The difference between a good business and a bad businessis that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another. The bad businesses throw up painful decisions time after time.
From all business, my favorite case on incentives is Federal Express. The heart and soul of their system— which creates the integrity of the product—is having all their airplanes come to one place in the middle of the night and shift all the packages from plane to plane. If there are delays, the whole operation can't deliver a product full of integrity to Federal Express customers. And it was always screwed up. They could never get it done on time. They tried everything—moral suasion, threats, you name it. And nothing worked. Finally, somebody got theidea to pay all these people not so much an hour, but so much a shift—and when it's all done, they can go home. Well, their problems cleared up overnight.
AIG is a lot like GE. It is a fabulously successful insurance operator, and with success it morphed into a massive carry business—borrowing a lot of money at one price and investing it at another price. AIG was a big operator that was a lot like GE Credit. We never owned either because even the best and wisest people make us nervous in great big credit operations with swollen balance sheets. It just makes me nervous, that many people borrowing so many billions.
"One solution fits all" is not the way to go…. The right culture for the Mayo Clinic is different from the right culture at a Hollywood movie studio. You can't run all these places with a cookie-cutter solution.