What's on Your Mind?

We’ve all heard the saying, “When you change the incentives, you change the behavior,” and most of us even believed it at some point. But with experience, you find that human behavior doesn’t fit into such neat little boxes. People act the way they do for all kinds of reasons, some of them rational, some of them not. The truth is that incentives often backfire because of something called Goodhart’s law. Once we target something to incentivize, it ceases to be a good target. A classic example occurred when the British offered bounties for dead cobras in India. Instead of hunting cobras, people started breeding them which, needless to say, didn’t solve the problem. …

In summer 2019, Bob McDonough took a full stack web development coding bootcamp at the University of Pennsylvania. An English-turned-telecommunications major in college, McDonough had been working at a bar while sending out job applications for positions he barely wanted. Most paid below $50,000 a year, an undesirable salary for a 27-year-old in Philadelphia. McDonough says his “degree really wasn’t doing it” for him. “So, I figured I’d add a certificate to stack my résumé,” he says. What McDonough was doing was upskilling—the practice of learning new skills or sharpening old ones to attain maximum desirability in the job market. While taking this web dev course,…

When the federal government shutdown on October 1, it started a chain reaction of income problems for federal workers. Roughly 900,000 government employees are now on furlough. Another 700,000 are working without pay because their jobs are too critical for them to stay home. To add insult to entirely preventable injury, the current administration has indicated that it may not provide the legally mandated back pay to these workers once the shutdown is over. Considering the fact that getting another job during the furlough may require the government employee’s agency approval (and wouldn’t help critical employees working without a paycheck), the shutdown could be a pers…

If you were to join a team meeting at Parity on any given day, you might sense something unusual. One colleague may have just returned from a strength session. Another might be joining from an airport between competitions. Someone else might be analyzing sponsor data mere hours before competing in a world-class event. This is what it looks like to lead a company where a significant portion of the workforce comprises elite women athletes. And I believe it represents a powerful window into the future of work. At most companies, people point to a visionary founder or a breakthrough product as the thing that makes an organization stand out. At Parity, the differenti…