To continue, profit motivates only those who receive them. In a big company that's typically the shareholders and some execs, not the employees. There might be some reward system in place that benefits all employees, but most of the time there's no linear correlation between company performance and employee bonuses. More typical from my experience is that if the company performs well, you get whatever bonus percentage of your annual salary you're entitled to (provided you've also met your personal targets), and if the company performs poorly, no one gets anything. Yet it's the employees who have the most effect on the company's performance [citation missing], the shareholders who get most of the profits have none. I'm starting to think profits aren't that effective an incentive in many cases. For a mom and pops sure, where the employees are the "shareholders", but where are those nowadays, and how big part of the economy are they?