Dan Pink was in town on Jan 27th at the RSA to talk about Drive, The Surprising Truth of What Motivates Us. I was planning to go on the off chance of getting in however I was offered two tickets on the day. In turn I offered the second ticket to my network and was joined by Sean Trainor. The place was completely sold out.
Dan talks about rewards and punishment as reasons why we do, and don’t do stuff, and encourages us to think about other reasons why we do stuff. Because they are interesting, because we like doing them, because we want to get better, to learn. He argues that rewards almost always don’t work.
He concedes that performing a mechanical task can be enhanced through the offer of a carrot, a financial incentive. Dan then goes on to illustrate, through a number of examples, how financial incentives don’t work when offered to complete tasks which require even rudimentary cognitive skills
A summary of the talk and the full download is available here.
http://stopdoingdumbthingstocustomers.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/intrinsic-motivation-drive-live/
I encourage you to take a listen to the talk, and then please give us your feedback. Do financial rewards add value, or destroy it?
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