Lessons on motivation

If you want employees, colleagues, your kids or a 4th grade basketball team to perform better you offer an incentive, right?

Dan Pink doesn’t think so.

I recently watched his TEDtalk titled “The surprising science of motivation” and found Pink’s argument pretty compelling, in terms of what it means for business and other areas of your life when motivation matters.

Put simply, Pink challenges traditional thought that incentives are necessary to get people to perform better. Not the case, Pinks says. He believes incentives can dull thinking and creativity. He says there’s “a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”

Pink, who I first became aware of through A Whole New Mind (via a reading assignment from my boss for our external communications team) has built his latest book, Drive, around his take on motivation. That book comes out in late December. So, his TEDTalk is a bit of a preview.

Here are a few quotes from Pink to consider:

*”…too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things. To entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.”

*We need a “new operating system for our businesses [that] revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. 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.

*”…here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.

Will businesses listen to Pink? Is there truth to the concept that performance can go down when the reward goes up?

Maybe it explains why some youth basketball teams I’ve coached go in the tank after I reward them all with Gatorade for a good practice.

Okay, maybe that’s a motivation post for another day.

Again, check out Pink’s TEDTalk if this interests you, Great stuff.

By the way, Pink has a great blog and he’s on Twitter.

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John Wooden’s definition of success

Basketball coaching legend John Wooden recently celebrated his 99th birthday. He hasn’t coached in 34 years, retiring at age 65, but he has certainly remained in the public eye through several books and public appearances. He’s such a treasure of wisdom for sports and life.

With his birthday in the news, I saw a link someone shared to one of those public appearances, his TEDtalk in 2001, and wanted to share a few thoughts on it.

The focus of Wooden’s talk was his definition of success:

…peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable.

Wooden says, “If you make the effort to do the best of which you’re capable, try and improve the situation that exists for you, I think that’s success. And I don’t think others can judge that.”

Whatever you’re doing, whatever your line of work. Wooden believes it’s about giving your best effort.

Did you catch that? It’s not necessarily about winning.

Winning is a product of what you do.

Wooden says, “…if you make effort to do the best you can regularly, the results will be about what they should be. Not necessary to what you would want them to be, but they will be about what they should, and only you will know whether you can do that.”

That’s a quote every youth sports coach should digest.

Wooden also quotes Cervantes, who said “The journey is better than the end.”

Yes, it’s the getting there where the real work happens, the “fun” as Wooden says.

Indeed.

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Rethinking a college education

Think back to when you were debating what college to go to. It likely came down to cost, location and curriculum among the many factors, right?

You probably liked something about college A, something else about college B and so on… But you had to roll the dice and pick one, just one, to spend your four or five years at.

But… What if you could attend certain classes at several colleges before your degree is done? That is… As a broadcast journalism major, I would have loved to take a few classes at the University of Minnesota, even though I was officially a student 100 miles away at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Or, it would have been fun to spend a semester at Medill at Northwestern. Or, maybe another semester at a respected journalism school in the South.

Imagine being able to skip the red tape of an official transfer to do that. It’s really no different than studying abroad, I suppose. So with the massive advances in technology since I was in college, pre-Internet, why haven’t colleges embraced the possibility?

How easy would it be to take a class from another campus online or through iTunes. Why not use technology to provide a unique experience? Get past the notion that you have to be a grad of college A… it’s about producing smart and productive people for the greater good of society. Isn’t it?

Online or in-person, this kind of open enrollment just makes sense.

This concept came up for discussion in the latest episode of the Media Hacks podcast (#18), hosted by Mitch Joel. As Joel points out in the podcast, imagine how much better you’d be if you got to learn from the best at say eight different universities rather than relying solely on the faculty of the college you’re physically attending?

The Media Hacks discussion was inspired by a report in Fast Company magazine.

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