LINKS:

• Rob Cross’s research: What Creates Energy in Organizations? | Charged Up: Managing the Energy That Drives Innovation.
• Bob Sutton’s last 3 books: Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less (Amazon | BN | IndieBound); Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best and Learn From the Worst (Amazon |BN |IndieBound); The No A**hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (Amazon |BN |IndieBound).
• Bob Sutton’s 12 Books That Every Leader Should Read.

The post Pinkcast 4. Advice from Bob Sutton: Do people leave encounters with you with more energy or less? first appeared on Daniel Pink.

LINKS:

• The underlying research: The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Notetaking by Pam Mueller at Princeton and Daniel Oppenheimer at UCLA.
• Articles on the Mueller-Oppenheimer research: Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, APS News.
• My favorite paper notebooks: Field Notes
• My favorite source for pencils: CW Pencil Enterprise
• I process my handwritten notes using a slightly modified version of the Getting Things Done approach.

The post Beta test 3. Why you should take notes by hand first appeared on Daniel Pink.

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The post Protected: Pinkcast 1: My go-to productivity trick first appeared on Daniel Pink.

“[T]he financial advice industry,” he says in his important new book Get Wise to Your Advisor: How to Reach Your Investment Goals Without Getting Ripped Off, “has more built-in conflicts of interest than almost any other industry.”

Lockshin knows whereof he speaks. He’s consistently been one of the top-rated financial advisors in the country by Barron’s and for 20 years he ran his own fee-only, conflict-avoiding advisory firm.  Now he’s helping the rest of us figure out whom we can trust for honest guidance about money matters.

Because the book was so revealing, I asked Lockshin to answer some questions about his book for readers. He’s also provided an outstanding 8-page PDF on the questions you should ask anyone aiming to give you financial advice.

At the heart of the book is the distinction between advisors who must meet a “suitability standard” and those who must meet a “fiduciary standard.” It sounds a bit wonky, but it’s a big deal. Explain.

Advisors who must meet a “suitability standard” are required only to offer advice that’s suitable for their clients, which means they can suggest products that earn them big commissions but that aren’t necessarily the best choice for the client. Financial advisors who must meet a “fiduciary standard” are legally obligated to put their clients’ interests first.

Think of it this way. Some advisors say, “If there are two products and they’re both decent, I’ll always select the one that pays me more.” But others say, “If there are two products to choose from and they’re both similar and appropriate, I’ll always select the one that costs the client less.”

Ok. So how do I determine which is which?

In its simplest form, a fiduciary – a true steward of your financial well being – will always place your interests first.  Full stop.  Any conflict of interest should be a yellow (if not a red) flag that your advisor may be tempted to put their interests before yours.

What else should we be looking for in an advisor?

Make sure your advisor has the skills and qualifications to meet your needs. Check his or her violations history through FINRA’s or the SEC’s website and ask lots of questions to understand the advisor’s level of education and experience in the financial services industry. You’ll be surprised to know that there are almost zero education requirements to become a financial advisor.

Do all of us really need an advisor? Can’t we do a lot of this work online on our own?

It’s possible to handle your investments and savings on your own, provided you possess one important skill – discipline. There are also online solutions like Betterment.com or Wealthfront.com and others that automate investing and savings for you at a fraction of the cost of retail advisors – and do it quite well! However, here’s the key: The math is simple, but the emotion and discipline are not.  Much like dieting, most of us know what to eat and how to exercise; yet we often need a trainer or dietician to assist with our discipline.  A good financial advisor can help with that discipline.

What’s one thing Pink Newsletter readers could do today to improve their chances of successfully navigating their financial futures? 

Probably the most important thing is making an honest assessment of one’s current situation.  Ask a few really simple, but extremely important, questions. For example:

1)   Am I disciplined about my financial planning process or do I rely on someone else to do my thinking for me?

2)   Do I truly understand what I am paying in fees?

3)   If I do rely on someone else, am I confident that person is dedicated to meeting my needs without any economic conflicts of interest that could get in the way?

4)   Have I religiously searched for the best advisor to meet my needs by asking tough questions rather than making an emotional decision?

