New discovery

Every month, Thomas Harrison organizes a team-member appreciation event for the employees of Discovery Senior Living.

Harrison hands out bonuses in the form of paper checks, a meaningful gesture in an era of the impersonal direct-deposit wire transfers. “Yearly bonus plans are old news to me,” Harrison explains. “People want the immediacy of a reward. I want them to know I really care about them.”

It's not a job Harrison takes lightly. “It's a lot of work,” he says. “As a management philosophy, we pay at the high end of the spectrum.”