TECH NOTES: Carrot and stick era is on way out

Aug 6 2009 by Herb Kim for The Journal

AS the founder of the Thinking Digital conference, I know how much goes into trying to establish a new conference so can I say "Bravo" to Bruno Giussani, the European director of TED and the curator of the new annual July TEDGlobal Conference in Oxford.

I met Bruno in February at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and he made the bold claim then that TEDGlobal would exceed the content of the main TED Conference, something I partially dismissed as perhaps a bit of salesman bravado. But after having experienced the new TEDGlobal at the end of July I can happily confirm that Bruno was not exaggerating. The quality of the presentations was so high it was widely accepted by most delegates that Stephen Fry was actually one of the week's weakest presenters. So seriously did Gordon Brown prepare for his TEDGlobal appearance that he gave one of the strongest performances of his entire career as a public figure.

There's no way I can cover all the wonderful talks given at TEDGlobal so let me highlight one of the real standouts. In 2007, I wrote a column about Dan Pink and his book A Whole New Mind. Dan was one of the speakers in Oxford last week and he is finishing a new book called Drive: The Surprising Truth About Human Motivation.

Dan talked how traditional monetary incentives are largely ineffective in any task involving free thought and creativity. Economic & psychological evidence shows repeatedly that traditional 'extrinsic' incentives actually destroy creativity and productivity. In a sense, financial bonuses kill!

In creative professions it is 'intrinsic' motivations that drive people to perform. At a high level 'intrinsic' motivator elements include autonomy, mastery and purpose. Now, of course, even creative people want money, but money alone will not actually consistently produce the kind of results leaders and managers might wish to produce. In a sense we are evolving away from traditional carrots and sticks and towards a new ethos where the performance of a given creative task is its own reward.

Pink points to the increasing number of companies adopting the Google 20% free-time rule for employees work on their own projects. He also shows evidence of ROWE (results-oriented work environments) where employees are given total autonomy to achieve their results. Goodbye standard office hours, fixed desks, regular meetings, etc. 20% free-time and ROWE are yielding very promising early results.

Herb Kim is CEO of Codeworks, the North East's centre for digital innovation.