For more, check out the book Get Wise to Your Advisor: How to Reach Your Investment Goals Without Getting Ripped Off and this free PDF on the questions you should ask any prospective advisor.

The post Interview with Steven D. Lockshin, author of Get Wise to Your Advisor first appeared on Daniel Pink.

Because his book addresses such core desires, I’ve asked Joel to answer a few questions about the book and his work as an executive coach. Here are his answers:

1.  In Getting Ahead you coach readers through three steps that are necessary to career advancement: improving other peoples’ perceptions of us, increasing our visibility, and exerting influence. In your experience, what holds otherwise high-achieving people back from taking these steps?

Many of my clients protest that they’re ‘‘too busy’’ to make the effort to bring perception, visibility, and influence into their work lives. They are consumed by and can barely keep up with their daily responsibilities. They oversee too many projects and have extensive to-do lists. They have seemingly endless meetings and are overwhelmed by e-mails. Well, let me ask: Do you think that leaders of large organizations receive fewer e-mails than you? Do they have fewer projects to work on, or shorter to-do lists? No. The difference is that they take time to prioritize perception, visibility, and influence. Despite the sense of urgency and importance that these demands provoke, these leaders still are able to make perception, visibility, and influence a vital part of their professional lives.

2.  In the chapter on improving one’s image, I like your emphasis on getting constructive feedback from others. What do you think is the most painless (or least painful) way to go about doing this?

Many people are afraid to ask for constructive feedback. You may worry that you’ll discover something you don’t want to know. It can feel risky and vulnerable to ask how others perceive you. The most painless way to go about asking for constructive feedback is to explain why you are asking for feedback.

Some possible ways to introduce the discussion are:

• ‘‘I am doing a bit of self-evaluation and looking for some ways to grow my career. I talked to my boss already and felt it would be beneficial to speak to other people with whom I work. I want to know how you think I am performing and what your perception of me is. I value what you have to say.’’
• ‘‘I know you are someone with whom I work indirectly. I would like to learn about myself and the ways I can improve in this company. I respect you as a person and would therefore appreciate your feedback.’’
• ‘‘I want to improve my performance. I am asking for honest feedback because I know you are aware of and see things that would be helpful for me to know about.’’

3.  If I had to guess, I’d say the chapter on increasing visibility is the one that creates the most anxiety in readers. Nobody wants to be seen as pushy, aggressive, or a credit-hog. What are some ways to cultivate visibility without being obnoxious about it?

• Focus on how what you’ve done benefits your group, department, or company. The self-promotion process can often cause you to concentrate on what you’ve accomplished without giving any thought to how it benefits the company or management. A big picture approach can soften the impression that you care more about furthering yourself than you do about your organization’s success. You need to show how what you do benefits other business units, customers, clients, and people above you, below you, and inside your own department.

• Have others sing your praises. Have clients, customers, or vendors sing your praises. These groups can share compliments about you via e-mail or voice mail. Whenever you do something positive above and beyond expectations, solve problems, or provide top-notch service, make sure to ask the person you’re serving to tell your superiors (your boss and boss’s boss) about it.

4.  Clearly Getting Ahead is relevant to people at the beginning of their working life – but what about people who are nearing the end of their careers? Where could improving perception, visibility, and influence take them?

The book’s third section, on influence, is most relevant to people nearing the end of their careers. As upper executives, you spend most of your time influencing significant results and people’s behavior.  By influencing others, you increase your value to the overall organization.

While visibility isn’t as important as it used to be, as a person in upper management, you still need to make sure you have visibility to other executives who identify you as someone who drives the company’s success forward.

5.  Your book is packed with tools and tips. What’s one tip Pink Blog readers could use – today – to take themselves to the next level?

Two studies conducted by Cameron Anderson and Gavin J. Kilduff in 2009 found that people who speak up and act dominant will be perceived as competent even if they aren’t. They merely appear so because they believe so completely in their own competence. So what does this teach us? Speak up. Speak first. Speak often. Stop overthinking and delaying what you want to say. Stop being fearful; instead, trust in yourself. Have confidence in your knowledge. Focus more on what you know and less on what others think. Identify two different situations in which you decide to speak up and speak often. You might have to leave your comfort zone, but do it. You’ll be heard and seen as competent, and you’ll notice others’ perceptions of you starting to shift favorably as you contribute more often.

