[RSA Animate] Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think.

I want to give you two that call into question this idea that 'if you reward something, you get more of the behavior you want' and 'if you punish something do you get less of the behavior you want.'

The higher the reward, the better the performance, as long as the task involved only mechanical skills(things like memorizing strings of digits, solving word puzzles, throwing a ball through a hoop).
Once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skills, a larger reward led to poorer performance.
For simple, straightforward tasks, "If you do this, then you get that." they're great! But when a task gets more complicated, when it requires conceptual, creative thinking, those kind of motivators demonstrably don't work.

There is another paradox here. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. So they're not thinking about money, they're thinking about the work. Once you do that, there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction - autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy - The desire to be self directed, direct our lives.
Management is great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self directed is better.
Atlassian, an Australian software company, let the developers work for anything they want, with whomever they want, but with beer and cake and fun and things like that. It turns out that that one day of pure, undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software, a whole array of ideas for new products.

Mastery - The urge to get better at stuff. It's not going to get you mate or make you any money. It don't need money, It don't take fame, It don't need no credit card to ride this train. Because It's fun, Because you get better at it, and that's satisfying.

There are bunch of people around the world who do technically sophisticated, highly skilled work. But they're willing to work for free, and volunteer their time 20, 30 hours a week, then what they create, they give it away rather than sell it(Linux, Apache, Wikipedia). They do it for someone else for free.
Why are they doing this? It's overwhelmingly clear - challenge and mastery, along with making a contribution, that's it.

More and more organizations want transcendent purpose. But we're seeing now is when the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen. More and more organizations are realizing this, disturbing the categories between what's profit and what's purpose. The founder of Skype says, "Our goal is to be disruptive, but in the case of make the world a better place." Steve Jobs, "I want to put a ding in the universe." That's the kind of thing that might get you up, racing to go to work.

I thing that the big take-away here is that if we start treating people like people, not assuming that they're simply horses, we can make organizations and work lives that make us better off and make the world a little bit better.