Leonard Siffleet was an Australian Special Forces radio operator, sent on mission to Papua New Guinea to establish a coastwatching station. In September 1943, his patrol was sent to Japanese held New Guinea, to recon the Japanese forces stationed there. Siffleet and two other Australian soldiers were captured by local natives friendly to the Japanese and turned over to the Japanese.
All three men were interrogated, tortured and confined for approximately two weeks before being taken down to Aitape Beach on the afternoon of 24 October 1943. Bound and blindfolded, surrounded by Japanese and native onlookers, they were forced to the ground and executed by beheading, on the orders of Vice-Admiral Michiaki Kamada of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The officer who executed Siffleet, Yasuno Chikao, detailed a private to photograph him in the act. At the end of the war, Chikao was captured, tried for war crimes and sentenced to be hanged; his sentence was commuted to ten years imprisonment, and upon completion of his sentence, he returned to Japan.
The execution of prisoners by beheading was not an uncommon practice by the Japanese. Under the code of Bushido that the Japanese military conformed to at the time, the act of beheading a captured enemy actually restored some lost honor to the foe, since warriors were considered dishonored if they allowed themselves to be captured alive. In the eyes of the Bushido adherents, this “dishonorable surrender” justified the terrible treatment captured Allied prisoners received at the hands of the Japanese.
The photograph of Siffleet’s execution was discovered on the body of a dead Japanese major near Hollandia by American troops in April 1944. It is believed to be the only surviving depiction of a western prisoner of war being executed by a Japanese soldier. Published in Life magazine, it became one of the war’s most iconic photos. Siffleet is commemorated on the Lae Memorial in Lae, Papua New Guinea, together with all other Commonwealth war dead from actions in the region who have no known grave. A memorial park commemorating Siffleet was also dedicated at Aitape in May 2015.
今天学习了 Oprah Winfrey 2007年在 Howard University 的毕业演讲：
Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is currently North America's first and only multi-billionaire black person. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
President Swygert, trustees, distinguished guests, my fellow honorees, my she-ro, Dr. Dorothy Height, graduates, parents, friends, what a deep honor to be here today for me.
I think Dr. Gates said it best. You can receive a lot of awards in your life, but there is nothing better... There is nothing better than to be honored by your own.
Thank you. Well, let me just say that everybody I know who has ever graduated from here, and that's a lot of y'all... told me just wait 'til you get there. Just wait 'til you get there. They said to me you are going to feel the love. And Howard, I am feeling you today.
I am feeling you today. I thank you for the honor of being able to celebrate with you today. I am here because my good friend and former executive producer of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Dianne Hudson, and new member of the Howard board of trustees, said to me, you have got to come to Howard.
Dianne Hudson says, it is our pride, it is a mighty force. You just have to experience it, girl. And she told me this. She said, once you come, it's going to feel like family reunion. And are you going to want to come again and again.
Thank you, Dianne, because it's your passion and commitment to excellence and created continued excellence for this great institution that made me stop whatever I was planning on doing and get to Howard.
And I'm really so glad I did, because I get to see you all. I get to witness and welcome you all to the beginning of your new and fantastic life ahead, if you choose it to be so. And I know that it is there for the choosing, because there is nobody more nurtured and prepared to lead us into an exemplary future than the Howard University graduating class of 2007.
I can say that nobody knows for sure where you will go in your life. What impact you will have on others. But each one of us may have a better chance than most, because you all have spent four years responding to the nurturing, which is the truest meaning of teaching.
You sat in your different classes. You have tested. You have done your reports. You have turned in your exams. And you deserved to be here today. Congratulations.
And all after all of the partying is over, and I know there will be some partying up in here, the anxiety may start to creep in. What do you now do with all of this education? I'm here to tell you today, don't worry. Don't worry about it. Relax. Take a breath.
You are in really good hands, because God has got your back.
All you need to do is know who you are. And I know you know who you are. Because I have, as a part of my Harpo production team two former graduates of Howard, 1991 and '94, Terry Mitchell (ph) and Jackie Taylor (ph), who came with me today, and all the way here they were telling me that when you leave Howard, one thing you know for sure is who you are.
Because Howard teaches you to define yourself by your own terms and not by somebody else's definition. So here are a few things I want you to know that I know for sure. Don't be afraid. All you have to know is who you are. Because there is no such thing as failure. There is no such thing as failure.
What other people label or might try to call failure, I have learned is just God's way of pointing you in a new direction.
So it's true. You may take several paths that end up on what might be a dead end for you at the moment. But this is what I also know for sure. You must trust in the words of my favorite Bible verse that say: "And know the lord will lead to you a rock that is higher than thou."
Every one of us has a calling. There is a reason why you are here. I know this for sure. And that reason is greater than any degree. It's greater than any paycheck. And it's greater than anything anybody can tell you that are you supposed to do. Your real job is to find out what the reason is and get about the business of doing it.