The post How to get ahead: 5 questions for Joel Garfinkle first appeared on Daniel Pink.

The post How to Pitch Better: The Rhyming Pitch first appeared on Daniel Pink.

How do you craft an effective email subject line?

The post How to Pitch Better: The Email Pitch first appeared on Daniel Pink.

Up first is The Question Pitch, which shows when you should use the interrogative to make your case (and when you should avoid it).

The post How to Pitch Better: The Question Pitch first appeared on Daniel Pink.

1. There is no plan.
Make decisions for fundamental, not instrumental, reasons.

2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
What do you consistently do well? What gives you energy rather than drains it?

3. It’s not about you.
The most successful people improve their own lives by improving others’ lives.

4. Persistence trumps talent.  
There are massive returns to doggedness.

5. Make excellent mistakes.
Commit errors from which the benefits of what you’ve learned exceed the costs of the screw-up.

6. Leave an imprint.  
Recognize that your life isn’t infinite and that you should use your limited time here to do something that matters. 

* * * *

Buy the book at Amazon, BN.com, or IndieBound
Watch the classic 2-minute trailer

The post The 6 essential lessons of a satisfying, productive career first appeared on Daniel Pink.

Among the insights and provocations:

• “Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes.”
• “Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no.”
• “By getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.”

Watch and ponder.

The post Dan Ariely’s revised model of labor first appeared on Daniel Pink.

The post Are you inside the circle or outside? first appeared on Daniel Pink.

Heidi Grant Halvorson and E. Tory Higgins, who together run the Motivation Science Center at Columbia Business School, argue that human beings have two broad approaches to the world. Some of us are red lights. We’re prevention-focused. Our overriding goals are to minimize losses, to feel secure, and to elude the looming possibility of failure. Some of us, meanwhile, are green lights. We’re promotion-focused. Our overriding goals are to maximize gains, to feel nurtured, and to take chances even if it means making big mistakes.

Red lights aren’t better than green lights — or vice versa. But knowing your own focus — and, equally important, knowing the focus of those you’re trying to lead, teach, or woo — can make a huge difference. (You can assess your own style here.)

Because I know Pink Blog readers love the sort of actionable social science found in this book, I figured out Heidi Halvorson’s and Higgins’s approaches (they’re both promotion-focused) and convinced them they had a lot to gain from answering some questions.

* * *

1. To what extent is being promotion-focused or prevention-focused innate? That is, are we born one way or the other? Do we ever change over time? 

We aren’t born with a dominant focus, and we all use both promotion and prevention focus at least some of the time depending on the circumstances. But our upbringing at home and the culture surrounding us can make us more promotion or prevention-focused.

How were you raised? When you did something wrong, did your parents punish you with extra chores  (prevention) or withdraw their attention and affection (promotion)?  What culture do you live in?  Americans grow up in a society that praises individual accomplishments and loves innovators, making us more promotion-focused (on average) than societies that emphasizes rule-following and self-sacrifice.

And yes, we can change over time because situations can put us in a promotion focus or a prevention focus, and when these situations are institutionalized, they can have stable long-term effects, as when people work in a company that itself has a promotion or prevention “culture.”

2. One of the big ideas in the book is the concept of “motivational fit.” Could you explain what it is and why it matters? 

Motivational fit happens when your experience – the way you are working, the kind of task you are working on, or the feedback you receive – sustains or enhances your motivation.    Promotion motivation feels like eagerness, a desire to really go for it.  Being optimistic, working quickly and creatively, making choices based on the pros of each option, and being offered incentives framed in terms of potential gains all provide a motivational fit for someone who is promotion-focused.

Prevention motivation, on the other hand, feels like vigilance – being careful and on the look-out for problems.  Being a realist (or even a skeptic), working slowly and accurately, making choices based on the cons of each option, and being offered the incentive to avoid losses, all create fit for prevention.

