It’s Sunday morning and I’m eating breakfast, my mind turns back to last week where I watched TEDTalks about ‘the surprising science of motivation’ by Dan Pink and Paul Romer’s radical idea: charter cities. They both led me to think about what it means to work and by definition live in the 21st Century.
The downturn happened, the banks were underwritten by governments and now we have the opportunity to start again. Greed, short-term-ism and 20th Century thinking took us into a Global Recession that analyst predict will take us decades to fully recover and payback national debts. So the question remains, How much does money matter as a motivator? 20th Century thinking is it matters a whole lot. Many would argue that even Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is permeated with money at every level, although equally it could be argued that because it felicitates the fulfillment of basic needs the foundations are therefore set and that is enough. An argument that I absolutely agree with for the 21st Century job.
Shift in ‘rules’ governing of economic social models are changing. Coercive rules are not working in the same way, the stick and carrot approach are design and built from work you can screw up, a nice a,b,c guide where the answer perfectly match a,b,c. Collaborative and creative thinking simply does not thrive in a results orientated money reward job. Dan Pink explains this a million times better that I ever could in this video, presenting evidence that the equation of Money=Motivation=More Efficient Staff is simply not as true anymore.
Take Sporkings as an example, like most bloggers we work on this site not for money as a reward, our collaboration has become about allowing us to ‘work’ together, out of this, creativity and critical thinking thrives. Ideas and solutions naturally present themselves and motivation comes from passion and belief in what we are doing. This is enjoyment, the type of enjoyment that millions in future will be going to work for.
Work 3.0 should follow the mantra of ‘your job defines your happiness’ therefore look for the things that make you happy and strive to work on these indicators. I like the way in which the work/life balance is presented in this blog.
This next video describes the ways in which ‘rules’ that govern the way countries have developed bot positively and negatively.
Linking this to the above, suggest that a shift in thought in they way jobs are fulfilled is not necessarily a bad thing. I like to parallel with what the banks are about to go through. A decent salary is one important thing but a bonus motivator that rests on one (financial) goal does not open the forum up for creativity, sustainability and preservation, instead it keeps narrowed focus and short-term-ism.
