Sunday Posts

I am reading DRIVE , Daniel Pink's usually interesting take on motivation and what makes people tick. I have come across the key ideas of this book before, primarily through Pink's presentation at the TED, which I found extremely interesting and put on this blog earlier. [ See it here ] The key idea, to repeat, is that there is a limit to extrinsic, material, incentives for work. Most managers indeed operate with an extreme, behaviourist assumption about why people work. Because they get paid, simple, is an extraordinarily naive but extraordinarily common answer. And, accordingly, they believe that the promise of higher pay, extra pay, incentives, is what makes people go that extra mile sometimes required by the business. WRONG, says Dan Pink, in this book. I completely agree. Psychological theories, elegantly presented in the book, show that extrinsic motivators, like money, does work, but only in a limited context, only for activities which are routine (making 40...

Aldous Huxley's point was that while Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can not serve truth very well. Life's issues are often so complex that they need nuanced, detailed understanding. Executive Summaries are often too reductive, too naive, and our reliance on those often lead to lack of false understanding. Maslow's model, I shall argue, is one of those neat, well argued models which may lead to wrong conclusions. For the uninitiated, Maslow's model is insightful, breaking down human needs in five neat blocks - Physiological Needs, Safety Needs, Social Needs, Esteem Needs and Need for Self-Actualization - stacked up in a pyramid shape. Everything about it is useful and understandable: The categories seem clear and distinct, there is a philosophical implication of a man's journey to be a better individual and stages are quite clear. It is one simple model which tells a lot. The model was deservedly successful, becoming gospel truth among managers of men and m...

Viktor Frankl defends idealism, why we must believe in others to be what they should be, rather than what they are. Deeply moving and inspiring, this comes as a gift in the middle of my despair. I am struggling with my innate idealism, something I inherited and grown up to believe, in the face of the usual mid-life crisis, a point where I start thinking where I am going and how much I have lost being a dreamer and not a realist. However, here is a man who has seen it all, who has seen the moral bankruptcy of incomparable magnitude, and yet kept his faith and believed in the ultimate goodness of mankind and the meaning of life.