Notes from my presentation from our users' conference, CONNECT 2012. For a copy of these PowerPoint note pages visit http://hrhiring.wordpress.com/

1. Please note, if you are reading these notes, and/or you attended my presentation. I travel light. That’s to say give me
enough warning and purchase a plane ticket, decent hotel room and a steak dinner—expenses, and I’d be happy to travel
about anywhere for about any size audience, so contact me in the new amazing Tyler Community, or via email
rex.castle@tylertech.com. “Motivation!” is one presentation we do in the non‐software realm. My coworker Bryan
Thompson has some exceptional stuff, I do a deal on hiring and a deal on presentation (Why Not WOW!), and other stuff
related to Human Resources, management and leadership. So, if Bryan or I can help…holler (that’s West Texan for contact
us). Contact our President, Brett Cate, if you want to avoid us having to “ask permission.” Request us and tell him “we’ll
pay expenses.” I bet we’ll be there shortly.
Also please note, the following notes will not be exact. They’re notes I wrote and then I did the presentation. Sometimes
the notes and the presentation don’t exactly mesh, but I didn’t go back and mesh them.
How many of you have a Facebook account?
How many of you actually spend some time with your Facebook or twitter account?
Why?
How many of you play a musical instrument?
Why?
Why did you decide to come to this?
What drove you?
More importantly, what drives you?
By a show hands how many times have you ever been asked what motivates you?
Now as a rhetorical question you can answer to yourself, how many times have you ever asked a subordinate?
Motivation comes from the Latin word meaning to move, stir, set in motion, shake or remove.
Some of you have been playing with the puzzles on the tables in front of you. Some have probably wondered “what is this
all about?”
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2. Harry Harlow was a professor in the 1940’s. He did experiments on rhesus monkeys. Most of these
experiments today would be thought of as cruel. He’d do things like take new born monkeys’ from their
moms and evaluate not only the significant stress he’d place on the mom monkey, but the infant’s tragic
reactions.
One of the experiments he conducted, however, was less barbaric and more valuable. He wanted to evaluate
learning, so he placed the puzzle displayed on the screen, something akin to the ones some of you have been
fiddling with, in a cage with his monkeys.
To the researchers’ surprise almost immediately the monkeys started playing with the thing and to the
researchers’ additional surprise they figured out the puzzle without being prodded.
In a couple of weeks when Harlow was to run his “how do primates learn experiment,” the experiment was
ruined as the monkeys were dissecting the puzzle now very quickly, two‐thirds in less than a minute. But
Harlow now had a different question: “Why?”
“Why, without prodding, without reward, without even quiet praise did these monkeys choose to play with
this puzzle?” At the time we thought there were two motivators of behavior: biologic and carrot/stick.
And the monkeys played with them with focus, determination and what the researchers thought looked like
joy. Huh?
And then Harlow added rewards and performance actually went down. Significantly. Why? Because for a
monkey this puzzle was a creative, problem‐solving, learning task.
Harlow realized he had discovered a third driver: biologic; extrinsic and now intrinsic motivation, but his ideas
were so radical they were scoffed at and he sort of set his results aside.
But, Rex, we’re not rhesus monkeys. We won’t change our behavior without a biologic need or a carrot or a
stick.
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3. Perhaps we can say we’re not rhesus monkeys. We can argue “oh, we’re only motivated for biologic reasons.
Like if I sucked the oxygen out of this room most of us wouldn’t sit here and think “well, this is mildly
uncomfortable;” we’d seek oxygen. If we’re hungry we’d seek…what?
Food. Good.
And we can argue we must always be rewarded or punished to do something. But then someone turns a
stairway into a piano and the majority of us, the majority who used to take the escalator, take the stairs.
We can further argue, and I state this in this way because that’s the way the guys in the white coats and
pocket protectors state this stuff.
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4. that the carrot we’re offering is the joy of music, but if you listened closely this was the joy of noise as there
was limited music being offered.
People tromped up the stairs to make noise and have fun.
Those are both carrots, but their carrots that are internal to each of us and not something that is controlled
externally except where we can manipulate an environment and make that environment accepting of joy and
fun.
And, as this slide indicates, the people in the white lab coats with the pocket protector have done these
experiments over and over and over again and the results have been the same. We’ll talk about that more in
a minute.
But let’s look at why this joy and fun thing is so incredibly important and potentially valuable.
