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The Foreword: Incentives are a motivational technique that is often misunderstood. Most companies that use incentives become advocates, and those that have not used them continue to resist their adoption. How To Use Incentives Effectively will appeal to both the advocate and the resister. The advocate will be able to focus on "effectively," and the resister should be enticed by "use incentives effectively." This new publication is another in Bank Marketing Association's series of "how to" education materials. You will find, from "The Foundation" in Chapter One to "Operation Outreach" in Chapter Seven, very practical, hands-on ways to put incentives to use effectively. Incentives have long been used as a positive or negative inducement by businesspeople to take a course of action. From the subtle incentive of encouraging customer spending with tax deductions for interest expense to the obvious commission income of the "pure" salesman, we live in a world of incentives. Banking as an industry has been slow to adopt the incentive concept fully, possibly because of a lack-of-dignity perception it has carried. It has been frequently stated that bankers must maintain a certain image, and incentives in some mysterious way are counter to that image. Deregulation is changing banking's image.. As John Naisbitt remarks in his book, Megatrends, "We change thinking when there is a confluence of changing values and economic necessity." Economic necessity is now upon bankers in a way we have never understood before. It is my belief that How To Use Incentives Effectively will become a primer for the financial industry. We are going to become innovative, creative, and practical in the use of incentives to affect the behavior we are "renting" from our employees. People want to succeed, and management that encourages and rewards the success of employees in a meaningful way will itself become a big winner. ~ Smith W. Brookhart, III