surprisingly, they do alright because they’ve been doing it this way for years and there’s not a lot of risk taking.  Many businesses operate this way. 

At the other end you have The Glass Company; they’re a world class outfit when it comes to compensation management.  They get fresh reports daily from an automated, online system.  Sales and compensation can be sliced and diced at the most granular level.  They can give you the global average cost of sales for widget X on Tuesdays.  They can tell you how many times a customer bought accessory B with widget Y.  They can tell you how many sales reps are on pace to hit quota and they can model the effects of the proposed new marketing campaign.  They still use their gut but they back decisions with data.  The business feels empowered to try new things and innovate. 

Notice that the difference between the two companies is not the talent of management or the insight into the value of strategic compensation.  The difference is in the tools available.  Many, many companies make do with very limited access to data and analysis tools.  They make do by working with what they have and by filling the gaps with assumptions and experience.  However, they would use more data if they had it.  The thirst for data and insight is unlimited.  That’s a universal truth.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Have Tools?

A developing theory I’ve had over the years is that most companies stuck in the dark ages are there because they can’t decide where to go.  Imagine that we were running an experiment where we put a group of people down into a deep tunnel with several unmarked passages to lead them out.  Nobody in the group knows which way is out and they must decide what to do.  I think we’d find several outcomes.  Some groups would follow a strong leader who would decide, rightly or wrongly, the direction.  Other groups would split up and go in several directions each with their own goal in mind.  Some groups wouldn’t be able to decide on a common direction and the debate would paralyze them, they’d just sit there. 

These outcomes are analogous to what we see in the SPM world in regards to analytics.  Some companies are stuck in paralysis.  They agree that something must be done but they can’t agree on how to do it, so nothing is done.  Some companies have followed a direction set by a strong leader.  Other companies have developed independent capabilities in several places within the organization.

Macro-Analytics vs. Micro-Analytics

The reality is it is very unlikely that you will be able to build a monolithic analytics environment that gives everyone what they need in one rollout.  There are too many perspectives to satisfy. 

The most common divide is a concept I like to call macro vs. micro.  When putting together an analytics tool the most important element is the data and how it’s structured.  Often times you need to tweak your source systems in order to produce data at the level desired for your analyzers.  Here’s where the conflict occurs. 

Let’s take a Global Compensation Director.  She would like to look at her data at a summary level based on role, country, etc.  She wants to reconcile compensation data from the SPM system with data from the accounting system and the sales reporting system.  Global Directors want to view metrics like a captain of a cruise ship.  Cruise ships can drift a few feet off course as long as the captain can avoid the ice burgs.

Now let’s take the Compensation Analyst assigned to the Northeast New Jersey territory in the retail business unit.  He wants account level and product level metrics.  Analysts need to know the specific rate paid on specific orders.  They are looking to find deviations at a micro-level.  They need to answer questions related to the setting of quotas and the effect of vacation time.  Analysts deal with individuals and their paychecks, there is no place for estimations, averages and summaries when it comes to paychecks.

Take the First Step

So where is the “analytics” City of Gold?  Every company needs to draw their own map.  Certainly there are many ideas out there that can be reused as starting points or templates.  This isn’t a case where you buy a tool and it triggers a wave of game changing analytical analysis that you’ve never heard of.  What a nice analytics tool gives you is built-in adaptability.  You might start with one vision and change it later after a period of use. However, in order to get started, every stakeholder needs to identify what they want to see.  Priorities can be set based on the value each capability provides.  Perhaps its Finance’s ability to do better forecasting that takes the top spot.  Perhaps is Sales’ ability to analyze the impact of spiffs.  Perhaps you choose to provide the capability that is cheapest to implement.  Whatever the case, any capabilities are better than none.

My favorite analogy to use here is the construction of the New York subway system.  The intricate web of tracks we see today all started with a single line.  At the time nobody envisioned what is it today and I would bet there was great debate over where to start.  Thankfully, they started somewhere and New Yorkers have been benefitting ever since.

The latest is an upcoming movie titled “In Time” starring Justin Timberlake.  This one is set in a world where everyone on the planet stops aging once they turn twenty-five.  On that birthday, they’re given one year of time to deposit in their proverbial bank account.  That time continuously counts backward and if it reaches zero you die.  In other words, every minute of your life is being spent as you continue to live.  In order to survive, you have to earn more time to keep your account balance positive.  In essence, time becomes the new currency of the day.  Everything from coffee to magazine subscriptions is purchased by withdrawing time out of your account.  Every job pays wages in minutes that you deposit into your account and use to live another day.  Time is literally money and money is literally time.

Based on the trailer, the movie looks like a bit of a dramatic thriller.  All kinds of social and societal dynamics are explored and apparently danger lurks on every corner.  It looks like a super-intense version of real life; which I suppose is what happens when going broke literally kills you and getting rich means you undoubtedly have to take other people’s lives away from them.  The possibilities are endless, I hope it delivers.

Obviously, in real life we value time in a figurative sense.  Most of us can’t really place a dollar value on a minute, but we cherish it nonetheless.  When we “get more time”, it probably means we just have more time not reserved for someone or something else (i.e. free time).  People often talk about wanting more free time but I’ve never seen anyone place a true monetary value on it.  I wonder what the true value of free time would be to the average American?  It would be an interesting experiment to modify an incentive compensation plan to use time as currency instead of money.  What if the bonus for hitting quota was not just a monetary reward but also a time reward?  What if an extra day off came with a smaller bonus?  If a sales rep had the choice of a bonus plan paying in money or time or a blend which would they choose? 

My hunch is that all individuals are not the same.  American’s have a reputation for valuing money over time and I’m sure many would live up to that expectation.  However, I suspect there would be individuals more than satisfied with some extra time off instead of heftier bonus checks.  Of course, the experiment would have a major bias if you only looked at sales people.  Overachieving sales reps tend to be the workaholic, money motivated types.  But you never know; personal situations and the business of life could become an even bigger influence than it already is and motivate people to take more time for themselves.  As the old saying goes:

“No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business’.”

Canidium’s team will implement Real Goods Solar’s new incentive compensation management system, which will allow the company to oversee sales incentive design, modeling, quota allocation, dispute resolution and analytics. Incentive compensation management services will provide the company with more control over sales execution.

Real Goods Solar has led the sustainable living market through education, solar installation and renewable lifestyle products for 33 years. The company is the leading solar energy integrator, having installed over 11,500 solar electric systems for homes, schools and businesses across the country. With 15 offices in California, Colorado and the Northeast Real Goods Solar is one of the largest residential solar installers in the United States. As a result, Real Goods Solar enlisted the help of Canidium to implement a new incentive compensation management system for their sales force. 

Kent Halliburton, vice president of sales and software at Real Goods Solar, said: “In an extremely dynamic and fast paced industry, Canidium’s implementation will provide the compensation flexibility Real Goods Solar’s world-class sales organization needs to stay ahead of the market.”

Added Erb: “At Canidium we strive to provide the highest quality incentive compensation management services to each of our customers. Working with the professionals at Real Goods Solar has been a positive experience and we look forward to growing our relationship with them in the future.”

Canidium uses an unbiased, value added approach to implement and integrate sales incentive and compensation systems, as well as to support business intelligence and analytics in order to achieve optimal results in line with a company’s overall business strategies. For more information on Canidium please visit www.canidium.com.   

About Canidium LLC: 

Canidium LLC is the leading provider of sales performance and incentive compensation management services that optimize the ratio between compensation and sales. Canidium’s unbiased, value added approach utilizes best practices and the best of breed vendors to implement and integrate sales incentive and compensation systems, as well as supporting business intelligence and analytics in order to achieve optimal results in line with a company’s overall business strategies.

Based in Houston, Texas, Canidium provides hands-on support during the entire project lifecycle to ensure its Fortune 500 clients receive the critical information necessary to execute and obtain outlined sales objectives.

For more information, please visit www.canidium.com. Find Canidium on: Facebook /Twitter /Linkedin. 

About Real Goods Solar:

Real Goods Solar is a leading solar energy integrator, having installed over 11,500 solar electric systems for homes, schools and businesses across the country. Real Goods Solar offers turnkey solar energy solutions, and has 33 years of experience in solar energy, beginning with its sale of the first solar photovoltaic panels in the United States in 1978. With 15 offices in California, Colorado and the Northeast Real Goods Solar is one of the largest residential solar installers in the United States. For more information, go to www.RealGoods.com or call 1-888-56-SOLAR (1-888-567-6527).

The webcast, “All Systems Are Not Created Equal: Learn to Perform Vendor Comparisons and Maximize Your ROI”, will walk participants through a sample plan for accomplishing goals, will review a traditional timeline, and will provide information on how to choose the best system to maximize ROI. Participants will learn to look beyond the bells and whistles of vendor demos to determine which software is the best fit for their organization’s specific needs.

