Transcription

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are motivations art unbelievably interesting i mean it i’d find and i’ve

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been working on this for a few years and i just find a topic still so amazingly

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engaging

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and an interesting so i want to tell you about that

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scientists really surprising

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the site is a little bit freaky

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we are not as endlessly manipulative or and as predictable as you would think

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there’s a whole set of unbelievably interesting stories i want to give you

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two

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the call into question this idea that if you reward something

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you get more than behavior you want

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if you punish something you get less celeste talk

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let’s go from

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london to the mean streets of cambridge massachusetts

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in northeastern party united states let’s talk about a study done at m_i_t_

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massachusetts institute of technology

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here’s what they did a typical whole group of students and they gave me a set

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of challenges

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things like gun

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memorizing strings of digits

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sobbing word puzzles other kinds of spatial puzzles even physical tasks like

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throwing a ball through

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at the given these challenges and they said

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to incentivize their performance

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they gave me three levels of rewards

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so if you did pretty well got a small monetary reward if you didn’t medium

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well you get a media monetary reward

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and if you did really well if you were one of the top reformers you’ve got a

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large cash

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we’ve seen this movie before this is centrally typical motivation scheme

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within organizations right

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we were worth the very

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top reformers we nor the local formers and other old folks come in the middle

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up here

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it a little bit

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so what happens

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they detest they have these incentives here’s what they found out

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as long as the captain about only mechanical steel

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bonuses workers they would be expected to hire to pay the vendor performance

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fit that make sense

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but here’s what happens

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but once

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the task offer even rudimentary cognitive skill

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a larger reward led to poorer performance

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now this is strange right on larger reward but the poor performance how can

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that possibly be

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those interesting about this

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is that these folks here who were group who did this

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are all economist at that to at m_i_t_ one of university cargo

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what at carnegie mellon okayed top-tier be economics profession

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and they’re reaching this conclusion that seems

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contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics

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which is uh… which is that the higher the reward the better performance and

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they are saying

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that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill

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it’s the other way around

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which seems like this kind of the idea that these awards don’t work that way

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seems vaguely left-wing and socialist doesn’t it

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it’s kind of this kind of weird socialist conspiracy

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for those of you have those conspiracy theories i want to point out the so

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notoriously left-wing socialist group that finance the research

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the federal reserve bank

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today was the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that’s

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quite

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surprising seems to defy the laws of vehicle physics

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so this is strangest race funny so what do they do they said lets this is that

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this is freaky

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let’s go test it somewhere else maybe that

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fifty dollars a sixty dollar prize is insufficiently motivated for m_i_t_’s

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right

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so let’s go to a place for fifty dollars is actually

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more significant relatively silico fake experiment going to go to moderate india

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throw india where fifty dollars sixty dollars whatever the number was is

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actually significant sum of money silly replicated experiment india roughly as

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follows

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tomorrow ward

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equivalent to reach salary

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allosaurus small performance low performance tui salary media performance

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about a month salary

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uh…

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high performance but two months aller

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they so there’s a real

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good incentives but this year to get a different

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result here

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wat happen though was that

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the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the

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small reward

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but this time around the people offered proper work

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they did worst of all

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higher incentives what the worst performance

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with interesting about this is that it actually isn’t all that anomalous this

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has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologist

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by sums

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six and by sociologist

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uh… and bike on a mess over and over and over again

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for simple straightforward tasks

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those kinds of incentives if you do this when you get that

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they’re great

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first task that are algorithmic

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set of rules we have to just follow along and get a right answer

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if then we wards carrots and sticks

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outstanding

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but when

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the task gets more complicated when it requires some conceptual creative

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thinking those kinds of motivators demonstrably

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that money is a motivator

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that work but in the slightly strange way if you don’t pay people enough

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they won’t be motivated with cherries but there’s another paradox here which

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is of the best use of money is a motivator

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is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table

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pay people enough to the not thinking about money the thinking about the work

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out what to do that turns out there three factors that the sideshows lied to

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better performance

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uh… not to mention personal satisfaction

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economy mastery purpose

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economy is our desire to be self-directed

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director own lives

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now in many ways traditional notions of management run afoul of that

