Advance praise

What leaders are saying about The Drift Tax

• Building a high-performing team is hard. Keeping it high-performing is even harder. In The Drift Tax, Jim Rembach shows leaders how to create an environment that reinforces the right behaviors day after day in ways that promote sustained excellence. Smart, timely, and immediately useful.

• The Drift Tax puts a price on a cost I have spent my career explaining: motivation is not additive. External rewards can buy behavior for a moment, but fulfilling people's psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness determines whether that behavior holds when real pressure hits. Jim Rembach has taken what motivation science has shown for decades and built the organizational case most leaders have never seen.

• The Drift Tax offers a fresh and compelling way to see an old problem. Repeatedly, we witness in organizations that capable people are often expected to sustain performance through willpower. But the systems the people work IN delivers the results and behaviors. Jim's insights are thoughtful, practical, and timely, especially in an era of accelerating complexity and AI. This book gives leaders a powerful new lens for understanding the hidden costs of execution drift.

• Change rarely happens all at once. More often, we drift, one small compromise at a time, until where we are is a long way from where we intended to be. Jim Rembach's The Drift Tax shows leaders how to recognize that drift, confront it, and get moving in the right direction again.

• Jim helps us understand that the most important elements of an organization are what you cannot see. Take the chapter focusing on ownership. He understands that people take care of what they own, and that it is collaborative governance in team after team that provides a leadership culture to empower people to be their best selves and do their best work.

• Jim Rembach uses the Drift Tax metaphor to draw on his personal and professional experience in organizational management and leadership, and on a substantial body of research by distinguished and well-known interdisciplinary researchers, to connect discoveries that have been sitting beside one another for years without anyone fully assembling the picture. Jim has named the most expensive line item missing from every P&L, and the costly decisions based on that information. He explains how execution failure stems from the erosion of systems and standards and the Kinetic Chain of Execution, even for great teams.

• Leaders often invest in smart people, training, and new technology, then wonder why the same execution problems keep returning. Jim Rembach gives that expensive cycle a name: the Drift Tax. Drawing on behavioral science, he shows why good intentions fade without everyday structures that reinforce sound decisions. That insight is especially urgent as AI amplifies whatever management habits an organization already has. This book helps executives see where performance is leaking and what it takes to make improvement last.