Book excerpt: The ultimate goal of the text is to make compensation decision makers out of its readers. No book can provide all the answers nor can it provide a fail-safe formula. What is can provide are the knowledge and techniques that lead to answers. All compensation decisions are made under a set of decision-making constraints. This book analyzes those constraints. A thorough understanding of them will assist the reader, since a careful consideration and weighing of all the constraints should result in more rational and workable compensation decisions.... The decisions have an impact upon the company achieving high productivity or slowly slipping into oblivion. To aid in preparing for compensation decisions, these pages were written to provide readers with the skills to make wise decisions in a complex, ever-changing, and competitive environment. -Pref.