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management is great if you want compliance but if you want engagement

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which is what we want to work force today as people are doing more

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complicated sophisticated things

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self direction is better

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let me give you some examples of this of

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almost radical forms of self direction in the workplace that lead to good

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results but start with this company right here at lafayette

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an australian company at the software company and they do something really

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cool

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once a quarter on for thursday afternoon they say they’re developers

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for the next twenty-four hour who can work on anything you want

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you can work out the way you want you can work out with whomever you want

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always ask is that you show the results of the company at the end of the twenty

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four hours in this fun at a meeting not a star chamber session but is fun

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meeting with peer in taken fun in

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other things like that

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it turns out that one day

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appear undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing

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software a whole array of ideas for new products

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but otherwise we’ll never marched

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one day

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now this is not if that in senate this is not the sort of thing that i would

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have done three years ago before i knew this research

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i would have said you want people to be

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creative and innovative

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given the furqan innovation bonus

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if you do something cool i’ll give you twenty five hundred dollars

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they’re not doing this at all essentially saying you probably want to

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do something interesting let me just get out anyway

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one day have autonomy produces things that never merch

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so if i got mastery

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masters are urged to get better at stuff we’d like to get better at stuff

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this is why people play musical instruments on the weekend

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yet always people acting in ways that scene

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irrational economically

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they play musical instruments on weekends why it’s not going to get them

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to make its not gonna make them any money while you’re doing it

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because it’s fun

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because you get better at it and that’s satisfying

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go back in time a little bit imagine imagine this if i went to my first

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economics professor

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woman named mary alice shoma

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and i went to her in nineteen eighty three

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and said

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british illegally talked after class for a moment

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epa’s inkling i got this idea for business model is one of run past you

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here’s how it would work

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you get a bunch of people around the world

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we’re doing highly skilled work

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but they’re willing to do it for free

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and volunteer their time twenty sometimes thirty hours a week

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as you look at some of skeptically

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overlap but i’m not done

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and then what they create

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they give it away a rather than salad

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it’s going to be huge

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the shortest should sleep with what i was insane

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rating to fly in the face of so many things what do you have you have lyrics

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how ring

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one out of four corporate servers and four to five hundred companies

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apache powering

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more than the majority of web servers

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wikipedia what’s going on why or why are people doing this why are they why are

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these people many of whom are technically sophisticated highly skilled

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people who backdrops

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they have jobs

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they’re working at jobs for pay doing challenging xx doing sophisticated

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techno technological work

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and yet

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during their limited discretionary time

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they do equally if not more technically sophisticated work not for their

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employer

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but for someone else for free

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that’s a stranger

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economic behavior

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economies that look into it why are you doing this

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overwhelmingly clear

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challenge in mastery

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along with making a contribution that’s it

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what you see more and more is a rise of what you might call

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purpose mode

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is that more and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent

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purpose

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partly because it makes coming to work better

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partly because that’s the way to get better talent

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or seeing now is

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in some ways when the profit motive becomes un moored from the purpose

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motive

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up bad things happen

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that things ethically sometimes but also bad things just like

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not good stuff

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crappy products

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lane services

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uninspiring places to work

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that when the profit motive his is

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is paramount or when it becomes completely unfit for the purpose motive

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people do great things

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more and more organizations are or realized and sort of disturbing the

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categories between what’s profit and what’s

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and what’s purpose and

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and i think that actually heralds

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something interesting i think that the companies that organizations are

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flourishing whether profit for proper somewhere in between

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far art bar animated by this purpose we’re going to get a couple of examples

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here’s the bad respect

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this is our goal to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better

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place

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pretty good purpose

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here steve jobs

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when one of the being in the universe

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that’s a kind of thing that might get you up in the morning rate racing to go

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to work

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so i think that um…

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we are

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purpose

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maximizes not only profit maximizes

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i think the signed shows that we care about mastering very very deeply

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unassigned shows that we want to be self-directed

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and i think that the big take away here is that

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if we start treating people like people

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and not assuming that they’re simply

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spear slower smaller better smelling courses

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if we get past this kind of ideology of carrots and sticks and look at the

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science

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i think we can actually build