The benefits of motivational fit, not only for individuals’ performance and success but also for influencing others (as parents, managers, coaches, etc.), are really remarkable.  Studies show that people value what they are doing (or what you are selling) more, find feedback more believable and persuasive, and are more engaged and effective when they experience fit.

3. Does that mean that on the job managers should give prevention-minded employees and promotion-minded employees different types of feedback?

Absolutely.  Promotion-focused people thrive on optimism, so it’s really important to keep them feeling positive even when you are delivering bad news. They need to learn from their mistakes, but not dwell on them for too long. They also respond well to praise, and work best when they feel that they are making real progress toward their goal.

Prevention-focused people, on the other hand, aren’t optimists.  (At least, the successful ones aren’t.)  They are what psychologists call “defensive pessimists.”  It’s not that they believe they will fail – that’s just plain pessimism, and that doesn’t work for anyone.  It’s that they believe they might fail, if they don’t work hard and take the necessary steps to keep from getting derailed.  This kind of thinking keeps them vigilant, and keeps their motivational machine humming.

Prevention-focused people are often visibly uncomfortable with too much optimism or praise – on an often unconscious level, they realize that having a sunny outlook would make them lower their guard, and that their work would suffer as a result.  So avoid effusive praise with the prevention-focused – instead, give them honest, realistic feedback about how they might improve.

4. You’ve got a whole chapter on parenting. But give us a preview. Should parents be promotion-focused? Prevention-focused? Neither? Both? 

This is a great question, because it speaks to the whole “which is better?” issue that comes up all the time, not only for parenting but for work and life in general.  We know from nearly two decades of research now that people can live successful, satisfying lives with either dominant focus.  They will have different strengths – and different weaknesses – but overall, one way of living and working isn’t “better” than the other.

That said, there is good reason to believe, especially from research on teamwork, that promotion and prevention can work together well and having strengths in both is desirable – because ultimately, we all want to be able to advance and achieve while also staying safe and secure.  Otherwise, you may find that you live a life of adventure but never remember to pay your bills and floss, or that you have perfect credit and teeth, but never seem to have any fun.

So as a parent, your best bet is to use both promotion and prevention-focused ways of reinforcing and discouraging behavior to some extent.  But just as important, you want to teach your children when it’s best to be promotion-focused (it’s time to be open and creative) or prevention-focused (it’s time to be careful and analytical), and how to work with that focus to reach their goals.

5. We’ve been talking a lot about selling around here recently. Can you give an example of how you might sell the same product differently to a prevention-focused prospect versus a promotion-focused one? 

The second half of the book is devoted to describing ways of creating motivational fit in order to – as you might say – move people.  The gist is that you want to pitch your product or idea in terms of gains, advancements, and rewards to a promotion audience, but pitch it in terms of losses avoided, safety, and reliability for a prevention audience. If you are selling toothpaste, for instance, you want to emphasize the white teeth and beautiful smile for promotion, and the anti-cavity protection for prevention.

The post Is your focus prevention or promotion? 5 questions for Halvorson & Higgins first appeared on Daniel Pink.

On Friday April 12, 2013 at 2:30pm EDT, I’ll be talking with Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of blockbuster books, Made to Stick, Switch, and their newest bestseller, Decisive, which is all about how to make better decisions. You can listen live — and ask the Heath brothers anything you want — by dialing this number (206-402-0100) and entering this passcode (203373#).

If you’re new to the Pink Blog and don’t know what Office Hours is, here’s a quick reminder: About once a month, I’ve been opening the phone lines and a special guest and I take your questions about work, business, technology, personal productivity, and anything else you want to discuss. Think of it as “Car Talk” . . . for the human engine. The program is free of charge and free of advertising. You can find more information on the Office Hours page and download previous episodes on iTunes. (This episode, too, will be posted on iTunes next week.)

The deets:
Office Hours with Chip Heath and Dan Heath
April 12, 2:30pm EDT
Phone number: 206-402-0100
Passcode: 203373

The post Office Hours is back — and it’s sticky! first appeared on Daniel Pink.