Your calling isn't something that somebody can tell you about. It's what you feel. It's a part of your life force. It is the thing that gives you juice. The thing that are you supposed to do. And nobody can tell you what that is. You know it inside yourself.
You know, I come from good stock. Dr. Swygert was mentioning my grandmother who had a dream for me. And her dream was not a big dream. Her dream was that one day I could grow up -- she used to say, I want you to grow up and get yourself some good white folks, because my grandmother was a maid and she worked for white folks her whole life.
And her idea of having a big dream was to have white folks who at least treated her with some dignity, who showed her a little bit respect. And she used to say, I want you to -- I hope you get some good white folks that are kind to you. And I regret that she didn't live past 1963 to see that I did grow up and get some really good white folks working for me.
Oh, yes. So have no fear. Have no fear. God has got your back. And sometimes, sometimes you find out what you are supposed to be doing by doing the things you are not supposed to do. So don't expect the perfect job that defines your life's work to come along next week. If that happens, take the blessing and run with it. But, if not, be grateful to be on the path where you eventually want to live.
Abide in the space of gratitude, because this is what I know for sure. That only through being grateful for how far you've come in your past can you leave room for more blessings to flow. Blessings flow in the space of gratitude. Everything in your life is happening to teach you more about yourself so even in a crisis, be grateful. When disappointed, be grateful. When things aren't going the way you want them to, be grateful that you have sense enough to turn it around.
I spent eight years in Baltimore. I knew in those years in Baltimore that I was unhappy being a television news reporter. But the voice of my father, who thought he knew what I was supposed to do was in my head. He said don't you give up that job, girl. You're never going to $25,000 in one year. That's my father's dream for me. But God could dream a bigger dream than you can dream for yourself. And so I tried to live in the space of God's dream. And the television executives told me when I was in Baltimore that I was just -- it was too much. I was too big, and I was too black.
They told me that I was too engaged, that I was too emotional, I was too -- too much for the news and so they put me on a talk show one day just to run out my contract. And that was the beginning of my story. So I say, even when things are difficult, be grateful. Honor your calling, don't worry about how successful you will be. Don't worry about it. Focus on how significant you can be in service and the success will take care of itself. And always take a stand for yourself. Your values, you are defined by what you stand for. Your integrity is not for sale.
From the very beginning of my career in Baltimore, and I walked in the room and all of the men in the room said to me you need to change your name, because nobody is going to remember your name. You need to change your name and I said what do you want me to change it to? They said we think Susie is a good name. Susie is a friendly name. Susie is a name that people will remember. People can relate to Susie. I said I think I'm going to keep my name if people remember it or not. It is my name. You have to be willing to stand up for what you believe in. If I -- if I could count the number of times I have been asked to compromise and sell out myself for one reason or another, I would be a billionaire 10 times over. My integrity is not for sale and neither is yours.
There are many times -- there are many times Diane Hudson, who has working with me for 20 years can tell you this, many times when we were told that we would lose the advertisers, we would lose the ratings. I said I'm going to take the high road. They said you won't be able to survive in this business taking the high road. You won't be able to get the numbers. The advertisers will drop out and I said let them. Let them. We will chart our own course. We will stand up for what we believe in. And 21 years later, we're still the number one show.
The human death of our integrity is the most we have to offer and I would beseech you to remember what Harriet Tubman said of her efforts to spirit slaves from the plantation. Harriet Tubman once said that she could have liberated thousands more if only she could have convinced them that they were slaves. So do not be a slave to any form of selling out. Maintain your integrity. It has always been, I believe, the only solution to all of the problems in the world and it remains the only solution.
Through your presence here today, you come from a long line of giants whose shoulders you strand on, giants who graduated from this school and giants who never made it to school. I believe in the words of Jimmy Baldwin, your crown has been paid for, so put it on your head and wear it. Your crown has been paid for and so as you walk forth from this place, these hallowed grounds today, the most important lesson I can offer you from my own life is that in order to remain successful, to continue to wear the crown, as you walk the path of privilege, you must not forget the less privileged you left behind.
You cannot continue to succeed in the world or have a fulfilling life in the world unless you choose to use your life in service somehow to others and give back what you have been given. That's how you keep it. That's how you get it. That's how you grow it.
We are in a crisis in this country with black youth. They don't know what you know. They are falling and they're failing. They are dropping out at rates of 50 percent and higher because we, our generation, didn't teach them who they are. We have a responsibility to raise them up, to lift them up to save them, to liberate them from themselves, go out and save a child. And sometimes it doesn't even take a lot to save somebody. As you all know, I built this beautiful school in South Africa, and I spent a lot of time trying to grow my daughters into a future as bright as yours and I can't wait to see some of them come to Howard University.
