Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation

TED is an annual conference about "ideas worth spreading." I've been attending TED for several years and find the speakers fascinating. A lot of famous people present at TED -- Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Tony Robbins, and so on -- but there are also many  less-well-known presenters -- such as scientists, engineers, economists, directors, entrepreneurs, and artists -- who are doing amazing work around the world.

Almost all the presentations that have been given over the years at TED are available for free viewing at the TED website. Each talk is about 15 minutes long, which make them perfect for watching during a break in the day. The video quality is excellent, and many of the talks have been translated into other languages.

Above is a talk by my friend Dan Pink. Dan is Al Gore's former speechwriter and is now a career consultant and author. (His recent book, a manga called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, should be required reading for every high school student on the planet.)

Lately Dan has been studying the psychology of human motivation. In this video, Dan offers some counter-intuitive advice about using financial rewards to incentivize people.

(A couple of days ago, someone put together a Google spreadsheet list of all the TED talks to date. It's a great way to browse the topics. When you find one you like, just click the link and it will take you to the TED site.)

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.

Comments

[Robert]

This speech seems largely cribbed from Alfie Kohn's excellent book, Punished by Rewards. Anyone interested in these ideas should start with that book, I think.

[Alex]

A great speaker, but specious reasoning.

(1) He takes experiments that measure tasks that take a few minutes, and extrapolates to business-level tasks that take hours, days, or months. It makes sense that if you're trying to finish a task super-quickly (i.e. in a few minutes), then the fervor created by a monetary reward could distract you from creative thinking. Does that still happen over longer periods? I wouldn't think so.

(2) It's true that Wikipedia is more successful than Encarta. Does that mean that Microsoft would have been better off following the Wikipedia model than the Encarta model? No, because Microsoft's goal is not to make an encyclopedia, it's to make money. The Wikipedia model succeeds because nobody is profiting off the time and effort that all these people put into the project. Their motivation is altruism. Figuring out how to use that in a business scenario is not obvious.