Money is not a motivator?

After reading The Warren Harding Error I learned that the world is too complex now for just linear thinking and that we need to interweave ourselves as a piece of nature. Ray Anderson the CEO of Interface Inc. realized that it was his job as a fortune 500 business to reduce his waste consumption from all his factories. Someone with his kind of power in the world’s economy can play a big effect on how others can see it. He saw the bigger picture and wanted to be less waste full, and to his astonishment with a small investment in waste reduction he saved over four times the money he spent. Ray changed his worldview and the impact of his industry on it, and slowly his values changed and so did his company by giving back to the earth more than they took. Ray is part of the core group of cultural creative with a leading-edge thinking that helped guide his decisions to green values.

Dan Pink’s video on motivation and Drive has some results that were surprising to me. When it comes to rudimentary cognitive skill tests the students at MIT when given a larger reward to fulfill the tasks performed poorer than those with a small reward. This seems all backwards to me that people wouldn’t be better when given a higher incentive to think harder. These students weren’t applying themselves harder when money was on the line. The motivation wasn’t there to encourage the students to outperform each other just because they were making more money. They probably didn’t care as much to the results because they knew how much the reward was already going to be. To pay you employees just enough to keep money off their minds while they work is the best way to give them an incentive to be productive and seek out new and improved ideas for the company. People have always done better in activities that they and not being forced to do and enjoy the work at hand.