Autonomy-Mastery-Purpose Incentives that work

Daniel Pink is a Career Analyst or that is what the Ted biography describes what he does. I have seen both the videos embedded here. Daniel has been studying what motivates people to perform at their best. If you have not seen these videos it may surprise you. Ask yourself what is your incentive and motivation to do what you do everyday. Entrepreneurship is a funny business your success is so uncertain and you are in constant flux of going bust to hitting one out of the park, what keeps you going? well, Daniel explains it in his book Drive. I have written about how the world has been changing right in front of our eyes because a lot of what we do has to do with Cognitive skills and not conveyor belt mechanically repetitive stuff. But our companies and management methods were created in the industrial age and we are always trying to implement them in this new world. The sad part is we complain that this management and money/benefit/perks based incentive stuff does not work! of course it does not work because our environment has changed. We need new ways to motivate, incentivise and engage with each other. The new incentives that work are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. If you are an entrepreneur and want to be successful in what you are creating make sure you have answered the questions to the above 3 incentives.

Autonomy: The desire to be self directed, if there is one thing common with all the entrepreneurs that I have met and the most successful ones, they exude this attribute.

Mastery: The urge to better at stuff. This created Linux, Apache Software Foundation, Wikipedia and every entrepreneur that I know whats to get better at something. They learn music or run marathons or do yoga or get better at managing their own time, help other entrepreneurs etc They seek challenge and mastery

Purpose: More and more organizations are looking for the Transcendent Purpose and he explains that the reason for this is that it attracts the best talent, it is more fun place to work and what is even more interesting is if the purpose gets misaligned due to the profit motive it basically makes people do bad things. Bad customer service, illegal or even criminal activities, crappy products etc. Profit is important but should not be the reason you are doing what you are doing. This goes totally against what was going on in the banking world before the financial crisis. I remember what motivated me to work with Glitnir, it was the emphasis on Renewable Energy and Sustainable Fishing, we did a lot of things that aligned with that strategy. It energized me everyday that I was doing something that actually impacted how energy was created in the world and our customers were not killing the source of fish in the sea. But we kind of lost our way during that journey and  we all know what happened next.