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5. In the first half of 2007 the number of highly disengaged employees was 1 in 10; by the
second quarter 2010 that number was 1 in 5. The percent of disengaged has doubled in 3
years.
If these trends continue, by third quarter 2012, that number will be 1 in 4. By fourth
quarter 2016, 1 in 3.
Although the trend is sporadic from quarter‐to‐quarter, the more highly disengaged
employees we have in our workforce the more disengagement they will produce. The
trend, therefore, is accelerating.
So we have both ends of the spectrum, the rhesus monkeys (and some of you) and their
intrinsic motivation and this group of higher order primates who are becoming
progressively more disengaged. Let’s talk about what motivates us and what we need to do
in our organizations to perhaps reverse this disastrous trend of disengagement.
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6. In 1989 I began work in HR at Coca‐Cola and was immediately charged with creating incentive
programs and motivating people.
My GM was questioning me about our route guys who were on an incentive plan, go figure. They
would be on this incentive plan and then a few years later the incentive appeared to quit working.
He wanted me to investigate the “why” behind this quit working, which I did.
Here’s what I found.
A route guy would grow his route by increasing sales until his personal compensation reached
around $45K at which time the company would say “to make $45K, your route must be too big and
our customers, therefore, are probably suffering” and then we’d cut the route back to where the
route driver was making $32K and give the excess to another newer driver.
Then the route guy would build his route to around $45K and we’d cut him or her, occasionally,
back to $32K and he or she would rebuild his or her route to $42,500 and there it would sit. “Why
wasn’t the route person growing the route any longer?”
In this instance we had a demotivating system. The first, and probably most important
recommendation I would make, is to look at your systems, your processes, your rules and make
sure you don’t have one of these systems demotivating some employees or your entire workforce.
Let’s look now at what motivates us and why.
I hired Les K…”I want to do something spectacular.”
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7. I want to share with you some science. The information I’m about to share with you
regarding motivation is science. We can argue with the science, but if we run the same
experiments again and again and come to the same results, we probably at some point
need to start thinking “Hey, maybe this isn’t so much theory any longer.”
But before I share with you the science of motivation let me share with you another thing
we’ve learned about our brains and how they work. I want you to think about the last time
you cradled a baby in your arms.
Close your eyes for a moment. Think about it.
As you remember cradling a baby, looking into her eyes, watching her face, think about it.
You’re sort of gently rocking the baby. Are you cradling her body against your right or left
arm. Is her head resting in the crook of your right or left elbow?
How many of you are right handed?
90% of us will cradle a baby in our left arm, but 90% of us are right handed. Why is it the
majority of us, when handed the most valuable thing we will probably ever hold, stick her
in our non‐dominate, clumsy arm?
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8. Firefox is a web browser.
Linux is a web server application.
Apache is a corporate web server application.
Each is a programming marvel. They’re some of the best applications out there, rivaling any
of their competitors in terms of usability and in terms of features.
Who can tell me what all three separate entities have in common?
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9. What the preceding have in common is they’re open source products meaning anyone can use
them and they’re, for all intents and purposes, free. Linux and Apache do have paid staff and they
do have an income stream, so I don’t want to stand up here and say “they never cost anything.” At
the same time
Firefox has 150 million users.
Linux is on 1 in 4 corporate computer servers.
Apache owns 52% of the corporate web server software market.
As I said these are outstanding products; they compete on equal footing with a host of for‐profit
providers.
How is it that a company, an entity really, can produce something like Firefox, Linux, or Apache and
do it with a lot of part‐time, borrowed talent?
Many people, around the globe, who are working on this, are volunteers and believe in giving stuff
like this away.
They work for nothing and charge nothing for their work and then like to give it away. The internet
is the most outstanding example of this.
That’s nuts. Isn’t it?
Lauri, with an “A,” Travis is the person responsible for Tyler Community…Everything to Lauri is
Community. Erin and “wear your hair thicker” and telling Lauri and her suggesting “Community” as
a solution.
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10. MIT professor Karen Lakhani and Boston Consulting Group consultant Bob Wolf surveyed
684 open‐source developers, mostly in North America and Europe, about why they
participated in these projects.
They uncovered a range of motives, but they found “that enjoyment‐based intrinsic
motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the
strongest and most pervasive driver.”
A large majority of programmers, the researchers discovered, reported that they frequently
reached the state of optimal challenge called “flow.”
