{"id":550,"date":"2009-11-10T09:00:46","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/000550"},"modified":"2009-11-09T10:13:37","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T16:13:37","slug":"dan-pink-discussed-the-sad-state-of-employee-incentives-at-ted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/550","title":{"rendered":"Dan Pink discussed the sad state of employee incentives at TED"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fantastic video from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.danpink.com\/\">Dan Pink<\/a> about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/dan_pink_on_motivation.html\">motivation in the workplace<\/a>.\u00a0 He examines the science of motivation, and knocks business for not adapting new methods of encouragement for the new, right brain type problems that face us.<\/p>\n<p>This quote pretty much summarizes the talk:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse,\u00a0 is that too many organizations are making their decisions,\u00a0 their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You can see a transcript of the talk by clicking on the &#8216;Transcript&#8217; link on the right hand side of the video.\u00a0 It&#8217;s actually pretty cool&#8211;clicking on a sentence and it updates the video to that part.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not linkable, though&#8211;FAIL.<\/p>\n<p>A few takeaways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If\/then rewards work well for simple tasks&#8230;they concentrate the mind and narrow your focus.<\/li>\n<li>From a study by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bos.frb.org\/\">FRB of Boston<\/a>, &#8220;once [a] task called for &#8216;even rudimentary cognitive skill&#8217; a larger reward &#8216;led to poorer performance'&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Management is not a tree, it&#8217;s a television set.\u00a0 We invented it.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.atlassian.com\/\">Atlassian<\/a> used to give their engineers autonomy at least a few times a year to choose what they work on (FedEx Days), and now gives <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.atlassian.com\/developer\/20_percent_time\/\">workers control over 20% of their time<\/a>.\u00a0 (<a href=\"http:\/\/joelonsoftware.com\">Joel<\/a> has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/inc.html?23\">something to say about Atlassian too<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>Autonomy, mastery, purpose are what people are looking for (once money is taken care of)<\/li>\n<li>Results only work environment&#8211;people can work when they want, as long as they get their work done.\u00a0 Here&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ROWE\">stub wikipedia article about ROWE<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Encarta vs Wikipedia&#8211;who won?\u00a0 The encyclopedia that leveraged people&#8217;s desires to work, not the one that paid them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, my thoughts.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/dan_pink_on_motivation.html\">watch the whole video<\/a>.\u00a0 It&#8217;s only 18 minutes and is well worth your time if you are an employer or an employee (which covers most of us, I think).<\/li>\n<li>ROWE reminds me a lot of college, especially higher level classes.\u00a0 No one cares about when you do the work and I don&#8217;t remember being required to be at classes, but the results (passing a test, turning in a paper) were very important.<\/li>\n<li>He only talks about the autonomy component of the new &#8216;motivation trilogy&#8217; (autonomy, mastery, purpose).\u00a0 I wish he&#8217;d chosen to talk about &#8216;purpose&#8217; because to me that is the hardest bit&#8211;someone needs to do grungy jobs.\u00a0 I guess granting workers autonomy is pretty revolutionary too.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;once money is taken care of&#8221; is a huge elephant in the room that he again does not address.\u00a0 When the work is high value add, it makes sense to take money off the table (software developers are <strong>very<\/strong> lucky in this respect).\u00a0 But what about a worker at Target, for example?\u00a0 A Target store can&#8217;t afford to pay someone enough to take the money issue off the table, but can probably benefit from the &#8216;motivation trilogy&#8217;<\/li>\n<li>The whole Encarta vs Wikipedia example that he gives is great, but he ignores the fact that Wikipedia has <a href=\"http:\/\/wikimediafoundation.org\/wiki\/Staff\">very few paid employees<\/a> and that Wikipedia only won because of volunteer labor.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not a solution that scales across a society.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Overall, in general, a thought provoking talk (expect nothing less from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ted.com\">TED<\/a>).\u00a0 I would say that he is describing the future of work as consulting.\u00a0 You are paid for what you know, the problems are fuzzy, answers are unexpected and at times unclear, and results arrived at matter far more than hours put in.<\/p>\n<p>Is the future of work consulting?\u00a0 If so, the business world is about to be upended, because, to borrow Dan&#8217;s phrase, &#8220;the operating system of business&#8221; isn&#8217;t designed to handle a workforce of consultants.\u00a0 Heck, society isn&#8217;t either.<\/p>\n<p>[tags]work, employment, gtd[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fantastic video from Dan Pink about motivation in the workplace.\u00a0 He examines the science of motivation, and knocks business for not adapting new methods of encouragement for the new, right [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,2,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","category-technology-and-society","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}