Doug Erb, Canidium’s president and co-founder, will lead the presentation. Erb has more than 13 years of experience architecting and implementing sales performance management solutions. He co-founded Canidium in 2008 and has achieved a wide variety of experience in several industries including Banking, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, and Telecommunications.

If you are looking at a SPM system or are currently doing an evaluation, this session will help you learn which ROI drivers to consider, will help you determine how to apply them to your situation, and will teach you how to navigate the vendor nod and flashy demos.

To register for the free webcast please visit www.hr.com, and for more information on Canidium please visit www.canidium.com.

About Canidium LLC: 

Canidium LLC is the leading provider of sales performance and incentive compensation management services that optimize the ratio between compensation and sales. Canidium’s unbiased, value added approach utilizes best practices and the best of breed vendors to implement and integrate sales incentive and compensation systems, as well as supporting business intelligence and analytics in order to achieve optimal results in line with a company’s overall business strategies.

Based in Houston, Texas, Canidium provides hands-on support during the entire project lifecycle to ensure its Fortune 500 clients receive the critical information necessary to execute and obtain outlined sales objectives.

For more information, please visit http://www.canidium.com/. Find Canidium on: Facebook /Twitter /LinkedIn.

4pm… Flight arrives on time in beautiful Chicago despite a broken light causing a short delay on departure.  Apparently the pilot stepped on the gas and made up a few minutes.  I continue to be fascinated by the flight crews at Southwest.  They’re always joking and smiling.  What does Southwest do to motivate their employees?  Is it the honey roasted peanuts?  The Khaki shorts?  Incentives can’t possibly tell the whole story here.  Even if Southwest put bonuses in place for on time arrivals and great customer satisfaction scores, you wouldn’t get this genuine “good mood” that I routinely observe. 

The conference hotel is the Westin this year; one of my favorites.  I’m no hotel connoisseur but I do travel quite a bit and Westin is Five Star in my book.  The rooms are always very nice and the Heavenly Beds are the 3^rd leading cause of over sleeping (just behind power outages and setting your alarm to PM instead of AM).

7pm… We attended the opening reception (sponsored by Varicent Software).  The finger foods were top notch and I almost of ruined my dinner.  There was also an open bar and everyone had a good time reconnecting with old friends and associates.  These sales compensation events are like reunions to those of us that have been in the space for a while.  Shortly thereafter the Canidium team went to dinner at HUB 51, a trendy spot in downtown Chicago.  We agreed to take their least desirable table in order to be seated without a wait.  It turned out to be a great dinner, the burgers are fantastic.

Day Two – The Conference Begins

After only slightly sleeping in, I made it to breakfast.  This consisted of an English muffin, cut in two, with a ham and egg scramble smothering each half.  It was tasty but I’m not a breakfast guy so I didn’t finish. 

9am… During breakfast (sponsored by ZS Associates) we were entertained by the keynote speaker, Sam Geist.  Mr. Geist has written several books with clever titles. (i.e. Execute… or Be Executed, Why Should Someone Do Business With You?).  His latest tome is titled Would You Work For You?  The cover of the book has a mirror on it so you can ask yourself that question (and we all got a copy!).  Sam travels the country doing speeches and seminars.  He asks insightful questions and tries to get everyone thinking.  His presentation was very entertaining.  I got the feeling he was giving us about one percent of his material but those high points were plenty.  We probably weren’t prepared to do a lot of deep thinking at 9am anyway.

1pm… After attending some workshops, we had lunch (sponsored by Towers Watson).  I give another high mark primarily because I shamelessly ate a huge slice of chocolate chip cookie dough cheesecake.  I made some friends from a company in Canada.  Apparently they also love cheesecake in Canada and have business challenges just like we do in the states.  Of course, I offered to help.

2pm… The highlight of the conference was our workshop. 

Forefront of the Global Corporate Landscape: Sales Performance Management Outsourcing and Managed Services

Susan Milhau from Canidium and Rob Pluta from JM Family did an outstanding job describing the benefits of managed services for sales compensation systems.  We are very proud of the relationship we’ve built with JM Family and it’s always exciting to share this success story with others in the business.  Our clients do a much better job of selling Canidium than we could ever do (no offense to our sales staff!)

7pm… The rest of the day consisted of more workshops and networking.  The conference activities concluded with another reception (sponsored by AON Hewitt).  This one had a pasta bar, pizza and more finger foods plus the open bar.  Networking was great once again.  I made another friend, this one from SalesForce.com.  It was fascinating to hear how SalesForce.com uses SalesForce.com to manage their sales process.  We discussed the subtleties of developing compensation plans for a product that has ridiculously high market share.  At what point are you just paying people to not screw it up?  It’s comforting to know that I’ll probably always have a job because no matter how successful a company is they always want to do better.

