Last week we heard Dan Pink talk about motivation, part of a thread of discussions on how to lead knowledge workers in our Hi Tech industries. Knowledge workers are more productive when they are free to pursue their own interests, as Google's 20% time, 3M's 15% time and Zappo's unscripted customer service show.
Dan illustrated different levels of motivators from basic needs for things like food, through "carrots and sticks" like money to the higher level needs for autonomy, mastery and purpose by handing out first a sandwich, then £10 and last a long period of Q&A. Simple "sticks" like a fine for lateness doubled the lateness of Israeli parents picking up their children from daycare - because it made lateness a service with a price. Simple "carrots" like paying students larger incentives to perform tasks only improve performance for mechanical skills. Once thinking is involved, students perform poorer with monetary incentives - even when the experiment is moved to India and the same incentive is now worth a couple of month's salary.
Local founders, technologists and academics from local organizations including Abcam, Anglia Ruskin, ARM, Bango, CSR, Illumina, Imerge, Marshall, Qualcomm, Philips, Polysolar, RAND, Red Gate, University of Cambridge had plenty of questions. How do we drive ourselves and our teams to do the necessary drudgery that makes up much of technical work or learning to play an instrument? Our audience was more talkative than earlier stops on the book tour like the RSA and Amazon according to the minder from Dan's UK publisher, perhaps a reflection of its diversity.
Our Hi Tech cluster depends on the pride of its workers to make those distinctive products that embody Cambridge ideas for the world. It is good to see so many people taking time to think about what drives them and their colleagues.
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