#incentivisation

The beeb on Glass:

To quote Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital, these technologies will evolve into “a digital butler… [it] recognises callers, disturbs you when appropriate, and may even tell a white lie on your behalf. The same agent is well trained in timing, versed in finding the opportune moments, and respectful of idiosyncrasies.”

The thing is that for this to be true, the butler has to be yours, not Google’s.

How do we get a team to work and perform?

First of all, we must work out what kind of team we have:

Is it pooled: split by task?

Is it sequential: where the team relies on every member to do a different bit? this team will get held up by the slowest person 

Is it reciprocal: where everyone helps out but there is one hero in the team who brings it all together? (this is a common structure)

Or is it networked: where every member adds to the output? great in theory, rarely happens in practice

Once we've worked that out - we then need to think about how to incentivise them.

Sales people tend to want money & commission to drive them on.  Accountants tend to want titles.

In my mind, this is all about our place in society.  We want to fit in and be better.  Money is a good comparable as we can compare it across jobs and functions (it's also quite useful when we want to buy stuff!).  Titles are great within an organisation but not so great to compare across industries.  An MD of a small start up is not the same as one of a FTSE 100 company.