Daniel Pink

coming out of it is some amount of reinvention, some amount of entrepreneurship.

A lot of those kinds of activities are often very, very self-motivated.

The other thing from a company's perspective is in these kind of tough times, you're pretty much out of carrots.

You don't really have many bribes left.

And that might force some companies, not all, might force some companies to think a little bit more creatively, a little bit more deeply about motivation.

Not necessarily, because it comes from within.

A carrot and a stick come from without.

I mean, what you're doing is you're giving people freedom.

I mean, I don't think that freedom is a carrot.

Freedom is, I think, qualitatively different.

It allows people to be self-motivated.

They're not chasing after something that you're dangling in front of them.

what you're doing is that you're in some ways giving up control.

And there are a lot of managers out there who think that their job is to control people.

And I think in the industrial age or even in the information age when people are doing simple work, when they're turning the same screw the same way, or they're answering calls at a call center, or they are adding up columns of figures, that maybe control makes some sense.

But when fewer people are doing that,

and they're inevitably forced into doing things that require more innovation and creativity, giving up control is actually a better strategy.

The problem with that is that managers giving up control face a little bit of a crisis because if they're not controlling people, then what the heck are they doing there?

You know, I think that the question all of us should be asking ourselves in any kind of job is, okay, what the heck are you doing here?

And if you went away, would anybody care?