Management, Motivation, and Mayhem

Take a minute and start to think like a manager. A real pointy-hared-boss. Got it? Good.

Now, imagine that I told you to stop giving bonuses for good performance, don't require people to be in the office... Ever. Cancel all meetings, and make any that absolutely MUST happen be optional. Give your employees payed time to work on whatever they want to work on, with no promise of return for the company. Make it a rule that you have to take a full hour lunch out of the office. And finally, make the only metric that the company tracks for an employee their deliveries vs dead-lines.

You would tell me I was crazy, right?

Now, take a minute to put yourself into the head of an employee. Now, re-read those points above. Feels pretty good, right?

There have been actual studies performed that show that the kind of management I listed above greatly improves efficiency and effectiveness of workers, increase company value, and
makes everyone (even the managers) happier, healthier, and more productive. More-over, there have been real-life companies that have used this method. You may have heard of Google.

Why is it? Why does almost every company in the developed world runs themselves using carrots on sticks, and fear of layoffs to manage their employees, when all the science says that
it doesn't work, and what does work is the thing that everyone wishes their boss would let them do? Why do companies keep a strangle-hold on out-dated methodologies when the work
that we do, the people that we work with, and the atmosphere we enjoy has fundamentally changed in the last 100 years?

People are essentially hunters. It's built into our DNA to chase after things, keep a sense of purpose throughout the day, have large amounts of dopamine and serotonin drop into
our brains when we get what we are aiming for, to compete, to track, to kill. In the modern world, however, we don't get to hunt. Instead, we get to sit under florescent lights for hours and hours on end, tapping out patterns of romantic and Arabic symbols on an over-priced piece of plastic and silicon, and then go home and simulate the excitement and enjoyment of success with a beer.

Yay.

But you can't beat genetics. We try all the time, and simply fail. Even in basic physical activities: Champion swimmers are Swedes and Germanic, while champion runners are Kenyan. It's not an accident; It's because of the lighter bones, and higher muscle-density respectively. It's genetics. We have an almost unstoppable drive to have sex simply because it feels good. It's because we are driven to that feeling of "goodness" that keeps the species from dying out.

We are driven to the hunt, the chase, the capture, the kill. Only, we've changed what we are chasing after and in the modern world we have unparalleled freedom to pick what it is that we want to chase. Until we go to work.

Imagine what it might be like at work for you to take some time to pick a thing that you want to track and chase (a new project, a pickup-game of basketball, etc) and went for it. And at the end of the day, not only did you make progress on it, but everyone around you congratulated you on it, and your boss handed you some cash. That's real success. That's what our DNA is telling us to go for in this modern world, and yet almost every company in every industry tries to run away from that in the hopes that.... What? That we will be more productive as we fight every instinct that humans have left?

I could go on and on, pontificate to the end of time on the merits and demerits of this theory; examples of its success and failure. But I won't. All I will say is this: Are you happy? Do you think you would be more-so if your office looked more like the scenario above?

What is the economy to you? What does it mean to support "fun, cool things", and get support for doing "fun, cool things"?

Just a thought....