In 305 insightful pages, Wharton professor Adam Grant recasts our notions of what it takes to succeed. Talent is a factor, of course. Effort, persistence, and drive often matter even more. But Grant identifies a third, previously invisible, element: A person’s “reciprocity style.”

In our professional lives, he says, we tend to be either givers, takers, or matchers. Most of us are matchers. We’re willing to give — to help others — but we expect something in return. Matchers live in the world of reciprocity, tit-for-tat, and Even Steven. A few of us, meanwhile, are takers. Our style is to get more than we give. (Spoiler alert: Research shows that we hate takers and root for them to fail.) And a few of us are givers. We give more than we get — with no expectation of return.

Grant has found that the people who occupy the bottom of the success ladder are givers — in part because they’re “too trusting and too willing to sacrifice their own interests for the benefit of others.” So who occupies the top?

It’s the givers once again.

Grant’s book (Buy it at Amazon, BN.com, or IndieBound) looks at the evidence for this surprising finding and then offers a path for how to become the sort of giver who flourishes without being fleeced.

Because I like this book so much, and because I’ve written about some of Grant’s other research in both Drive and To Sell is Human, I asked him to answer a few questions for Pink Blog readers. Since Grant himself is a giver of epic proportions, he obliged.

* * *

1. One concern that some people have about being givers is that they’ll be taken advantage of or that they’ll become poster children for the old adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.” What are a few ways that successful givers avoid these traps?

One powerful strategy is to assess the generosity of the people you’re helping. If they’ve consistently operated selfishly, like takers, it may be wise to shift from giving to matching. Instead of assisting them without any strings attached, help them on the condition that they pay it back to you—or pay it forward to benefit someone else. A second approach is to set clear boundaries for helping time versus personal productivity. For example, there’s a Fortune 500 software company that has encouraged engineers to set “quiet time” three mornings a week from 9am until noon to make sure that constant interruptions don’t interfere with their progress. A third option is to develop giving networks, bringing together groups of people to make and grant requests in a meeting or on a listserv. By making giving visible, taking is discouraged, and a marketplace often emerges that connects people with those who are best suited to help them. For a powerful example, see the Reciprocity Ring by Humax Networks.

2. Many of us know about the strength of weak ties from Mark Granovetter’s landmark work. But you introduce the idea of “dormant ties,” which I found quite compelling. Can you explain what dormant ties are and why they matter to givers?

Dormant ties are connections to people you used to know, but have fallen out of touch for several years or more. In a series of fascinating studies, Daniel Levin, Jorge Walter, and Keith Murnighan have shown that dormant ties actually provide more valuable advice than current ties. Dormant ties tend to be more helpful than weak ties, because there’s a residue of trust and familiarity that makes it easier to reach out. But they also offer more novel information than strong ties, as they’ve encountered new people and ideas in the time since you last connected. From my perspective, givers have the most to gain from reactivating dormant ties, as they’ve built up a track record of generosity. If they can overcome the reluctance to seek help, there’s a reservoir of goodwill waiting to be accessed.

3. Okay, let me just get this out of the way. People named Dennis are almost twice as likely to become dentists as people with comparably popular names. What the heck is going on here and why should we care? 

The evidence here is very controversial, but it does turn out that we’re surprisingly drawn to careers—and people, places, and products—that remind us of our own names. If your name is Dennis or Denise, when you first learn about dentists, you might have a slightly more positive feeling because it taps into something familiar that’s part of your identity. Research by Brett Pelham and his colleagues suggests that this is true for a wide range of names, especially if our names are rare and we identify strongly with them. The self-similarity effect extends to helping: we’re more likely to give time and money to people who remind us of ourselves. I go into more detail in chapter 8 of the book, and I think we should care for two reasons. First, subtle factors can shape where we direct our giving, and we need to be cautious about helping for the wrong reasons. Second, if we want to convince other people to be more generous, we can often boost giving by showing them how they share uncommon commonalities with others in need.

4. Now let me toss an odd word at you: Karma. Does your work offer some empirical support for the mystical idea, often found in the religions of South Asia, that our actions have repercussions – good or bad – that extend far beyond the present moment into the rest of our lives?

