milliondare.com

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Prices for bread, orange juice, bananas and gasoline for the last 10 years.

You be the judge.

My company is not giving bonuses to employees this year.

Why not?

Well, primarily due to bad planning rather than poor performance - we didn’t hit our targets despite growing most metrics (top and bottom line).

Here are a few lessons learned from this experience:

1. No matter how good you are, you always depend on somebody else. Think about it - Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Warren Buffet, even Paris Hilton… They all depend on somebody else who is not of their ’status’ (education, affluence, etc). There is always an unknown variable in everything we do day to day and we simply can’t influence them all the time, no matter how good (or bad) we are.

2. Big company, small company, same impact? My company is relatively small so I believe I have a much larger impact on what we do. However, since I can’t directly contribute to sales, I’m stuck in point #1 above.

3. No mullah, no luva. How can you stay motivated when you know your salary is significantly lower due to the lack of bonuses? That’s a tough cookie to swallow for senior management.

What do you think about the issue?