“The really good people want autonomy — you let me do it, and I’ll do it. . . . That’s all they want. They want a chance to do it.”
– Gordon Bethune, former CEO of Continental in today’s NY Times
Harvard professor Teresa Amabile, whose transformative work I describe in Drive, has a fascinating piece in the (newly revamped) Harvard Business Review, which is just hitting newsstands.
Amabile tracked the day-to-day activities and motivations of several hundred workers over a few years and found that their greatest motivation isn’t external incentives, but something different: Making progress [...]
To celebrate the arrival of 2010 and to thank the astonishing number of you who are pre-ordering Drive (the number of early orders already beats the monthly sales of AWNM’s debut!), I am offering a free, exclusive New Year’s Day teleseminar.
To participate, simply email the receipt for your Drive order to pinkseminar@me.com. You’ll be registered [...]
A software developer in California (I’ll call him Miles) wrote to me recently with a question about motivation. Instead of answering right away, I asked if I could pose his problem to all of you. Perhaps by combining our minds, we could be a free open source McKinsey & Company for motivation.
So here’s Miles’s question for [...]
The inimitable Seth Godin has assembled a crew of five dozen thinkers and doers from around the world to tackle that question. In a remarkable collection of one-page essays, released today, each member of Godin’s dream team selects a single word — then uses it to offer guidance for the coming year.
I especially [...]
Management scholar Henry Mintzberg has a provocative solution to the problem of executive bonuses: Don’t trim or tweak them. Get rid of them altogether.
In a persuasive and clear-eyed essay in a special section of the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Mintzberg says that no matter how you configure bonuses, they create twisted incentives that [...]
Management theorist Russell Ackoff passed away late last month, leaving behind a lifetime of memorable insights. Here’s one of my favorite, reprised in a good WSJ story about Ackoff’s life and legacy.
“All of our social problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It [...]
If you’re interested in education, motivation, or doing right by our kids, you owe it to yourself to watch this Edutopia interview with James Paul Gee.In eleven minutes, he offers an array of compelling insights, including:
How games, unlike schools, avoid the mistake of separating learning and assessment,
Why we should use textbooks the same way we use [...]
(via Adam Richardson)
“A study of cheating among graduate students, published in 2006 in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56 percent of all M.B.A. students cheated regularly— more than in any other discipline.”(Source: NY Times, 3/15/09)
