From Paul Grahama's "Hackers and Painters" comes a wonderfully insightful essay about contribution and reward. In describing a startup as a place where individuals can be rewarded for their contribution, he identifies the biggest impediment to smart and/or ambitious people in bigger companies: that their contribution is averaged out with all the other dumb or unambitious folks.

According to Graham: to get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.