A weekly post featuring talks by innovative thinkers, sponsored by TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). This is what the internet was made for – to allow challenging ideas to escape from their academic ghettoes and hang out in a place where they can talk to each other.

Here’s one in the eye for all those who justify excessive salaries as a necessary motivation in business. Daniel Pink demonstrates that extrinsic rewards – carrot and stick – increase productivity only when there are fixed rules to be followed. For creative tasks that require originality and imagination, inner motivation produces the best results.  Autonomy, mastery, and purpose produce not only more and better stuff, but happy, invested employees. I’ve known this intuitively for a long time. Nice to see the science behind it.