Lindsey Ring oversees our Content area, our help files, release notes and other
documentation. It’s her passion. I don’t have to prod her, or push her; sometimes I have to
rein her in. It’s a lot easier to rein someone in than it is to push someone.
Tell me what do research studies like this suggest for our organizations?
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11. What, too, is interesting about rewards is they lose their effectiveness. They can provide a
boost, similar to caffeine, but they wear off. And, worse, can reduce a person’s longer‐term
motivation to continue the activity.
Have any of you ever had the experience of someone not doing something because “it’s
not my job.” At coke, which is probably one of the most incentivized environments I’ve ever
seen, we had an incentive for people not to use their sick leave. What this created, in some
cases, was we had the walking dead coming to work and infecting everyone else.
My question is did we incent the behavior we were wanting?
I was in Abilene one day with my Director of Safety, Pete. We had been discussing, for a
long time, how we could go about getting our route people to better police the cabs of
their trucks because you had to stand back when they opened the doors. There was no
telling what would come spilling out, or running out for that matter.
A Pepsi guy pulled his truck into a 7‐Eleven in front of us. Pete said “you want to see
something cool?”
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12. In this instance was the Pepsi guy being motivated by a carrot or a stick?
Slipping back on our white lab coats we can answer the question by saying he was being
motivated by the carrot of keeping his job for doing his job;
However, we can also answer the question by saying he was being motivated by the stick of
the threat of losing his job.
Pete and I saw an initially befuddled young man when we asked the question “why is your
cab so clean?”
The question was so foreign to him, he was initially confused. But then he became very
prideful of the state of the cab of his truck. He was focused and determined to keep that
cab clean. He seemed to take joy not only in our question, but in the status it brought him
and the act of having a spotlessly clean cab.
Like Harlow’s rhesus monkey, this delivery man seemed to be motivated by something
other than what we think of as traditional motivations. In the meantime our managers at
Coke kept trying to figure out ways to incent our guys to clean the cabs of their trucks.
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13. There’s a big movement out there that is not yet recognized as a movement. One reason
could be that traditional businesses are profit maximizers—which square perfectly with
Motivation 2.0—carrots and sticks. These new entities are purpose maximizers—which are
unsuited to this older operating system because they flout its very principles.
Only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic (rule/formula driven) work,
while 70 percent comes from heuristic (stimulating, investigative, learning) work. The
reason? Routine work, algorithmic work, can be outsourced or automated; heuristic work,
artistic, empathic (the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the
feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another), non‐routine, generally cannot.
What’s most interesting is research such as Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile have
found that external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely
for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones. “Intrinsic motivation is
conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity,”
Amabile.
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14. People are seeking Mastery, Autonomy, & Purpose.
Mastery: command or grasp, as of a subject
Autonomy: independence or freedom, self‐governed, as of the will or one's actions
Purpose: the reason for which we exist, or do, or make the things we do
I want to leave you with a story…
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15. A few months ago I hired a guy. His name is Mark. I gave him our LMS, our online Training
Center. He’s brilliant in terms of the stuff he’s creating for this paid subscription service. In a
few years I can see the quality of our content being far beyond anything any of our
competitors are even dreaming of.
We would like to sell this online Training Center to more of our clients. So, of course we’re
looking for an incentive plan for Mark. He’s in charge, we incent his behavior and he makes
more money and we make more money.
I asked Mark what would incent him. I sat down with him, explained what we are trying to
do.
Mark paused for a moment. “You know Rex,” he began, “I’ll always take more money. So if
this incentive stuff is the way to get there I’ll do that.”
“But,” I said.
“But,” Mark repeated. “I want to do something spectacular.”
“I want to do something spectacular.” As Daniel Pink suggests in the preceding video, my
job is to take money off the table, remove any obstacles, and be witness to this spectacular.
My only regret is it will take some time.
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16. At the beginning of our time together today I asked you a number of questions. All were
focused on the why? Now, I’d like to ask you another question. Why am I here? Why am I
doing this? I oversee Human Resources and I oversee Interactive Content, two areas that
used to have two separate managers. I have a full‐time job. This is not in my job
description. Why?
That’s the question you need to be able to answer for the people performing their work at
a most amazing level, and if you have people who are not performing day‐in and day‐out at
this level, the question we need to ask is “why not?”
I want to thank you all for your valuable time. I very much appreciate you coming to listen
to my thoughts. If I can ever be of assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact me through
the new Tyler Community or via email.
Right now, if anyone has questions, I’d be happy to try and answer them.
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