Recently, I was with them and we were all sitting around talking about careers and the possibility for them and I speak to what is possible. When you see me, you see what is possible. Many years ago, I saw Sidney Poitier receive the academy award in 1964. I was 10 years old and I watched him get the award for "Lilies of the Field." And as he accepted his award, I had never seen a black man on television in a suit. I'd never seen a black man get out of limousine and go anywhere on television. And when I saw Sidney Poitier accept his academy award for "Lilies of the Field," I remember sitting on my linoleum floor baby sitting for my half sister and brother, saying, if a black man can do that, I wonder what I can do.
I stand here a symbol of what is possible when you believe in the dream of your own life. I stand as a symbol of that turtle on the fence. Somebody helped me to get here, just as I know you were helped to get here, Howard, because I know a lot of you came here with only the clothes on your back and a dream for what could be. And so as you have been saved, as you have been liberated, you must liberate others.
I want to share the story about one of our honorees here today. I was in class with all of my girls and we were talking about careers and all -- a lot of my girls say they want to be doctors, because they have seen the ravages of AIDS and they want to grow up and be doctors and some say they want to teach and others say they want to sing or act or dance and there was one girl, one girl who said she wanted to be a historian. And all the other girls started to snicker, because I don't think they had heard the word historian and later that afternoon, I saw her sitting in the computer lab and she was slumped in the chair, and I said, Vindelli (ph), tell me, why are you sitting slumped in the chair? And she said I'm feeling very silly. I'm feeling very, very sad. I said why? She said because I'm not like the other girls. They all want to be really fun things. But I have to tell you, mama Oprah, history is my passion. When I read about the ancestors, it makes me come alive.
So we're sitting there at the computer and I said you know what? I know a famous historian, let's see if we can look him up on the computer and so we punched in Dr. Henry Louis Gates and her expression was you mean he's black? And she said and is he alive? I said, yeah, he's both black and alive. I said you know what? I'm going to e-mail him and see if he will e-mail us back. So I e-mailed Dr. Henry Louis Gates and I told him about my -- my daughter, who was feeling ostracized because she wasn't like all the other girls who wanted to be fun things and Dr. Gates e-mailed back a three-page letter, telling her how as a young boy, he too was one of the only ones who wanted to be a scholar, a Rhodes scholar, telling her how they carried the torch of our ancestors into the future, telling her how it's all right to be what you want to be.
And as she read that letter, I had her read the letter out loud before me. I saw her shoulders get a little straighter, I saw her head get a little taller, I saw her straighten her back and I saw the biggest smile I've ever seen come from the face of a child. And I said tell me how you are feeling now. And she said I'm feeling all right. I'm feeling like I'm not the only one. And so in that moment, through a letter, I saw her get saved. I know that it's possible to do, for every one of our lives, every one of us in our lives to help somebody, to liberate somebody, to save somebody. I know that the motto for Howard is truth and service. And I know when you move through life living your own truth and live through the paradigm of service, you too will be all right. So I beseech you to go forth and serve. Serve first yourself. Honor your calling, do what you are supposed to do. Honor your creator, your family, your ancestors and when you walk this path of privilege, don't forget the less privileged you leave behind.
今天学习的 TED 是 Dan Pink 的《The puzzle of motivation》：
Daniel H. Pink (born 1964) is a best-selling author and has written five books about business, work, and management that have sold more than two million copies worldwide and have been translated into 35 languages.
I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of. Something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal.
In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school.
In America, law is a professional degree: after your university degree, you go on to law school. When I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90% possible.
Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to.
But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses.
So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might know it. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. He created this experiment that is used in many other experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Now what would you do?
Many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or ten minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here.
The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem.
I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US, This shows the power of incentives.
He gathered his participants and said: "I'm going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem." To one group he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem."
To the second group he offered rewards. He said, "If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator.
Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem?
Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. 3.5 min longer. This makes no sense, right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work, right?
If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.
What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.
I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.
What's alarming here is that our business operating system -- think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources-- it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you.
Glucksberg did another similar experiment, he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing.
What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it?
If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. So, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well.
But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility.
Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting, financial analysis, computer programming -- has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.
Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work!
It makes me crazy. And here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy.
This is a fact -- or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact.
Let me give you an example. Let me marshal the evidence here. I'm not telling a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward, on down.
What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.
Then they said, "Let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Let's go to Madurai, India and test it." Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards.
What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.
Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No, these are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. Do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience.
Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics, LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of eleven Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger.
Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what they said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance."
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.
The good news is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, they're interesting, or part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.
I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is not a tree, it's a television set. Somebody invented it. It doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better.
Some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. You don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy.
Some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half.
Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, "Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want." Engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and woolly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. Being Australians, everybody has a beer.
They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty; not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever.
That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed.
It's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20% time -- done, famously, at Google -- where engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20% time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.
Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), created by two American consultants, in place at a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.
What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, the building blocks of a new way of doing things.
Some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." And I say, "Nope. I have proof." The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a euro or a yen. Do it because you like to do it.
Just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.
This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation, right? This is the Thrilla in Manila. Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout.
Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive-- the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.
And here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between science and business, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe -- we can change the world.
I rest my case.
