Quotable:
The typical industrial-era organization is like a battleship. Hundreds or
thousands of people onboard, and most of them are essential--but most of them
aren't actually directly responsible for the work that we hired the battleship
to do. Without the fuel people, the navigation team, the folks in the med corps
and on and on, it doesn't work.
The battleship can go far, with impact, and change the course of history.
While it has exactly one captain, it's the synchronized work of more than a
million people (when you think about all the machinists and support folks back
home) and it works. It does what we ask it to do.
One more thing about the people on the battleship: just about everyone has a
punchlist, an itemized inventory of what they need to get done. And many of
them are rewarded for doing that set of tasks more efficiently, more elegantly
and with better quality than expected. Great people means the system works even
better, but it's designed to survive with people who are merely good at what
they do.
The typical professional services company, on the other hand, is a lot like
a blueberry pancake. While there's an essential support team, the firm is all
about blueberries working in parallel. Each blueberry can work independently,
and sometimes they even work on projects that might have conflicting outcomes
or views of the world. I don't care how many people report to you. I care about
how connected and how brave you are.
As the firm gets bigger, it doesn't get thicker. You don't make a better
pancake by making a thicker one. You make a better pancake by hiring ever
better blueberries.
And, as you've guessed, most of the blueberries don't know exactly what
they'll be doing in six weeks, and most don't work from a manual about the
industry's best practices on how to do what they do. It's hard to measure
blueberries, but a talented and motivated one can also change the world.
Apple is now a battleship. Most of the tens of thousands of people who work
there have a line job, selling, building, fixing or interacting. Only a few are
dreaming up something that you can't even imagine.
Your favorite record label, though, ought to be a blueberry pancake. Each
musical group is mostly alone, figuring out something that just might work. The
goal isn't to lock and repeat and scale. It's to go wide and stay interesting.
Great record labels have both better blueberries and the support staff to
launch them into the world.
I remember the day we transformed Yoyodyne from a pancake to a battleship.
We hired 17 salespeople in 24 hours (increasing the size of the company by 25%)
and for the first time, I didn't know every employee well. People had their
orders, and we were ready to scale.
If you want to make your battleship work better, be really clear about
defining the mission, the tactics, the chain of command and most of all,
precisely what you measure from each person on the team.
Your pancake, on the other hand, gives up swing weight and firepower and
instead gets flexibility and the possiblity of non-fatal failure (and
game-changing magic).
Both work. The problem kicks in when a successful pancake thinks its future
is in the battleship business. Or when battleships are asked to dance.
"Motivation theory is not synonymous with behavior theory. The motivations are only one class of determinants of behavior. While behavior is almost always motivated, it is also almost always biologically, culturally and situationally determined as well." (Maslow, 1943)
However, financial extrinsic rewards in the form of salary increases were viewed to have a great positive effect (ibid) This led to the conclusion of that "organizations will reap the greatest benefits by providing freedom and autonomy to pursue an intrinsically rewarding career, while simultaneously providing financial security and stability" (Chen, Ford and Farris, 1999, p. 53)
Kohn (1993) defines organisational incentives as extrinsic motivators, and suggest rewards to be bribes that work only for temporary compliance.
Kohn (1993) suggests rewards to hurt the management-subordinate relationship. This is expressed through flattery, concealing of problems and discourage of risk taking by the subordinate. Furthermore, some subordinates express a need to show that they are more competent than the one giving the rewards. Kohn (1993) concludes that rewards do motivate people, but it only motivates people to pursue rewards. Further, contingent payment system tends to undermine intrinsic motivation. Instead focus should be on intrinsic incentives such as job design, useful feedback, social support and room for self-determination.
Advertising Appeals and Executions
