Blogging from the airport, an hour before my plane leaves for DC. I’d promised myself not to be a chicken and check in two hours before – all that gets you is a long wait in the airport, but in the end I was there with everybody else. I’m sure it’s just a ploy to get people to do more airport shopping :o)
Anyway: DC today, Seattle on the 9th., back in Copenhagen on the 16th. See ya, and I will try to blog on the road.
If you want your employees to perform well, conventional wisdom says that you must give them lots of incentives. Stuff like free phone calls, company cars, gold stars, employee of the month awards are necessary, right? Wrong! Incentives, and the ensuing competition, actually make matters worse, and remove peoples attention from their work. This makes employees less motivated about their work.
According to this article by Alfie Kohn, you should in stead:
* Pay people well.
* Pay people fairly.
* Then do everything possible to take money off people’s minds.
Notice that incentives, bonuses, pay-for-performance plans, and other reward systems violate the last principle by their very nature.
I could not agree more. The whole notion that you can motivate anybody is wrong, and money is certainly not the way. People can motivate themselves, and businesses can create environments in which it is easy or hard for them to do so. Incentives make it harder!
I found this quote from my favourite book, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, on Chris Corrigans website.
Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu experiements on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of getting bounced of the grille of a shrieking Buick once when he chased a roughly shopping-cart-sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into the centre of it. He knew they were both fragile and tenacious. You could just stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot, or swirl around it, and keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch one in your hands, it would vanish — but then you’d look up and see another one just like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and yet indisputably self-perpetuating and fairly robust systems sort of gave Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.
We’re hosting Denmarks (the worlds?) first conference on happiness at work. We’ve been working on it for a while now, generating ideas, lining up speakers, preparing the material, and here are the basic facts:
* Thursday January 29, 9-6
* Held in N?rrebrohallen
* 4 speakers before lunch
* Lots of workshops after lunch
* 300 participants
This will be a fun, inspiring, energetic and innovative day, focused on why happiness in the workplace is a benefit to both organizations and employees, and how to do something about it. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll be sure to inform you when the conference website is up.
This book is the story of Chris Turner, and her work to bring change, learning and empowerment into Xerox. It’s a highly entertaining book, right from this first line: “My family never did hold much with organized religion. The fact is, we ended up in Texas because my great-grandfather roughed up a priest in Arkansas. Seems the good father didn’t want to bury a nonbaptized child the Catholic cemetery, and my great-granddaddy took offense at such malarkey… Given this background you’ll understand how I came by my habits of challenging rules and dogma. Questioning the status quo is something I have done all my life.”
And reading these “tales of a corporate outlaw” you’re left with little doubt that the status quo needs to be questioned. And here’s a tip: When you read the book, imagine it in a thick southern drawl – that makes it even better.
(more…)
So anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
– Vaclav Havel in Summer Meditations
Peter Carruthers ponders the entreprenurial drive and what it does to business leaders in this article. Teaser: Most of us are bogged down with a deep guilt about our businesses. We?re uncomfortable being away from the beast for too long. Maybe it?s the way we were taught ? that we have to work hard to prosper. Maybe it?s because we?re afraid it?s really going to stop breathing. [A little like the first months as a new parent when you check the baby every few hours.
There’s an interesting article by Linda Naiman in the CEO Refresher called Orchestrating Collaboration at Work Using the Arts, on the benefits of using arts in the business world. An appetizer: The arts take us on adventures in creative expression that help us to safely explore unknown territory, overcome fear, and take risks. We can transfer these learning experiences to the workplace. Art-making has an alchemical effect on the imagination. It teaches us to think in symbols, metaphors, and to de-code complexity.
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