This is a really interesting way of framing my work; I do think there’s a case to be made for the science behind karma. Rather attributing it to mystical forces, I believe matchers are behind many of the karmic moments in life. If you’re a matcher, you tend to believe strongly in a just world: you think what goes around ought to come around. This means that you’re motivated to punish takers for self-serving actions, and you’re equally driven to reward givers for acting generously. Studies led by Robb Willer at Stanford suggest that people do this in part through “prosocial gossip”—spreading negative reputational information about takers while boosting the status of givers.

5. Most people, you’ve found, are matchers – and that presumably includes most people reading this interview.  What is one step that Pink Blog readers can take today to move a little more in the direction of becoming givers?

I think changing your style starts with increasing self-awareness: do other people see you as a giver, taker, or matcher? If you visit www.giveandtake.com, there are free assessments where you can rate yourself and ask other people to evaluate you anonymously. If you decide to shift in the giver direction, my favorite strategy is what one of America’s top networkers calls the five-minute favor. The key is to look for ways to help others that are relatively low-cost to you. It might be making an introduction between two people who could benefit from knowing each other, sharing an interesting article, or offering to provide advice or feedback. If you choose a form of helping that you find enjoyable and meaningful, it might even boost your mood and energy.

The post Why givers (often) succeed: 5 questions for Adam Grant first appeared on Daniel Pink.

1.  Know your identity. Even after he became famous, Ebert remained in Chicago (rather than Hollywood) and continued working as a journalist.

2. Know your consumers. Ebert “knew it was impossible to attract a mass audience if you are trying too hard to impress a niche.”

3. Own your work. Ebert retained the rights to what he produced.

4. Embrace rivalry. Working with (and against) Gene Siskel sharpened his craft.

5. Embrace the future. “The fact that Ebert had more than 800,000 Twitter followers at the time of his death was mentioned before his Pulitzer in some obituaries.”

6. Be transparent. When Ebert became seriously ill, “he was forthright and up front about his condition.”

7. Be a mentor. He nurtured other writers, especially fellow film critics.

8. Be great. “Being the best is no guarantee of success, but it helps.”

Rosenthal: Ebert wrote a business script worth following

(HT: Rosemary Wisnosky)

The post 8 Business Lessons from Roger Ebert first appeared on Daniel Pink.

In their provocative and endlessly interesting new book, The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office (Buy it at Amazon, BN, or IndieBound) make a spirited case for the centrality of organizations in spite of (sometimes because of) their irritations. These annoyances, they explain, are tradeoffs necessary to get work done. Without them, even greater chaos and dysfunctions would ensue. And so rather than complain, we’d be better off simply understanding the trade-offs and seeing the organizational glass as half-full

Because I thought Pink Blog readers would find the book intriguing, I asked Fisman (he teaches at Columbia) and Sullivan (he’s editorial director of Harvard Business Review Press) to answer some questions.

* * *

In the book, you make a startling claim: That the dysfunctions of the modern workplace – the daily irritations aired at the water cooler and spoofed in Dilbert or Office Space – are actually an inherent part of the modern business organization’s success. Could you say something to make me feel better about this?

It can certainly feel demoralizing to have the tradeoffs that come with organizing laid out quite so starkly. But really, we’ve all experienced these firsthand, so in some sense we’re not telling you anything you didn’t already know. To the extent that making people aware of these tradeoffs has the effect of crushing their hopes of finding “5 Simple Steps to Ending Bureaucracy” or “Innovation, the Easy Way,” it should make you feel better, at least in the long run. Instead of chasing the latest fad, you can hunker down and actually get to thinking through when the benefits of organizational change outweigh their costs.

Organizational diagnosis can also help to make you feel better about the way things are right now: it’s made both of us feel a lot more Zen about the rules, constraints, and irritants now that we better appreciate why they’re there (part of what makes them irritating, after all, is their seeming pointlessness). As an exercise, take a minute and imagine how much worse things could be if they disappeared.

