Monday, January 27, 2003

Motivation   (Inc. Magazine) Unfortunately, motivating people is far from an exact science. There's no secret formula, no set calculation, no work sheet to fill out. In fact, motivation can be as individual as the employees who work for you. One employee may be motivated only by money. Another may appreciate personal recognition for a job well done. Still another may work harder if she has equity in the business. But you can boil down employee motivation to one basic ideal -- finding out what your employees want and finding a way to give it to them or to enable them to earn it. Here we've gathered some of the best and most interesting motivational techniques used by successful entrepreneurs. We hope they'll motivate you, too.   ("Motivating Employees", Inc.com) Lots of links here under the following headings: Corporate Culture as Motivation, Practical Perks, Recognition, Noncash Incentives, Motivation by Compensation, Further Reading. Looks useful if you're in the business business. Thanks to the elearningpost website for the pointer) 11:27:24 AM    comment [] The Culture of Ideas   (Nicholas Negroponte) One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people's walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo. A very heterogeneous culture, by contrast, breeds innovation by virtue of its people, who look at everything from different viewpoints. America, the so-called melting pot, is seen by many as having no culture (with either a capital C or a lowercase c). In rankings of students in industrial countries, U.S. high school students come across as average, at best, in reading, mathematics, and science. And unfortunately, the nation is unrivaled in gun-related crimes among young people. Yet, looking back over the past century, the United States has accounted for about a third of all Nobel prizes and has produced an unrivaled outpouring of innovations-from factory automation to the integrated circuit and gene splicing-that are the backbone of worldwide economic growth. I see two reasons for this. One is that we do not stigmatize those who have tried and been unsuccessful. In fact, many venture capitalists are more, not less, likely to invest in somebody who has failed with an earlier startup than in someone who is launching his or her first company. The real disappointment is when people do not learn from their mistakes. The other reason is that we are uniquely willing to listen to our young. In many cultures, age carries too much weight. Experience is rewarded over imagination, and respect can be too deferential. In some cultures, people are given jobs on the basis of age, creating a sedentary environment stifling to the young. Remember the saying "Children are to be seen and not heard"? Well, look at the economic growth created by such "children" as Bill Gates and Michael Dell, to name just two. ("Creating a Culture of Ideas", Technology Review, February 2003) 10:33:07 AM    comment [] Copyright and CopyWrong   (The Economist) Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving creators and publishers a short-term incentive to disseminate their work. Over the past 50 years, as a result of heavy lobbying by content industries, copyright has grown to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas, leaving thousands of old movies, records and books languishing behind a legal barrier. Starting from scratch today, no rational, disinterested lawmaker would agree to copyrights that extend to 70 years after an author's death, now the norm in the developed world. Digital technologies are not only making it easier to copy all sorts of works, but also sharply reducing the costs of creating or distributing them, and so also reducing the required incentives. The flood of free content on the internet has shown that most creators do not need incentives that stretch across generations. To reward those who can attract a paying audience, and the firms that support them, much shorter copyrights would be enough. The 14-year term of the original 18th-century British and American copyright laws, renewable once, might be a good place to start. However, to provide any incentive at all, more limited copyrights would have to be enforceable, and in the digital age this would mean giving content industries much of the legal backing which they are seeking for copy-protection technologies. Many cyber activists would loathe this idea. But if copyright is to continue to work at all, it is necessary. And in exchange for a vast expansion of the public domain, such a concession would clearly be in the interests of consumers. ("A Radical Rethink", The Economist, 01/23/03) 9:37:05 AM    comment []

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