Daniel Pink

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.

But I think that the genuine uncertainty of something that could lead to an innovation is far better than the false certainty that these outdated regimes of carrots and sticks will work.

I think that's in some ways delusional.

Everybody has regrets. It's one of the most common emotions that people have. Give me any regret that any of your listeners have. I'll find it in 15 seconds in the database.

Everybody has regrets. It's one of the most common emotions that people have. Give me any regret that any of your listeners have. I'll find it in 15 seconds in the database.

You know, if you hit age 50, you likely have more of your life behind you than ahead of you. We have this database now of 26,000 regrets from people in 134 countries. These four regrets are incredibly common around the world. There are foundation regrets, which are decisions that people make. They're not devastating upfront, but that accumulate to bad consequences. There's regrets about boldness.