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Motivation, motivation, motivation

Written by: Neil Crofts

Article Overview: I have long argued that the big, secret advantage that authentic businesses have over regular businesses is motivation. Not just the internal motivation of staff, but the motivation of customers and other stakeholders to support the business.

Motivation, motivation, motivation

I have long argued that the big, secret advantage that authentic businesses have over regular businesses is motivation. Not just the internal motivation of staff, but the motivation of customers and other stakeholders to support the business.



I have argued that because authentic businesses generate their profits in pursuit of a profound and positive purpose they are more profitable than their regular counterparts.



So, I was thrilled to see the talk by Dan Pink recently on TED. Dan was previously a speech writer for Al Gore. You can see it via the “Be Inspired” link on my homepage.



Dan goes further, he says that performance on simple tasks may be enhanced through a bonus or financial reward, but on more complex tasks financial incentives actually reduce performance.



Dan puts his case as a lawyer and examines motivation forensically and scientifically. His conclusion is that:



“There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are the 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.”



Dan is referring here to regular businesses, not to authentic businesses. Simple motivators continue to work well in simple and repetitive operations, but if we want motivate people to care, to solve problems and to be responsible, inspiration and meaning are more effective than cash.



The reason that bonuses and financial incentives work in the banking world is because of the specific micro-culture of banking. The culture holds that those with the biggest bonuses are the winners and that everyone else is a looser.



The scale of the bonuses and the young, male culture turn it into a race, where meaning is defined by victory. Addiction is the motivator, not passion and as we have seen the model is neither healthy nor sustainable.



At the other end of the scale:



“The mid 1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives. All the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Yen. Do it because you like to do it.



Now if you had, just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, And said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth, who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.”



We have the opportunity to redesign our careers and our businesses. We can all direct our lives to doing things that matter to us. There is not a shortage of issues and challenges. And we can make our businesses more profitable by solving them. It only takes a decision.

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Article Tags: al gore, bonus, counterparts, financial incentives, financial reward, internal motivation, letter spacing, nbsp, profits, span style, speech writer, stakeholders, ted



Related Forum Posts
Re: How To Stay Motivated In Your Business - Motivation spurs people into actions every time. When there is no motivation the reason to move forward seems lost. Thanks so much for this post Evan
Re: Why Did You Become An Entrepreneur? - Hi members, This is a great post by Evan and I am late getting on board but I thought I would ad my few cents worth, LOL. I must say that wanting to be an Entrepreneur or work for myself has never ever meant that I wanted to have my own company, that has never been my motivation. My motivation has always been to work from home and be in control of my life, nothing else. Just to be able to organise my life around working from home would be a dream come true for me and is something I am striving for. I have always been a fairly organised sort of person so the old trap of giving myself too much time off would probably work just the opposite for me. I would be so frightened of failure I would probably work too much. There is an old saying which goes something like ’If you love what you do then you never do a days work in your life’. It is something like that anyway and for many of us, working from home would seem like that, it certainly would for me, regards, Mal.
Re: Self Development Tips - Thanks for this article. It is worth reading once every month, to keep the motivation fire burning
Re: Famous Entrepreneur Blog? - [quote="Evan":2055iuhe] My questions is: Would it make sense to accompany the videos with a new blog on Modeling The Masters? The idea here would be to post the video, and then once a week share a lesson from one of the famous entrepreneurs and I put my spin on it for how you can implement it into your business. The idea is to give entrepreneurs additional motivation and strategies by copying what worked for famous, high flying entrepreneurs. [/quote:2055iuhe] Hi, Evan Absolutely this is a good idea! For all the reasons you've said - the blog will enable you to give additional motivation and strategies. If I remember correclty, people only rmember 10% of what they hear, but 30% of what they read? So by reinforcing the talk with the blog, you'll be able to reinforce people's memories, not to mention getting new viewers for the videos.
Re: How to Stay Motivated - Thanks for posting this, Matthew. Keeping the motivation strong is something I've really been struggling with. Donna, I think I was just not pushing as hard as I need to and getting maintenance instead of progress.


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