Category Archives: Dan Pink

December 17, 2010 Posted in Dan Pink, MIT, Motivation, People and Processes 2 Comments

On Motivation, and What Really Drives Us

By Ben Kepes

We’ve been told for years that incentivizing employees is the secret to better performance.

A great talk given at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) questions the assumption that if you reward something you get more of the behavior you want and, the corollary, that if you punish something, you get less of the behavior.

Dan Pink refers to a study at MIT which was funded by the Federal Reserve. In this study, a whole group of students were given a set of challenges – physical, cognitive, and spatial. Performance was incentivized via monetary reward in an approach typical of most workplaces. So what happened?

Tagged adoption, enterprise 2.0, productivity |

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.