One of my blog readers – Boaz Fletcher – sent me an awesome video
this morning from RSA Animate. It’s 11 minutes long and is a
fascinating lecture by Dan Pink about The Surprising Truth About
What Motivates Us. I love the RSA Animate format – an artist
animates the talk on a giant whiteboard in real time.
In this case Pink takes on the question of “Does More Money Motivate
Higher Performance?” In the first few minutes he shows that while this
works for tasks requiring mechanical skill, this does not work for tasks
that require even rudimentary cognitive skill. In fact, in these cases
there is an negative correlation between greater monetary reward and
increased performance. It’s counterintuitive, but the talk illustrates
it beautifully with several examples that will appeal to any technology
entrepreneur.
There are several deeply insightful points including the notion that
we crave autonomy and mastery in addition to simply making a
contribution and getting rewarded economically for it. Furthermore, if
the “profit motive” gets unmoored from the “purpose motive”, bad things
happen.
Ultimately Pink makes a good case that as managers and entrepreneurs,
we need to get past the ideology of using carrots and sticks to
motivate people. Grab 11 minutes and learn something important today.
