This is a serious book: it is a selection of articles from the Harvard Business Review on the subject of the compensation of labour: wages, salaries, bonuses and so on.

The book contains articles that span the period 1993 to 2001 and the authors are very famous in their field: Alfred Rappaport is the one that most readers will probably heard most of!

The contents of the book are:

• "New Thinking on How to Link Executive Pay with Performance by Alfred Rappaport
• Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work by Alfie Kohn
• Rethinking Rewards by Alfie Kohn
• A Simpler Way to Pay by Egon Zehnder
• What You Need to Know About Stock Options by Brian Hall
• When Salaries Aren’t Secret by John Case.
• Six Dangerous Myths About Pay by Jeffrey Pfeffer.
• Growing Pains by Robert D. Nicoson.

Anyone working in the area of the compensation of labour or in accounting and business studies should find a lot of interest here. The basic problems with executive stock options might be an eye opener for some of you. Inflation tends to make share prices rise, certainly the FTSE100 and the S&P500 both sky rocket over time come what may. This means that stock options reward anyone, absolutely anyone even over a relatively tight time period of a year or two!

These stock options hae become very popular of course as executives have realised what a breeze they are. Read the articles by Rappaport, Kohn and Hall for more on managerial incentives.

I liked the article by Jeffrey Pfeffer, the six myths: what he writes seems to so obvious but as I was reading it I kept coming across stories that illustrate that these myths persist. People, even senior managers and journalists who really ought to know better, are falling foul of the six myths.

Of course this collection won't appeal to everyone: there are lots of things that could have been said; but as a starting point for year one or two business studies/management studies/accounting undergraduate it is a good starting point. The least that this collection does is put everything in one place with less need to trawl through the library catalogue!

Typical of all HBR articles, these articles are well written and presented and make the topics they contain accessible, as they say.

Duncan Williamson
17 July 2004