Daniel Pink

And what the science shows is that you've got to pay people enough.

You've got to pay people enough.

If you don't pay people enough, you're not going to have any realistic motivation.

But once you pay people enough, external rewards like that, contingent rewards, if-then rewards, don't play that big of a role in high performance.

What really plays a role in high performance, once you pay people enough, is giving them freedom,

allowing them to get better at something that matters, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose, a sense that they're doing something larger than themselves.

That is far more potent and far more enduring than this elaborate regime of carrots and sticks that we've been using for 150 years.

Yes and no.

I'll give you an example.

Let's take something like call centers.

Call centers are very difficult jobs.

They're not particularly interesting.

People are often monitored.

The call center employees are monitored.

Their calls are timed.

When they get a call in, they essentially just have to read a script.

It's low on the autonomy scale.

It's not particularly interesting.

And it's not a job that most of us would covet.

Well, you have a company like Zappos who comes in and deals with its call center in a fundamentally different way.