Here’s another counter-intuitive idea I encountered in your book: Jobs should be designed so as to minimize misaligned incentives. That seems to me to be the opposite of how we conventionally approach the issue of motivation, which is to find the right incentives to get a particular job done. What’s going on here?

The view that you just need to get incentives right starts from the faulty premise that all jobs – and the tasks they involve – are created equal in their potential for incentive-based motivation. Most jobs involve multiple components, forcing employees to multitask. Deciding how to bundle the responsibilities under any given job description should come before thinking about how to provide incentives to ensure those jobs get done.

It’s easy to see this if you consider really bad examples of task combinations, like assigning bank loan officers both the tasks of selling loans and approving them. A mortgage salesman can and should be paid on commission to ensure he works hard to generate business. But per-loan compensation for someone who is meant to ensure that mortgages don’t turn sour years down the road is a bad idea (although one that was widely practiced during the subprime boom that preceded the subprime crisis). So a well-designed organization will split up these two tasks, allowing incentives work their magic, where appropriate.

Making sure work gets done relies on an effective combination of picking workers who fit with the job, putting them in the right workplace environment (hello, Google massage parlor), designing the job well, and finally providing appropriate incentives. The last of these is but one part of a much larger puzzle.

In the chapter called “A Theory of Necessary Employee Disillusionment,” you write that in a functioning organization, the best employees will also be the most frustrated and disgruntled employees. How does that make sense for the health of an organization?

Organizations strive to hire the best people they can, the ones who are most eager to do their jobs. But not every employee will be self-motivated, and even those who are will have aspects of their job they’d prefer to avoid now and then. So organizations set up incentives and rewards, they monitor, and they measure what gets done. Ironically, those same incentives and measurement systems run the risk of driving your best workers—the ones who see their jobs as avocations and not just a way to mark time and get a paycheck—to become the most frustrated by the lack of clear connection between management measures and job performance.

This logic, taken to an extreme, could suggest that you know the org is working when your best employees are disgruntled and disillusioned. This is most emphatically not what we’re suggesting.

Instead, we see this as a warning to those captivated by the idea of an organization based on high-powered incentives and other rational economic principles. You need to balance incentives with an acknowledgment of the power of intrinsic motivation – and the costs of alienating your brightest and best-motivated employees. But it’s also a warning to employees that balancing incentives with freedom to take initiative is extraordinarily hard—and yet is a necessary cost of organizing.

Smart leaders realize they need to balance performance measures of performance and systems to motivate employees with some human kindness. And the smart employee is the one who recognizes that the checks and balances placed on their well-meaning initiative are a necessary cost of organizing.

What is one idea you’ve learned in your research that Pink Blog readers could put to work today in their careers?

This really builds on our answer to the third question. When you’re frustrated with your org, it’s awfully tempting to buy a sledge hammer and just knocking stuff down. And it would be fun too! But pretty soon, you’d take out some plumbing or a load-bearing wall and the whole enterprise would come crashing down. If you can remember that, as you sit in your cubicle or office or in your next meeting, the dysfunction starts to make sense. That’s a pretty good rule for employees and managers alike.

The post Are meetings a force for good?: Some questions for the authors of The Org first appeared on Daniel Pink.

The post Always Be Cobbling first appeared on Daniel Pink.

In his new book Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire (Amazon, BN, or IndieBound), Nussbaum, a former assistant managing editor of Businessweek and a current Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons-The New School of Design, makes a spirited case for moving creativity to the center of our lives and our companies.

He shows that being creative isn’t some natural gift, but the product of hard work. And he introduces five new competencies—Knowledge Mining, Framing, Playing, Making, and Pivoting—that can boost the creative potential of individuals alike.

Because his book is so interesting, I asked him to answer a few questions for Pink Blog readers.

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1. You say we often fail to recognize our own creativity. Is this connected in any way to our concept of the “lone genius”? What can we do to tune in to our creative moments when they’re happening?

