Daniel Pink's Ted Talk on the surprising science of motivation.
Rewards (ie: money) work best on tasks that only called for mechanical skill.
For problems such as the candle problem, where you have to think - outside the box - (get the tacks outside the box) - extrinsic rewards don't work.
Once a task begs for even rudimentary cognitive skills, higher incentives led to worse performance.
New operating system (intrinsic):
autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives
mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters
purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
on autonomy:
radical amounts of autonomy at google. 20% of some employees time is for innovation
There's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does:
1. Those 20th cent rewards work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.
2. Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity.
3. The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments but that unseen intrinsic drive, the drive to do things that matter.
If we get past this lazy, dangerous ideology of carrots and sticks...
.... maybe we can change the world.
imagining there's more good stuff in here:
