How to use incentive alignment to unlock faster growth (in the real world)

My recent interview with Jesse Beyroutey solidified a hunch that I’ve been nursing for awhile:

Incentive alignment is one of the most important ideas in business, but making it work in practice is incredibly tricky.

Sure, you might understand the general principle — businesses who have incentives that are aligned with their customers tend to grow faster than those who don’t — but recognizing the logic of an idea and making an idea actually pay off are totally different things.

In order to put it into practice, you have to learn what good incentive alignment actually feels like from the inside. Case studies about companies that have done it successfully always feel much cleaner, simpler, and more inevitable than any business does in real life.