A lot has been written and said about the damage incentives can do to our economy. In the connected leader I wrote about how incentive pay can derail business by making people cheat. In Leadershift I talk about how economic incentives destroy the very social and moral obligations businesses need to succeed in our turbulent times. Yet, we seem to be locked so strongly in our world of incentives that we refuse to believe what we know to be true.
In his TED speech below, Dan Pink (one of my favourite thinkers) is making the case (as he says no stories, no philosophy just cold hard scientific facts) that incentives are only effective in the type of work we are seldom required to do.
Worth watching and thinking about. The debate I am sure will continue for some time (as G Hamel once said Royals seldom start revolutions and as a Frenchman I would know!) but it certainly benefits from this new important contribution.
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