Daniel Pink

It's not kumbaya, touchy-feely management that says we're going to sacrifice the bottom line.

It's actually, in its own way, a remarkably hard-headed, sophisticated, savvy, and strategic approach to business.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think it could.

I mean, one of the things, let's take 20% time.

One of the things about companies like Google and some others where people can spend 20% of their time working on anything that they want, chief financial officers go into cardiac arrest when that's proposed.

Because you're saying, okay, let's take one-fifth of our wages and we redeploy them into something we don't know if it's going to work.

And so I think there might be cases where they do that.

I mean, I think people...

The workplace, for many of us, not all of us, but for many of us, is so controlling that if you release those controls, initially it can be somewhat disorienting.

But I think over time, it can be far more powerful.

I'll give you an interesting study out of Cornell that looked at small businesses, and they categorized these small businesses based on whether they were top-down kind of carrot-and-stick management,

and bottom-up more autonomous management.

And it turned out that the bottom-up more autonomous management companies had four times, four times the growth rate of those other more command-and-control traditional companies.

You don't know.

I mean, I think that people want to do great things.

I don't think that everybody who has that kind of autonomy tomorrow will do a great thing.

I think a heck of a lot more will do a great thing than people expect.

But there is an element of risk there.

There's an element of uncertainty there.