Dan Pink Questions PDF

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Daniel Pink Ted Talk: The Puzzle of Motivation Some questions for your consideration: 1. What is the “candle problem”? Your job is to attach a candle to a wall so it doesn’t drip and your given a slab of pins and a candle, the key is to overcome functional fixiveness, you use the objects around you to advance your tasks. You take the pins out of the slab and pin it to the wall and set the candle on top. A Princeton university prof tested to problem “if you want people to perform better you offer them incentives but it does the opposite”. Contingent motivators. 2. What does he mean when he says? “There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” Our business operating system is built entirely around motivators, but for 21st century tasks often don’t work and often does harm. Rewards narrow our focus and concentrate our mind. White collar workers nowadays are doing less open-minded work and more straight forward focused work. When tasks ask for cognitive skills the larger reward leads to poorer performance.

3. What is “autonomy”? Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives.

4. He discusses a few examples of companies who are applying the notion of autonomy. What is one example that he provides? Daniel Pink talks about the Australian software company Atlassian who tell their engineers one time a year they can work on whatever they want for the next 24 hours. The engineers use this time to come up with a cool code or hacks that they then present to the company. This one day of intense autonomy has come up with many great ideas. They give autonomy and it works.

5. Overall, what do you think is Daniel Pink’s main message? His overall message would be that tasks and rewards don’t always work. As a society we need to adapt. People work better when they have autonomy, the sense of freedom in

someone’s job allows them to work smarter not harder and sometimes this will produce amazing results for your company.

6. Do you agree? Yes, I agree with this message to an extent. Having freedom while working on something you’re passionate about allows you to experiment and try new things. This is when great ideas are formed. Look at google one of the top software companies in all of the world, Gmail and other platforms were developed during the 20 percent period which means employees developed this on their own time and presented the idea to hierarchy later on. Gmail is now one of the most used mailing websites on the internet. However, if the employee was not passionate and didn’t care about his or her job autonomy would only lead to less productivity....