Daniel Pink, an author of inspiring books that could change the world. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and their three children. He has been to law school and has write Drive, A Whole New Mind, Adventures of Johnny Bunko, and his first book, Free Agent Nation. Pink is a free agent and his last “real” job was working in the White House as the chief speechwriter for vice president Al Gore. He achieved a BA from Northwestern and a JD from Yale. His ingenious speech is defiantly backed up by the hard work he did during college.
Daniel Pink’s TEDtalk was about the science of motivation. He starts out his talk about how he went to law school and did terrible. This leads into how his idea is going to be in the form of a case backed by hard headed evidence. Pink is challenging how society today runs business. His main argument is that we are all wrong in the way we motivate our workers.
Pink’s first piece of evidence is the “candle problem” created by Karl Duncker. The “candle problem” looks like this:
The object of the experiment is to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax does not drip on the table. There are two solutions people try first. One is some people try to tack the candle to the wall, and second is to melt some wax on the candle and stick it to the wall. Both do not work. After a few failed attempts many come up with the solution:
The key is to overcome “functional fixedness”. This is when the participant looks at the box as something that only hold the tacks. But, when the participant exhausts all other options they see that the box can be used as the platform for the candle as well. Sam Glucksberg did this same experiment but gave one group rewards and gave the other group nothing. The group that received incentives preformed the task three and half minutes longer. This is because rewards narrow the groups focus. The group that received nothing for their work performed the task faster because there was nothing blocking their creativity.
The overall message learned from this experiment is that incentives work well for a set of rules and a clear solution. But, when the tasks become creative incentives hurt the workers’ productivity. Daniel Pink provides more examples of this in his book Drive. Some of these include, Swedes donating blood and parents picking up children at a daycare. A more broad analysis is that everyday life does not have clear rules and one solution there are many rules with upon dozens of solutions. Incentives will not help a person’s overall work, as we though it has for years. This puts stress on need the more right brained life where there is not physical incentive and people just complete task for the joy of doing them. The more right brained world relates back to Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind.
Today people are doing more creative work and we are still giving incentives that do not work. Our world has known this for years and has ignored it. Daniel Pink is trying to across that we NEED to change what we are doing in order to flourish as a society.
Pinks talk about how Dan Reilly puts MIT students through a series of games that included creativity, motor skills, and concentration. What happen is if the tasks involved only mechanical skill bonuses and incentive worked (higher the pay, better the performance), but if the task involved any cognitive skill a larger reward resulted in poorer performance. They tested this in India and in London and the same result was reported.
If we want high performance we need to have a new approach. The new approach revolves around intrinsic motivation- the drive to do something because it is interesting, fun, challenging. He believes that this revolves three main things, which are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. He begins to explain further on autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives.
There is a movement towards letting employees to do what they want for a certain amount of time a day. This gives people more autonomy. Through this productivity goes up and new things are created that effect us in our everyday life.
Pink finishes talking about the two different encyclopedias. The one that gives no incentive to its workers has out lasted the one that gives incentive to their workers. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.
Daniel Pink is so passionate about his topic. He is jumping around the stage and using hand motions. He is always moving and changing his facial expression. Pink has hard cold facts and examples of why incentives are not working. His approach to his subject implants the message into the audience mind without a doubt.
Pink’s speech is mostly of the information from his second chapter of his book Drive and ties back to his idea that right brained people will take over the job force. Daniel Pink’s idea can strength business and change the world today. When the world accepts that people are not motivated through money and material means, the business world will change forever. * The background infomation of Daniel Pink is from http://www.danpink.com/about
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