we have the wrong models of motivation and how we understand business and education. What has changed and what we ought to do about it? Looked at 50 years of research in behavioral psychology and in recent years a little bit in behavioral economics. What it says is that the classic set of motivators we use inside of businesses but also in schools and our families–what I call if/then motivators: if you do this, then you get that–they work pretty well for relatively simple straightforward algorithmic sort of work, work where you are turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line or stuffing envelopes or adding columns of figures in a white collar office. Evidence is pretty clear they get you to focus. Trouble is that for work that requires greater complexity, greater creativity, conceptual thinking, fair amount of evidence that says that the if/then motivators often don’t work very well and can sometimes backfire. My contention is that most work in advanced economies is becoming less routine and algorithmic because that kind of work you can send overseas and automate it. As a result, kind of mismatch: using a motivational operating system, set of assumptions and protocols that’s really made for 20th century work, if/then motivators, and applying it to 21st century work. Compatibility problems. Suggest we upgrade to a different approach to motivation, one far less reliant on if/then rewards, not on all rewards but a certain kind of reward, and prizes other sorts of motivators such as autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose. Those last three in more detail? What the research shows as I read it–don’t want this to seem like it’s a screed against rewards of all kinds or cry for everyone to do volunteer work and never be remunerated. Point is that research shows pretty clearly that you’ve got to pay people enough. If you don’t pay people enough, you are not going to get motivation. But once you pay people enough–and I would argue pay people more than enough–additional units of money have relatively little impact on additional units of performance or satisfaction. What seems to matter more are these other elements. Autonomy is essentially self-direction. If you look at management–misplaced notion of management, think of it as something that emanated from nature, delivered to us from God, when in fact it’s just something some guy invented in the 1850s. Gary Hamill has said this: It’s a technology. It’s a technology for getting compliance. That’s what it’s for. If you sand off the rough edges, that’s what the goal of management essentially is. Don’t want compliance: want engagement; and the way that people engage, people engage autonomously, through self-direction. Providing people enormous amounts of autonomy over their time at work, task, techniques, team–cool and interesting examples of companies around the world taking this very different approach to motivation through greater amounts of autonomy. Mastery: mastery is our desire to get better at stuff because we like to get better at stuff. This is why people play musical instruments on the weekend. That seems to be in some sense something of irrational behavior. Well, it’s an undeniable deep source of satisfaction–musical instruments, playing chess, rock climbing. It doesn’t pay people any money. Well, it depends what you are mastering. Most amateur musicians by nature of being amateurs–or playing chess on the weekend–aren’t going to make a lot of money out of it. As a rational calculation of how to make money, they are better off doing something else.