Tag: Peter Drucker

  • Why the carrot or the stick?

    Why the carrot or the stick?

    It’s an open question to you the reader. Why are we attempting to motivate the 21st century knowledge worker, interacting in increasingly complex environments in the same way since the 19th century?

     

    As business leaders we have more than four decades of scientific research on human motivation available to us, yet there has been very little innovation or connection between what science knows and what business does to motivate employees.

     

    While carrots and sticks worked successfully in the 20th century when work was relatively less complex than today, with the increase in matrix organisations and with the ongoing decline in employee engagement and productivity, experts like Peter Drucker, Daniel Pink and Yves Morieux posit that motivation techniques that favour control are precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges and we should move towards the three main drivers of true motivation; autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

     

    What do you think? I’d love to hear from you if you’ve experimented with self managed teams or innovative ways to engage teams.

  • Perhaps it’s time for a different approach?

    Perhaps it’s time for a different approach?

    “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

    Peter Drucker

    The more complicated the organization, the more difficult it is to understand what is really happening within and for the customer. Perhaps it’s time to simplify our approach and focus on cooperation and collaboration?

    More than 2 million people have watched Yves Morieux’s Ted Talk; How too many rules at work keep you from getting things done. I invite you to watch and consider the key message and simplicity of cooperation and how this principal can cut through complexity, cost and a disengaged workforce.

    “Modern work — from waiting tables to crunching numbers to designing products — is about solving brand-new problems every day, flexibly and collaboratively. But as Yves Morieux shows in this insightful talk, too often, an overload of rules, processes and metrics keeps us from doing our best work together. Meet the new frontier of productivity: cooperation.” (Ted July 2015)