In this month’s Sunday Telegraph column, I explore vacations through the lens of Netflix, Inc., which has taken a peculiar approach to paid holidays. At Netflix salaried employees (though not hourly workers) can take all the vacation they want — whenever they want to take it. Somehow it works. (More: Check out Netflix CEO Reed [...]
In this month’s Sunday Telegraph column, I look a the bizarre, distancing, and vaguely incoherent dialect we often use in business. Then I lay down a challenge: For the next seven days, don’t say anything to your boss, your staff, your teammate, your supplier or your customer that you wouldn’t say to your spouse or [...]
Tom Peters calls it “the pursuit of wow.” Seth Godin calls it being “remarkable.” None of us do it enough — which is why it’s so spectacular when we see it in action. Case in point: Sunday night at the J.W. Marriott in Phoenix. I’ve got a letter to mail, but no stamps. So I go [...]
On Saturday, the first issue of the newly redesigned Bloomberg Businessweek hit the mailbox here at Pink, Inc, world headquarters. The magazine looks great — smart, simple, and forward-looking. Alas, according to today’s Times, the design of some of the magazine’s work practices are almost the mirror opposite — rigid, retrograde, and bizarrely controlling. Here’s [...]
Over at the Inside Influence Report, Noah Goldstein writes about a recent study that examined whether infusing a task with purpose can motivate high performance. The study, conducted by Wharton’s Adam Grant, involved the call center at a university fundraising organization. Grant obtained permission to talk to the folks working at the call center — [...]
In the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to work for Robert B. Reich, then the U.S. Secretary of Labor. He taught me a simple (and free) tool for diagnosing the health of an organization. When he visited companies and talked with employees, Reich listened carefully for the pronouns people used. Did employees refer [...]
A major TV network is doing a piece on new ways to work — and has enlisted my help in finding folks to profile. In particular, the producers are looking for people in the Washington, DC, area who contribute to open source projects such as Linux, Apache, and Firefox. If you fit that bill (or [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
