Good People. Wrong Incentive. That’s A Culture Problem.

My eleven-year-old is still trying to learn the Dougie. Over a decade since it entered the cultural bloodstream, and it is still moving through generations like a living thing. I grew up on the Running Man, the Kid-n-Play kick step, the Wop. These were not just moves. They were rituals, practiced on living-room floors, performed at local parties. And yet, in most cases, I had no idea who originated them. I knew the artists who introduced them to the zeitgeist. Still, the actual creators, the people whose bodies birthed the movement, had essentially vanished from the record. That gap, between cultural impact and cultural credit, is precisely what Connor Lim is trying to close. So, we brought him onto the latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast to better understand how.

Lim is the co-founder and CEO of the International Dance League, the world’s first global professional dance league. Six city-based teams, a regular season, a championship, and, as of this past summer, a global media rights deal with ESPN. IDL grew out of STEEZY, an online dance education platform he built after a childhood in Queens, completely consumed by the craft. For most people, dance is considered an art form, but Lim sees it as that and much more: a sport. Consider the battle traditions of breaking, krumping, and voguing, and Lim’s perspective no longer feels like much of a stretch. In fact, breakdancing made its Olympic debut at the Paris 2024 Games as an official event, a testament to dance’s competitive nature. It’s this thesis that fuels Lim’s ambition for the IDL to make dance as big of a sport as basketball, football, or baseball. However, unlike athletes, dancers have never sat inside a structure that captures the value they generate.

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NAPA, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 06: Jada Warren-Evans, Joshua Vasquez, Anna Fox, Connor Lim, Alec Albright, Clay Boonthanakit of IDL Global attend the CÎROC Athletic Club Pickleball Tournament ahead of the Big Game at M Ranch Napa on February 06, 2026 in Napa, California. (Photo by Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for CÎROC)

This is a double-edged sword because, even as an art, dance misses out on this value capture. Music has royalties, touring, and publishing rights. These are all mechanisms by which value accrues back to the creator, so an ecosystem forms, and the people who make it are remembered and rewarded. Dance, for all its cultural reach and resonance, has no such machinery. So, knowing the originator served no structural purpose, and the credit simply evaporated. Lim put it plainly: people act as they are incentivized to act, so he’s built the IDL on a system of incentives.

The late Charlie Munger, longtime vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, famously stated, “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome,” emphasizing that an organization’s operational reality and culture are direct reflections of its underlying incentive system. Having participated in the culture IDL is trying to prop up, Lim understands this fundamental truth and how it plays out in the exploitation of a community and its production—something most cultural commerce miss or, worse, ignore. That is an important idea, and it extends well beyond dance floors. We watch companies betray their stated values, undercut their own people, even burn their customers, not because the individuals inside are malicious, but because the incentive structure bends the entire enterprise toward the stock price, the quarterly number, the board. Incentives are the magnetic field. Point them carelessly, and the whole organization drifts somewhere the mission statement ever intended it to go.

So, Lim has deliberately engineered the field of IDL. There are roughly 26 million dancers in the United States, the vast majority of them raised inside a competitive studio system that runs from age three until college and then, abruptly, offers nowhere to go. IDL borrows the architecture that made professional sport lucrative—teams, owners, a league, collective bargaining—and applies it to dance, so that value can finally flow back to the people who create it. The league covers costs, guarantees minimums, and puts dancers’ names on the lineup, so that reverence finally reaches the people who earned it.

And that’s the thing: the explosion of dance through digital stages like TikTok has enabled display and discovery at a scale far greater than MTV or BET ever could. However, it has also enabled perverse incentives that allow online content creators to mimic and appropriate the dance works of original creators, passing them off as their own. The result of which has not only led to the theft of cultural IP but also the capture of its fortune.

Lim noted that this dynamic exists beyond online platforms; it also happens in gaming. He mentioned an NBA 2K game that allegedly lifted a dancer’s signature move, renamed it, and credited no one. What got Lim’s attention most is that the creator of the dance told him he would have been satisfied with nothing more than his name attached. No riches, just credit. That’s an incentive failure, the same one that allows the loudest voice to be mistaken for the origin. At the same time, the actual creator disappears from the story. It is cultural exploitation by another name, and it persists precisely because, for most institutions, no one is structurally rewarded for caring about who made the thing. That’s exactly what Lim is building the IDL address.

When people are acknowledged for their work, they feel seen and appreciated. That’s a simple truth—a truth that fuels greater work production and discretionary effort. However, this doesn’t happen because of altruism; it has to be built into the operating system of the organization: its culture. Get the incentives right, and not only do you retain your people, but you invite more of them to raise their hands.

Check out our full conversation with Connor Lim on the latest episode of FROM THE CULTURE Good People. Wrong Incentive. That’s A.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com