

Businesses have it wrong, incentives destroy creativity - racketman4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

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nazgulnarsil
this is such a counter intuitive result that they're going to have to back
this up with a fairly heavy duty inquiry before anyone should take it
seriously.

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nazgulnarsil
well...even in the video he repudiates his own point by incentivizing workers
with autonomy. I would guess that the experimental data has a very narrow view
of what an incentive is and has a very narrow view of what the problem space
is. everything that people do is based on incentives. people don't go to work
for the satisfaction of it. that some tests showed that additional task based
rewards don't work well (probably because it introduces competitive behavior
in a non-competitive problem space: creativity) doesn't mean that incentives
don't work. they just don't work at that level. he does mention the phrase
"extrinsic vs intrinsic motivators" a couple times but doesn't go into any
detail about what that means.

what I'd take from this is something that marketers have known for years: you
can get people to insane things (like build an encyclopedia for free) by
appealing to their inbuilt biases. as it turns out these biases are a bit more
subtle than "money good, me work faster", but again, marketers already know
this.

