Enstoa is truly a people first company. At the start of each year, we gather all of our team members from around the world for our annual Spark session, 3 days of off-site meetings, interactive sessions, team building activities and events. We reflect on successes and lessons learned of the prior year, and socialize the strategy for the year ahead.

Just because you have data doesn’t mean you’re using it as a strategic asset.

That’s an important distinction. We observe some organizations believe that just because they have enterprise applications, codified processes, and collect heaps of data that they’re exercising all of their enterprise assets to achieve their strategic goals. And yet they aren’t.

Let’s explore why.

Most of us have been taught to believe incentive-based compensation (“bonuses”) to be an essential management tool. The widespread use of this in almost all industries around the globe is a testament to how entrenched a concept it has become. Enstoa tested this theory in 2013 by scrapping bonuses and can now confirm the practice is useless, even harmful. We grew revenue-per-employee by 40% within four quarters of making the change. It wasn’t an anomaly—our 2015 growth is solid and 2016 looks good.