With the Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. Dan Pink is the best-selling author

of several books, including Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us.

And if you haven't checked out any of Dan's work, well, you should. He does a lot of

things as a writer, but one of them is to look at generally accepted concepts and see if

they hold up to examination. Take, for example, the time-tested theory of business management,

the carrot and stick method.

What the science shows is that these carrot and stick motivators, or what you can think

of as if-then motivators, if Chris, you do this, then I'll give you that, are effective

for relatively simple tasks, for solving simple puzzles, for carrying out a set of rules,

for doing things that aren't all that interesting. The problem is, the science also shows that

if a task requires even a small amount of creativity, conceptual thinking, those kinds

of contingent motivators don't work. They often backfire, they often do harm. And I think

one reason that these carrot and stick motivators persist, I think it's a couple of reasons.

Number one is how we've always done things. So there's the inertia explanation. Another

reason is that they produce results in the short term. I mean, if I say to you, Chris,

I'll give you a thousand bucks for doing something. I got your attention.

Yes. Yes. Right. Whatever it is, the answer is yes.

You got it. You know, you respond. And so you look about that in organizations, if I say

to an organization, if I'm ahead of a team, and I say, all right, team, we need to be more

innovative. So what I'm going to do to foster innovation, whoever comes up with a cool

breakthrough idea, I'm going to give $5,000. You're going to get activity. People will

respond to that. The science is pretty clear that they're not going to do anything that

...