Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The Surprising Science of Motivation

Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation
 

"There's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does..."
  1. Rewards and motivators only work in a narrow band of circumstances
  2. Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity
  3. 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 that matter


Self-reflection
I'm aware that Google has a 80-20 percent rule for its employees. This means that employees are encouraged to spend only 80% of their time on their work and 20% of their time on ANY project they'd wish to pursue.
When I was on the Google campus tour about two weeks ago, some engineers spent 20% of their time traveling to universities with the recruiters to have meet & greets with students. The most surprising fact of all is that 50% of Google products resulted from the 20% side-projects. One of these side-projects turned out to be GMail. Mind-blowing. 

The talk that Dan Pink gave wasn't breaking news oranything, but he gives a great explanation about how open source is becoming so successful and popular. When people work for themselves and their own self-interests, their efficiency and motivation goes off the charts! Now I just gotta find my interests...and work the shit out of them.

-Mike Gao

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