I’ve handed out a few bonuses in my time. Some years our results were spectacular; other times poor. Payouts went up and down accordingly. I can only remember two people opening the envelope and saying “thank you”. Both cases were in poor years. It never happened in a good one.

Perhaps that’s a function of good times. Bull markets are defined by optimism. Expectations climb beyond reality. Ask how much is enough and the answer, inevitably, is just a little bit more.

Do incentives work?

I was abused by my own mother. She was abused by hers. I want it to stop now. I don’t want my children to go through this.

Her concern was not what happened to her. She was terrified of treating her own daughter the same way. It’s why she came to the Newpin centre.

Newpin is a voluntary therapeutic community where struggling young mothers and fathers spend as many as four days a week for up to two years.

They commit because they are troubled parents responsible for raising human beings. Despite often desperate histories of intergenerational dysfunction, they want to get it right.

Does it work?

It’s almost half a century since Alvin Toffler published “The Future as a Way of Life” in Horizon magazine. The article spoke of a world where too much changed in too short a period. It was a prelude to his influential book, “Future Shock”. Toffler warned that given how rapidly the environment was evolving we would need to be more agile in the future.

A share market index tracks a basket of stocks. We follow them to see where markets are heading.  What we don’t follow so closely is what’s in the basket.

Companies come and go. Some end in bankruptcy; others merge or get taken over. Some just fade from view. Seventy years ago, Joseph Schumpeter labeled this “creative destruction”. It’s why index baskets are revised each year.

“He’s so gregarious. He’d make a great salesman.” It conjures up the positive, outgoing personality who always gets the order.

Is that actually the reality?

I’ve managed a lot of sales people. The ones who put runs on the board – that’s runs plural, not just the odd flashy win – often have a touch of reserve. They would place in a popularity contest, but not win it.

It’s February. We’ve made it through another prediction season. We now know what to expect in 2013.

Or do we? After all, most of the things commentators told us would happen a year ago failed to materialize. Mostly, they were wrong.

Some failures were well broadcast. US election predictions were pretty much all wrong. Left and right-wingers were equally hopeless. They had Obama winning or losing by huge margins. The result was a close call. Democracy, as usual, muddled through.

Neuroscientists say our brain can only handle about half a dozen things at a time. That’s why our best thinking does not happen at the office. At work, there’s too much going on.

You don’t need science to tell you that. Vedic mystics picked up on it a thousand years ago and you have probably worked it out yourself.

We were about age nine when my neighbour and I decided to explore the local creek. This required a boat.

Using scraps of discarded material, we fashioned a marine structure with wooden bow and stern. We hammered corrugated iron around it, puttied up the cracks and made a trailer out of garden stakes and pram wheels to haul it to the creek.

It capsized on launch and sank within seconds.

We promptly scheduled a product review. We added outriggers buoyed by old petrol cans and lashed them across the beam. They sort of worked. With a bit of tweaking they held the canoe upright, preventing our early death by drowning.

It all seems a bit Tom Sawyerish now but I was reminded of it by this example of retro-innovation in Steve Johnson’s book, Where Ideas Come From.