Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

You probably have heard the old metaphor; how a frog placed in hot water will jump out immediately, but put in cold water and slowly heated he'll sit there and boil to death.  That happens in business so often: we have a program that works in place and turn our attention away from it until one day we find we've been boiled and hadn't noticed. Such is our Service Award program, which had been in place a decade or so before I got here a decade or so ago.  It is a corporate incentive not charged to HR so we hadn't paid attention to the pricing, and since we administer the program nobody else had looked at the cost assuming we had. Then we began to get complaints about the quality and selection of the awards.  When we dug in we found that, looking up those same items on on-line retailers, we were paying about double plus shipping.  Then we had a great suggestion from an employee: why not just give her the same value and purchase on-line through Amazon with free shipp...