"Careers" is a board game I played as a child. At the start of each game, players wrote down a secret Success Formula by allocating 60 points among money, fame, and happiness. They could seek 20 of each, 60 of one and none of the others - whatever they wished - then off they'd go, rolling the dice and following a chosen career path in the hope of earning the rewards that would achieve success as they had defined it. You might think of Careers as an early exercise in work-life balance.

I got to thinking about Careers in response to Wall Street bonuses - and in particular the idea that they are needed to attract and retain the so-called best and brightest. "Money isn't a motivator" has been a management mantra forever, or since 1968, when Frederick Herzberg published One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees? That famous article put money among "hygiene factors" that can cause dissatisfaction (along with working conditions, company policy, your relationship with your boss, and a few more), but not among the satisfying "motivators," which include recognition, achievement, the work itself, and growth.  Certainly in my experience as an employee and a boss, money has mattered - but never ruled.

 Clearly, though, money means more to some than to others.  Last summer Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the Center for Work-Life Policy and I spent an evening talking with a hundred or so Merrill Lynch executives about coping with the terrible times they were facing; this group, I felt, really was motivated mostly by money and was poleaxed thinking it was all going away. For many, it had been a long time since they'd imagine there could be any other motivator than the bonus pool, any other joy than the next big deal. One woman told me that many of her female colleagues tried to time their pregnancies for an April or May childbirth - so that their pregnancy would not be noticed when one year's bonus was decided, and they would be back in the office in time to qualify for the next year's pool.

Go back to "Careers." Imagine there are people who care about fame to the exclusion of anything else; in their Success Formula, fame gets all 60 points. Imagine, further, that there's a place that can create celebrity beyond the wildest dreams of Narcissus himself. That place exists, of course. It's Hollywood.  Wouldn't it follow that fame-addicts would flock there? If so, before long the place would be predominantly populated by people predominately motivated by fame. A whole society would develop with fame as its central value and virtue. Specialized occupations - plastic surgeons, paparazzi, agents, personal trainers - would emerge.  There would be characteristic sociology and sociopathologies, such as bizarre forms of status and snobbery; typical festivals, perhaps involving promenades on red carpets before cameras while wearing borrowed duds;  characteristic psychology and psychopathologies. People would wear sunglasses so as not to be recognized - while dining at the kind of restaurants to which one goes to be seen. And it would all seem perfectly normal.

And hasn't that happened on Wall Street, except with money? If someone were madly-deeply-truly motivated by money, where else would he or she want to work? And if, as a result of tens of thousands of such decisions, the banks and brokerages of Wall Street and the City were populated mostly by people to whom money matters most, then you'd get a self-reinforcing system: Just as Hollywood built a machine in which celebrities are famous for being well known, Wall Street would make a machine in which people were rich because they created wealth, which they derived from securities that derived from securities that derived from securities. Pay would spiral ever higher, beyond the dreams of Croesus, becoming an ever-more-potent magnet for those who crave it. Rather than red carpets and Oscars and over-the-top outfits, you'd have huge end-of-the-year bonuses piled on top of reasonable-enough base pay, a financial fashion statement like Bob Dylan's leopard-skin pillbox hat, which "balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine."  And it would all seem perfectly normal.

Indeed, it would seem so normal that a Wall Streeter could no more speak against greed than a Republican can speak for tax increases. Till the crash, people at Goldman Sachs used to distinguish themselves from their rivals by saying, "We're greedy, but we're long-term greedy."

All this brings me back to the "best and brightest" bit. I've met a bunch of brilliant bankers, but I've met brilliant art historians, actors, biographers, consultants,  designers, doctors, editors, lawyers, social workers, and teachers. Every bit as bright as bankers, they just have different success formulas. These days Wall Street attracts, and seeks to retain, the best and the brightest of the people who put 60 points on money. But here's a thought that's nagging me: I don't want greedy people managing my money, whatever their time horizon, for the same reason that Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn once said that the people who might be a casino's best customers would be its worst employees.

It seems to me that a healthy Wall Street would be a society that attracted a more balanced portfolio of success formulas. We might start that healing by adding 25% to everyone's base pay while moving the decimal point one place to the left on everyone's bonus. We might encourage firms to provide paths to the executive suite for women - and men - who have lives outside the office. And since this is a financial services business, we might demand more empathy for clients who like a little fame - or even love - to leaven their dough.

Thomas A. Stewart is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz & Company.

Formerly the Editor and Managing Director of Harvard Business Review, he is the author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations and The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st-Century Organization.