SMUG Social Media University Global

What motivates you?

I’ve recently been listening to a compelling audiobook about motivation, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which author Daniel Pink says is about “the mismatch between what science knows, and what business does.”

Pink calls for a “new operating system” for business that focuses not on the extrinsic “carrot and stick” incentives, but on factors that contribute to intrinsic motivation. Carrots and sticks, or “if/then” rewards, not only don’t work (in most circumstances): they’re usually harmful and counterproductive, particularly for non-routine work.

Pink says the three key elements of what he calls “Motivation 3.0” are:

Autonomy – giving employees control over their tasks, time, team and technique.
Mastery – Becoming better at something that matters. Carrots and sticks can produce compliance, but only engagement can produce mastery.
Purpose – “Humans by nature seek purpose, a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional businesses have long considered purpose ornamental: a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn’t get in the way of the important things.”

When I tweeted about reading this book, my friend Lucien Engelen (@Zorg20) tweeted back a link to a post he had done for the TEDxMaastricht blog that included a video of Dan Pink from the TED Global 2009 conference. I’ve embedded that video below, because it provides a good introduction to Pink’s ideas. I hope it gives you enough of a taste that you’ll get the book, either via audio (on Audible) or in printed form.

In a future post I will discuss how social media can help cultivate intrinsic motivation, or what Pink calls “Type I” behavior. Meanwhile, you can get his book on Amazon. I highly recommend it.

Update: Wow! Check out this video that was mentioned in the comments below. Fantastic summary/visualization of Drive!

9 Observations from 3 Days in Paris

These are some things that struck me while in Paris last week. They’re not necessarily profound, but just some observations of a first-time visitor.

1. Subway maps are universal and require no translation. Having been to Washington, D. C. and New York a few times, and having visited the Netherlands and London last year, my visit to Paris has convinced me that there is really only one way to do a subway map.

The labels on the stations will be in different languages, but the basic scheme is always the same. So even if you don’t speak a bit of the language, you can just watch the signs at the subway or train stops and determine whether the stop you’re arriving at was what you were expecting. I got on a train one going the wrong way on Wednesday, but it was simple to just hop off and head back in the other direction. And speaking of subways…

2. You need to open the doors manually on the Parisian subways. Unlike every other city I’ve visited, the doors don’t open automatically at each stop. There’s a lever to flip or a button to push. I think I only saw one train with automatic doors in three days.

3. Live musical entertainment on the subway is a regular occurrence. Usually it’s a guy with an accordion, with or without an amplifier. These guys jump on the train, say something in French, and start playing. The first one I saw was accompanied by a tambourine-toting young lady, who circulated the car during the third song with a cup for donations. Other accordionists worked alone.

I also saw a bigger band of musicians that had set up in one of the metro stations, and on Friday night a saxophone player surprised us on the #12 to Mairie D’Issy with a medley that ended with a Stevie Wonder number. Here are some samples:

4. I saw the coolest orange juice squeezer at the hotel. Here’s some video of it:

My friend Lucien (@Zorg20) tells me these are really common in Europe. But he says most of the time they don’t let customers do the squeezing. This was an invention worthy of Caractacus Potts, from one of my favorite movies of all time.

5. Speaking of movies, I watched Invictus on the return flight. What an inspiring film! The critics say it’s accurate. Highly recommended.

6. The Louvre is immense, but the Mona Lisa is really small. It was neat to see the Mona Lisa, but you can’t get very close, and it’s behind a glass case. Which means that instead of seeing the painting you mainly see the reflection of the crowd.

7. The Eiffel Tower in Paris isn’t just twice as big as the one in Las Vegas. It’s way more than twice as cool. It was a little unnerving being met by three soldiers in berets with automatic weapons drawn as I came to the back side of the tower, but it is quite an amazing structure.

8. The Arc de Triomphe seems like the Washington Monument in that it took a while to complete. Napoleon got it started in 1806, but it wasn’t finished until 1836. At least that’s what Wikipedia says, so it has to be true, right?

9. The Cathedral of Notre Dame also was amazing. I think creating the wooden miniature model would have been difficult enough. I can’t imagine the complexity of the full-scale construction of marble.

Here’s video of my whirlwind tour of Paris landmarks:

As I said, these aren’t particularly profound observations and they aren’t exhaustive, but they give a bit of practical Parisian flavor. You can see some of my photos from the trip on Facebook.

Blogging from 30,000 Feet

As I’m on my Delta flight from Newark to Minneapolis, the second-to-last leg of my return from Paris, I decided to give in-flight wifi a try. It’s kind of cool to be able to track our flight progress as well: right now we’re at about 36,000 feet (according to the captain), and according to the flight tracker we’re going to be just south of Binghamton, NY fairly soon.

I think I might give Lisa a little surprise and Skype her from the sky.

Stay tuned…

Update: Skype didn’t work so well with airline wifi, at least on Delta. I could kind of hear Lisa’s voice, but it was really distorted. I just tried to call her cell. Now I will maybe try to upload some photos to Facebook.

Always continuing in a spirit of research and exploration. That’s what you would expect from your Chancellor, right?

Twitter ROI

This is one of those “your mileage may vary” cases, but it also illustrates Thesis 18: As I Approaches 0, ROI approaches infinity.

It also demonstrates something I learned back in my basketball days: you can’t score if you don’t shoot.

I had the pleasure of attending TEDxTC on May 5 at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. The theme was, “The Extraordinary Capacity of our Youth.” Lacking the requisite $6,000 admission fee, I had never attended the original TED conference. I didn’t really know how the local events worked, and it was interesting that TED lends its brand to local organizers, who add the “x(CITYNAME)” tag. In this case there were a couple of youthful musical performers and three local speakers, and in between were interspersed a couple of TED Talks to bring a taste of the TED event to the local venue.

It was ironic to me that one of the videos the organizers showed was a talk by Sir Ken Robinson, which I had previously embedded here on SMUG and to which I refer in almost every one of my presentations (it’s well worth watching again):

This leads to the Twitter ROI part of the story. One of the event sponsors, Worrell Design (@WorrellDesign) held a contest asking attendees to tweet their favorite speaker quotes. I tweeted a few of them to the #TEDxTC tag, but my favorite (you can see at the 5:40 mark in the video above) was:

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original”

Ironically, when I tweeted it I think I got it wrong. I believe I tweeted something like:

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never be creative” #TEDxTC @Worrell

But, I tweeted it, and even though I should have used @WorrellDesign instead of @Worrell, my tweet was allowed into the contest, made the finals, and eventually was named the winner.

My prize arrived by mail on Thursday, courtesy of Worrell. It was a portable, 500GB USB-powered hard drive. Perfect for taking big video files on the road. See pictures in the SMUG Student Union on Facebook.

It’s just one of the neat things that has resulted from me getting involved in Twitter. If you’d like to start exploring Twitter, check out the SMUG Twitter Curriculum, and either start working through the courses in numerical order, or go right to Twitter 152: Tweetcamp III for a good overview.