Excellent TED talk on motivation

[xela]

Most of us (by which I mean me and the handful of people who regularly read my LJ) are, however much we may dislike the term, knowledge workers; many of us also manage other knowledge workers. And most of us — or at any rate, those with whom I have, over the years, had conversations about the subject — feel that, once you're making a decent living, money isn't anywhere near as good a motivator, for ourselves and those of our colleagues we respect, as upper management seems to think it is.

But until now I didn't know there was science to back that belief up. Indeed, science to show that financial incentives are in fact de-motivatiing for creative intellectual work.

Deniel Pink's TED talk. Ninteen minutes. Well worth watching.

Comments

[nakor.livejournal.com]

It may be true in general, and it may be only that I haven't hit the "decent living" layer, but I sure find money an enormous motivator for doing my knowledge-work at somebody else's problems instead of whatever I find interesting. It's true that it doesn't change my rate of output, but it certainly changes my direction.