Somehow, I’ve become embroiled in a controversy (why do these things happen to me?) about the proper use of “professional.”

Many of those who have studied the topic insist it be restricted to, at a minimum, roles for which accredited institutions award certifications.

Some go further, wanting “professional” to be used only when the law doesn’t allow anyone to practice a craft without certification. By this definition, of course, cosmetologists qualify, but there is no such thing as an IT professional.

My own position? As I lack the authority to enforce linguistic usages on anyone (and if I had it, I’d use it to make using hopefully to mean I hope a felony), I limited my part of the conversation to description rather than prescription: “Professional” has at least four different meanings. In addition to the two already listed, it can mean “someone who practices a trade or craft that makes use of an extensive, well-defined body of knowledge and skills.” That’s what we mean when we talk about IT professionals.

And, it can mean “someone who gets paid for doing what they do.” I’m old enough to remember when professional athletes were barred from Olympic competition, the only difference between professional and amateur athletes being whether they’re paid for their efforts.

For some reason, these rather obvious points made some participants in the conversation downright grumpy.

Which brings us to the seemingly unrelated topic of whether incentive pay amounts to bribery, as claimed here not very long ago (“Do retention bribes make sense?” KJR, 7/2/2012).

The place to start is the definition. Many correspondents insisted it isn’t a bribe unless the result is nefarious or illegal behavior, so incentive pay isn’t bribery.

But by that definition, giving a politician money in exchange for their agreeing to vote a certain way on an issue isn’t a bribe either. After all, voting a certain way on an issue isn’t illegal. For that matter, changing one’s mind, and therefore one’s vote isn’t illegal. Changing it in exchange for cash or other favors is what makes the cash or favors a bribe … and therefore illegal … in the first place.

Unless it’s a campaign contribution, of course, which, I’m told, is an exercise of free speech, not a bribe. Which of course makes complete sense: The purpose of free speech is to allow us to persuade each other through the presentation of compelling arguments, and what argument is more compelling to elected officials than a large wad of cash they can use in their attempts to get elected?

I trust the distinction is clear. But I digress. The question is whether incentive compensation is bribery. As what makes bribing an elected official illegal is that it gets them to do what they otherwise would not have done, that appears to be the essence of the beast.

Which leads to this frequently expressed objection to the incentive-comp-as-bribery proposition: If that’s a bribe, isn’t all compensation a bribe? After all, very few of us would show up for work if our employers stopped paying us.

It’s a good point. A very good point, that leads to a very important insight about leadership. But it isn’t quite right, because basic compensation doesn’t get anyone to do what they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Unless you’re wealthy enough to retire with the lifestyle you desire (and aren’t in a position to get enough money to live on via other means, like extortion or armed robbery) your options are limited: Starve to death or get a paying job.

So when your employer pays you, it isn’t to get you to go to work. You’d do that anyway. It’s to influence your choice of where to go to work—a very different matter.

Which gets us to why the point matters: Many business “leaders” (as opposed to leaders) think that money is the only tool they have to get employees to work for them, instead of somewhere else. They think, that is, they have to bribe people to work for them.

And so, they pay more than they have to and get worse results for it, because if money is all that matters to their employees, how they treat their employees doesn’t matter. “Leaders” like this don’t treat them very well.

Which leads to this week’s question: What could an employer offer you to get you to work for them if the best they could pay you was 15% less than what you’re making right now?

And this week’s second question: If you’re in management, do you offer this to the employees who work for you right now?

Expertise leads to overreach. Some who have it think it qualifies them to hold opinions about other fields in which they have none.

There was Dr. Robert Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, who thought his opinion about the relationship between IQ and race was worth listening to, entertainers who think their celebrity makes their opinions about foreign policy worthy of our time and attention, and, (this week’s topic) economists, too many of whom consider their thoughts about business management to be worth sharing.

The problem in four steps:

1. Economists study the behavior of markets.
2. To understand markets, economists make a simplifying assumption — that humans act to “maximize utility” — to optimize transactions for personal gain.
3. Most economists, most of the time, use money as a proxy for utility (the economists’ term for “what people value”).
4. They then force-fit a marketplace perspective onto every phenomenon in human interactions in order to prescribe how we all ought to go about our lives.

Step four is where the trouble starts. Here’s a non-business example: Most of us value friendship. And yet, creating a “friendship marketplace” doesn’t work — renting another person’s time and attention doesn’t make them your friend. (For more on this and related topics, read Michael Sandel’s “How Markets Crowd Out Morals,” Boston Review, May/June edition, and thanks to long-time correspondent Leo Heska for bringing it to our attention.)

When it comes to business …

Economic theory started to encroach on what we laughingly call “management science” during the Japanese invasion of the mid-1970s. That’s when Toyotas and Datsuns turned out to cost less and hold up better than anything GM,  Ford and Chrysler were selling, and buying televisions from Sony and Panasonic provided better value than RCA or Zenith.

Prior to that, business leaders understood that paychecks were what they exchanged for an employee’s effort — “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” — but that they received an employee’s loyalty in exchange for a different coinage.

And so, employers redefined the employer/employee relationship as nothing more than a marketplace, and employee loyalty became a quaint hold-over of a simpler time. It wasn’t that employers didn’t want employee loyalty after that. It’s that they became blind to the coinage needed to get it, namely, their own loyalty toward their employees.

Who but an economist … someone who considers a giving a gift to be a less-efficient alternative to handing over an appropriately calculated wad of cash … could make a mistake like that?

It was at about the same time that boards of directors decided they had to bribe their CEOs to do their jobs, at an ever-increasing level of bribery (you’ll find charts and graphs in “Historical Trends in Executive Compensation, 1936-2005,” Carola Frydman and Raven E. Saks, January 18, 2007).

Is it actually bribery? That depends on your perspective.

Mine is that there really is an employment marketplace, which means that to fill any position, a company has to be willing to pay what the market will bear … or, must offer enough intangible benefits to compensate for the money they aren’t able to offer, remembering that money isn’t utility, it’s a proxy for utility.

Compensation is what companies provide in order to get the right people to work there instead of somewhere else. Using it to change someone’s behavior? That’s a bribe (“Something, such as money or a favor, offered or given to a person in a position of trust to influence that person’s views or conduct,” from The Free Dictionary).

Unless you’re an economist, in which case money is the sole driver of human behavior.

Then there’s the asset view of the enterprise. Prior to the takeover of management by economists, business managers figured they were responsible for running a successful business — one that out-competed other companies that sold similar goods and services.

But no longer. For the most part, business management now tries to maximize “shareholder value,” for which market capitalization is an appropriate metric. Business management became responsible for what a company can be sold for, not for what it does.

This would be just fine were it not for a nice little irony: The path to maximizing a company’s asset value is to ignore it.

The companies that are worth the most aren’t the ones that try to move the price of a share of stock in the right direction. They’re the ones where everyone focuses on selling great products and taking care of customers. That’s everyone. Including the IT staff.

Which means that as an IT leader, part of your job is helping everyone in IT connect the dots that separate their jobs from the company’s products and customers.

Not “internal customers.” The company’s customers.