On Fair Reward

From Strategy to Behavior at Scale

De: Eric Kish

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This book is the fourth in a five-part series that explores how organizations can use the exIQtive method (pronounced executive) to build and run scalable organizations. After more than a decade of working with founders, CEOs, and executive teams, I’ve come to believe that Strategy dies in the gap between Intent and Behavior. When this happens, we say the organization is not Scalable. For an organization to be scalable 5 things must happen:

• Readiness – Employees must be capable of performing their responsibilities independently, consistently, and with clarity.

• Engagement – People thrive in environments that meet their behavioral needs, offer a path for growth, and give them real agency over outcomes.

• Fair Reward – Compensation must reflect the actual value an employee brings to the organization—not just tenure or title—and align with what the market pays for that value.

• Alignment with Strategic Intent – Everyone must understand the company’s true priorities and direction, and feel personally invested in the outcome.

• Organizational Flow – The flow of an organization is shaped by its rituals—structured routines that reduce friction, create momentum, and embed a culture of continuous improvement. Disciplined rituals are how you put your company on autopilot, cruising toward strategic goals. They build the muscle memory that enables consistency at scale.

This fourth book, On Fair Reward, focuses on fair pay as the foundation of trust.

I learned these lessons the hard way—over 30 years of scaling six different organizations, serving as CEO, and navigating the full arc from chaos to exit. These were not theory-based case studies. These were companies with real revenue, real people, and real stakes—including one sold for $3.8 billion.

Every time, I faced the same challenge: how to scale people as fast as I was scaling product and market. And every time, I saw the same truth—shaping employee behavior to achieve business goals was the difference between success and failure.

It’s this experience that I distilled into my exIQtive methodology to transform strategy into behavior at scale. Over the last ten years, I’ve delivered my exIQtive flagship workshop more than 200 times, helping CEOs and leadership teams build fast-growing, sustainable organizations.

Most of those sessions were hosted by Vistage, the world’s largest CEO peer advisory organization. As a long-time Vistage speaker, I’ve had the privilege of working directly with hundreds of CEOs managing the pressures of expansion.

My goal in this book is simple: to give you a clear, practical, and scalable framework for making fair pay the foundation of trust for your culture. Because when your people are fairly paid, you can grow your business faster and scale smarter.

And when fair reward is paired with readiness, engagement, clear strategic intent and disciplined rituals—everything changes.

— Eric Kish