Management

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 [email protected]. You’ll be […]

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 […]

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 liked […]

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 […]

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. […]