Making Leadership Visible.

Cheese Not Required

by tom on May 16th, 2012

Here is the TED ( YouTube ) video of Daniel Pink explaining the mismatch between “what science knows and what business does”.

What is it that business “does”? Business thinks about how to get people to do things. To get people to do things, business “does” incentives. Like … sell stuff, when a trip. Pile up safety points, win a logoed jacket. Pull a lever, get some cheese. Sorry, didn’t mean to infer people are like lab mice. Just poking a little fun by exaggerating.

What Pink “does” is lay out a lawyerly case describing experiments that measure how people perform with various reward devices. The bottom line? Experiment showed that “the secret to performance is not rewards or punishment, but the unseen intrinsic drive to do work that matters”.

Question: Who defines what matters?

Answer: The leaders … the leadership team.

A brief example. How do you “get” people to innovate? One way is … if you want to innovate, go to work at Apple. Why? Exactly – the secret is “why”. What Pink describes as motivating was that Steve Jobs saw Apple as the institution that was all about changing how people lived (how they accessed and listened to music and made technology intuitive). He defined their purpose … their “why’ that made employees pioneers.

That’s work that matters. No cheese required.

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