I recently read Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, in which he contends that right-brain thinking and those capable of it will rule the world.  Tasks like typical accounting work are increasingly being outsourced or replaced entirely by computers.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have even contemplated taking a drawing class of all things to strengthen my right-brain skills.  It was with this mindset that I stumbled upon a TED talk by Pink where he discusses motivation and incentives.  These are areas where companies have failed miserably of late — many contend that the recent economic collapse was really a failure of incentives (read The Big Short for a good summary of these kinds of things or watch the 60 Minutes interview with the books’ author).  Pink reveals that typical carrot/stick rewards system work only in very narrow circumstances and are not applicable to knowledge workers.  In fact, performance drops when higher rewards are offered.

This is fact-based analysis but are businesses getting the message?  Some are…like Best Buy where ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) has been embraced and the idea of measuring performance by the length of time someone has their butt in their chair is seen as laughable.  Or Google where 20% Time is a tactic to make engineers more engaged but also to allow creativity to flourish that will result in new products. But how many other firms have gone this route?  How many will fail because they don’t recognize the shortcomings (or don’t recognize them soon enough) of their own beliefs about management and incentives.