Adi Bulsara

Here's what Adi had to say about the Ocandida case.

• A fair system requires fair people. Even a good system can be exploited by greedy people and even an imperfect system can be made to work reasonably fairly by fair-minded people. But that said, it makes sense to have as good a system as possible.
• Incentives are needed. If there's no incentive, most people won't go out of their way to do more than they have to. Indeed, in any organization, Adi feels there are typically 10-15% dead weight who won't do much even with incentives, 5-10% who will go on actively looking for improvements even without incentives, and the large majority in the middle who will be very much influenced by the presence or absence of incentives.
• Many people's idea of a good life is a government job or a union job -- because the pay will be better, the work won't be too hard, and they'll have security.
• Adi tells the story of working once as a labourer in a factory. He had to move barrels of material from one spot to another and then unload them. The first day he unloaded 40 barrels. That's when the union representatives came to him and said: "You should only do about 9 barrels a day -- maybe 12 on a really good day. You're going to spoil it for everyone else." Undeterred, Adi unloaded 45 barrels the next day. Then the tires on his car were slashed. Later management came to him and complained that he was causing problems with the union and would he please stop rocking the boat. In such a system, one wonders how any nation can achieve reasonable productivity. Yet we all know that in an earlier time there had been serious abuses that it took the creation of unions to curtail.
• Adi feels that the bottom rungs of the economic ladder are often the low-paying white-collar jobs. They are given tougher responsibilities, but are paid often only a fraction of what union workers get.
• Adi believes that more wide-spread profit-sharing would be a good idea, would be motivating, and would increase productivity. Probably it would have to be legislated because many employers would never do it voluntarily. We discussed ways this might be done: either by profit-sharing pools or by allocation of company shares. Presumably some sort of minimum profit-sharing could be defined in the same way that a minimum wage is defined. This would not preclude harder working or more innovative employees being awarded more than the minimum profit allocation. The mechanics would be tricky but by no means impossible. Adi believes a widespread sense of participation in the business results could be very motivating for employees.
• In the Ocandida case it is difficult to determine precisely how much profit someone like GumLover should be allowed to keep. Adi has seen both sides of the argument -- certainly he has seen situations where greedy owners gave away too little to the employees that were really making their business successful -- on the other hand, he has been working night and day to build up his own business -- he would not like someone to come along later and say he didn't deserve to reap the benefits of the equity he has built up.

Your views?

Last updated: Aug 10, 2005

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