Daniel H. Pink's Blog, page 26

Thought for the day: Failure vs. mediocrity

Most people are more frightened of failure than of mediocrity. It should be the reverse.

Failure is a broken leg — painful, but easily fixed. Mediocrity is a creeping disease — invisible and insidious — that disables so completely that there's often no recovery.

Is purpose really an effective motivator?

Over at the Inside Influence Report, Noah Goldstein writes about a recent study that examined whether infuse a task with purpose can motivate high performance.

The study, conducted by Wharton's Adam Grant, involved the call center at a university fundraising organization. Grant obtained permission to talk to the folks working at the call center — and then randomly assigned employees to one of three groups.

As Goldstein explains:

Some of these employees read stories from other employees...

What is your sentence? (Curacao edition)

At the International School of Curacao, teacher Danny Kinzer asked his Theory of Knowledge students to undertake the "What's your sentence?" described in Lindsey Testolin's remarkable video and on page 154 of Drive. Then each participant posted his or her answer on the school bulletin board.

Beyond Stop and Yield

Gary Lauder has a brilliant proposal to make traffic signs more emotionally intelligent — and to reduce energy costs and accidents in the process.  Just watch his four-and-a-half-minute TED Talk, which I've embedded below.

Factoid of the day: March Madness means (less) business

The folks over at Challenger Gray & Christmas have taken a look at what happens in the workplace when people are lured into the force field that is the NCAA basketball tournament.

The results?

They estimate that during the first week of the tournament alone, workers distracted by March Madness (and that includes you, Mr. President) could cost employers as much as $1.8 billion in wages.

7 Rules for Writing

To my amazement (and delight), Malcolm Gladwell has selected Drive as the March pick for the New Yorker Online Book Club. And as a way to gear up readers for the discussion, the magazine asked me a few questions — including whether I had any "rules" for writing.

I'd actually never thought about that. But it turned out that I did — in a kinda, sorta way — have some rules for hacking out sentences in the hopes that they grow into paragraphs and eventually coalesce into pages and books.

I'm...

9th graders ask themselves: "What's my sentence?"

Tasha Graff, a 9th grade English teacher at Morse High School in Bath, Maine, saw the Drive video excerpt, and decided to play it for her class. Then she asked her students to answer the question posed in the video and in an exercise on page 154 of the book.

Here's a sample of their responses:

She changed the way kids feel about going to the doctors and dentist.

He made the NFL and gave money for children's athletics throughout the USA.

His life was lived to the fullest and he had no regrets.

He...

Emotionally intelligent dashboard signage?

Would having this odometer make you drive more safely?

(Note: If it's not obvious, the scale is in kilometers rather than miles.)

(HT: Adam Shepard)

Do you pass the pronoun test?

In the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to work for Robert B. Reich, then the U.S. Secretary of Labor. He taught me a simple (and free) tool for diagnosing the health of an organization.

When he visited companies and talked with employees, Reich listened carefully for the pronouns people used. Did employees refer to their companies as "they" or as "we"? "They" suggested at least some amount of disengagement, and perhaps even alienation. "We" suggested the opposite–that employees felt that t...

TV network is looking for DC-area open source types

A major TV network is doing a piece on new ways to work — and has enlisted my help in finding folks to profile. In particular, the producers are looking for people in the Washington, DC, area who contribute to open source projects such as Linux, Apache, and Firefox.

If you fit that bill (or know somebody who does), and you'd like to be interviewed, shoot me a short email. I'll pass the info on to the producers.

Do it today if you can. Your fame awaits.