We have many myths about creativity–it’s rare, it’s special, it’s a result of brain activity, it’s just weird. But anyone who uses tools, who cooks, who comes up with a fresh business model, who uses Instagram, who makes a music playlist, who writes an original school paper is “doing” creativity. So our first step in tuning in to our creative moments is simply to be mindful of our own creativity. Recognize and reflect on what you do in your career and in your life that is original and of value. Think about how you came to that originality. Businesses need to do the same thing and ask how did that fast-selling product really get developed? Corporations need to map the “creativity circles” inside their organizations, especially the informal ones.

So be mindful. In our hyper-connected, frenzied world, it really helps to disconnect. Those long showers in the morning where you’re supposed to get those “aha” moments? They really work. That long run in the morning? It works. Biking? Yes. Even taking a few more moments over coffee helps you be mindful. It’s amazing how many times things finally “connect” when you are “tuning out.”

But you need to prepare yourself to be mindful. The key to creativity is knowing what is meaningful in the context and that is true in science and engineering as it is in art and music. We spend most of our time focussing on technology and associating new technology with innovation. But understanding what beckons us, what is meaningful, is critical to learning how to connect the dots of knowledge. Try it as a game. So….Shoes and the internet–Zappos. Friends and the Internet–Facebook. Sharing cars, not owning them–ZipCar. Green detergents that are cool and hip, not brown and awful–Method. Songs we can choose and technology–your playlist.

You also need to be masterful. You need to dig deep into your field or your hobby and understand its history and context in order to see what could be different, what could be used in another way. You need to master both knowledge and skills–the skills of creativity that I talk about in my book.

I guess you could call that the “3 M’s” –Be Mindful, Meaningful and Masterly.

2. I was really intrigued by a section of your book called “Donut Knowledge,” in which you provide some riveting examples of people who looked beyond an obvious problem and saw a deeper problem requiring a more creative solution. Could you talk about this “donut knowledge” and how to cultivate it?

It took me about 10 years to become a decent birder. Birding is all about seeing the “odd duck.” You spend years in the field training to look for what’s NOT there. In Singapore four years ago, I saw a black swan. It didn’t surprise me. I was looked for what didn’t fit the pattern. That’s what “Donut Knowledge” or “Donut Thinking” is about. You spend the time to learn the patterns and then you train yourself to look for what doesn’t fit.

In the book, I tell the story of Paul Polak, the renowned development guru, who went to Orissa in India to help solve the problem of clean water. Bringing clean water to villages would be a hugely expensive proposition of dams and pipes. Polak, because of his years in Africa and Asia, could see that the REAL problem was not water but cleanliness. Villages had plenty of water, but it was undrinkable. Solving the cleanliness problem was cheap and easy–chlorine. He partnered with IDIOM, the wonderful Indian innovation consultancy, to build SpringHealth, which now delivers clean water all over Orissa. He hopes to build it into a $1 billion company.

3. Pink Blog readers are creative people already. What’s something they could do today to increase their CQ?

This is what I teach in my Creativity and Capitalism class at Parsons. The fastest way to increase your creative capacities is to hang out with more creative people. Bring creative people into your work, your hobbies and your life and learn from them. See what they do and how they do it. And, if you can, teach brilliant students at a great school, as I have.

Then travel to strange, unfamiliar places. Reframing is a critical creative competence in the book and travel forces you to reframe your tacitly held assumptions. I birded in the Amazon with Achuar guides whose fathers were headhunters. The Achuar eat monkeys they kill with blowguns. They are just learning about money and markets and don’t yet understand how they work. The Achuar believe the spirit world is real and being awake is like being asleep. They bury all their dead under their bed to keep them close. The Achuar see us as savages because we burn up the dead or put them in places far away from the family. Now, that’s a reframe of a lot of assumptions.

Finally, get your “poly” up, as in polymath. Every five or ten years, learn something entirely new. Make it fun–birding, hunting, climbing, playing an instrument. Study some field of interest, like the Rolling Stones and the rise of electronic rock music. Learning a new knowledge domain can give you new dots to connect, provide deep context for seeing patterns of relationships and connect you to creative people and wanderers. Do this every five to ten years. My last two have been birding and collecting Native American art–both were incredibly important to my understanding creativity and innovation. Before that I was deep into rice. You?

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