The dinner place tonight is Rockit Bar and Grill.  I was told this place is owned by Jeremy Piven from Entourage.  I don’t feel like researching to confirm that.  I can tell you that he wasn’t there but the food and drink was great again.  It’s going to take weeks to work off this trip!

Day Three – Final Half Day

Still not fully digested from the night before, I skipped breakfast and went straight to the coffee.  This day consisted of a couple more workshop opportunities and precious few occasions to network before everyone starts heading home.  Our objective when attending these conferences is to expand our network and expand our brand.  It’s part marketing, part sales and part knowledge sharing.  We told our story to as many professionals as we could and that makes it a success, but you always want more.  I suspect we will be a regular attendee.  WorldAtWork does a great job putting these on and this was only the second year of the Focus on Sales Compensation.  They will continue to tweak the event and it will only get better.  I’m already looking forward to next year.  At worst it’s an excuse to escape the brutal Texas summer for a few days.

Canidium will present on the Forefront of the Global Corporate Landscape: Sales Performance Management Outsourcing and Managed Services on Thursday, August 25, 12:45 to 2 p.m. The workshop will be led by Susan Milhau, a sales executive at Canidium, along with Robert Pluta, director of application development at JM Family Enterprises. Milhau will discuss outsourcing and Canidium’s managed services offerings while Pluta will discuss JM Family Enterprises’ experience using Canidium’s managed services. 

 ”The Conference is the perfect place for us to share our expertise and experience in compensation management services and to meet others in the SPM and ICM industries. We are pleased to be presenting with one of our valued clients, JM Family Enterprises” said Erb.

The Conference, held at the Westin Chicago River North Hotel in Chicago, is the perfect opportunity for leaders in the sales performance and incentive compensation management services industries to share their experiences with others. Attendees will get knowledge-based information about sales compensation issues, fresh ideas from some of the top industry experts, and practical tools that can be implemented at the office immediately to motivate and retain top sales talent. 

For more information on Canidium please visit www.canidium.com and for further details on the Conference please visit the event webpage.

The first season of “The Biggest Loser” came in 2004, with a concept of making people loose as much weight as they can under the supervision of health experts and dietitians and not only they were helped to start a new healthy life they, the winner also got a grand prize money of $250,000.

The fascinating element to me is the prize money.  In that first season, the prize money was a huge part of the show.  I distinctly remember hearing about it constantly.  The contestants were frequently being asked to describe what they’d do with the money.  Players schemed with an end game of winning.  It was truly a competition.

This last season, I found myself asking my wife if there was still prize money.  There is; it’s just not a central theme of the show anymore, or so it seems.  Players occasionally mention “winning” but mostly it’s about staying on the show and continuing their workouts.  The group seems to pull for each other a lot more as well.  During one episode, two seasons ago, there was a race where the winner received a new car.  Toward the end of the race, the leaders stopped to allow one of their competitors to win because they all knew that he didn’t have a car.  Has that ever happened in game show history?!

And that got me thinking.  To what degree does intrinsic motivation drive behavior and performance compared to extrinsic motivation?

First, looking back, the concept of The Biggest Loser is a little strange to begin with.  Why is there prize money in the first place?  Is the hope for a better life with improved health NOT enough to get people on the show?  You can almost hear the pitch: 

Idea Guy:  How about this, we get a group of morbidly obese people and challenge them to a weight loss contest on a secluded ranch.

Producer: Why would they come?  Wouldn’t they rather stay at home and watch skinny people on TV?

Idea Guy: Well, we’ll give them top notch trainers and dieticians.  It’s a free trip to weight loss camp.

Producer: Have you ever heard a person say they wish they could go to fat camp and have it televised?

Idea Guy: Okay, what if we have prize money for the winner.  $100k.

Producer: Now you’re talking!  But it needs to be more if you want to get press.  Let’s make it $250k!  We’ll have overweight people putting on extra pounds so they can get on the show!

Second, looking at it now it’s obvious that the money doesn’t matter.  From what I can tell, most of the contestants are thoroughly convinced that being on this show is their only hope for getting the life they want.  That sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud.  Do they think The Biggest Loser is the only way to get training and diet management?  Or do they think being on TV keeps them motivated?

Regardless of that, my point is that money is no longer THE dominant motivator on the show, nor is it the only motivator in the workplace. Positive reinforcement, a strong support team and realistic goals are important drivers of human behavior, and should be considered when creating incentive compensation plans.