Thought Leader Interview
DANIEL PINK
Tell Us More About Your Background?
Beofre moving to Dubai, I worked in sales for an advertising agency in London. My background is predominantly in Telesales.
Tell Us More About Biz-Group
Biz Group started two decades ago when I first came to Dubai. We are a training and development company, predominantly like your magazine. We also have a team building division and a strategy division that helps small businesses.
Everything we do is about improving performance. For example, how do we improve the performance of teams, the performance of people and the performance of businesses?
What Made You Originally Set Up A Training Business In Dubai?
I originally came here two decades ago to launch a product for a client from the training industry and just fell in love with Dubai in early 1992. Dubai was entrepreneurial, optimistic and sunny. Every time I landed back in the UK it wasn't sunny and the 90's was quite a depressing time for UK business.
So, I looked at an opportunity to start a new business. I didn’t have enough funds to start an advertising agency, so I started a training company which grew from an initial idea and a passion, to what you see today, with 46 people in the company and a very passionate team helping companies improve performance.
How Do You Help Companies?
From a training and development perspective, traditionally we work with an organizationt o find out what their business objectives are, what strategic issues they want to improve and how we can provide training and development solutions tailor made for them, or alternatively implement some of the international programs we have that help get companies from A to B. We also help individuals, whether it’s leaders, front line customer service employees or the general population through professional development. We help companies improve their business results.
Take Us Through A Typical Day As CEO?
Having just read Arianna Huffington’s new book 'Thrive', what I shouldn’t be doing first thing in the morning is checking my iphone to find out what emails have come in overnight from our overseas partners, but I’m still doing that.
Then my day is pretty much mapped out intensively, sometimes I think I’m like a doctor, my PA manages to fill in appointments back to back. If im not in the office, I am in a training room first thing in the morning .
So, a typical day of mine may start with introducing a new concept, like multipliers for senior leaders, followed by running an 8 hour workshop.
But. I don’t think there really is a typical day in my diary, I could either be in the office supporting the team, I could be delivering business keynotes internationally or even delivering a training
74 | TRAINING MAGAZINE MIDDLE EAST Q3 2015
best selling author
For the last 15 years, Daniel Pink’s ideas have been shaking up the business world. He’s written five books – all of them bestsellers – that have been translated into 34 languages and sold more than two million copies worldwide. In 2013, London-based Thinkers 50 named him one of the top 15 business thinkers in the world.
Pink’s team has developed a set of workshops based on his bestselling book, Drive, that are now being delivered across the GCC by leadership training company Conscious Leadership Consulting and Coaching (CLCC). We sat down with him to talk about the science of motivation.
You say there’s gap between what science knows about motivation and what business actually does.
What do you mean?
Businesses use all sorts of motivators. But the mainstay motivator is what social psychologists call a ‘controlling contingent motivator’ or what I call an ‘if-then motivator’ – as in ‘if you do this, then you get that’. Fifty years research in behavioral science tells us that if-then rewards are extremely effective for simple, routine tasks with short time horizons. Human beings love rewards - so dangling them in front of us gets us to focus. That’s helpful if we know precisely what we need to do – if we’re following an algorithm, a recipe, a set of instructions.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is that fifty years of science tells us that if-then rewards are far less effective for creative, complex tasks with long time horizons.
Why is that?
It’s the same reason. If-then rewards get us to focus like a laser beam. But for creative, conceptual work – developing a new product, solving a complex accounting or legal problem, writing an algorithm rather than just following it – being locked in can work against you. For that kind of work, you don’t want to look at things narrowly. You want to look at them expansively.
What’s more, over the long term, if-then rewards deliver less and less motivational energy. If you’re working toward a long-term objective, you need something else to keep you going day in and day out.
Does that mean businesses should get rid of these if-then rewards entirely?
No. Not all. What we have to do is make decisions about how we run organizations based on evidence, not on habit or intuition. So we should use if-then rewards where we know they’re effective – again, for more routine, algorithmic tasks. And we should use a different approach for more creative, conceptual tasks.
Is that balance changing – that is, are workers around the world doing more creative sorts of work and less of the mechanical kind?
Absolutely. Of course, not in every company in every country – but more broadly, there’s a huge shift underway. We’ve certainly seen it in manufacturing. All sorts of manufacturing work can be done faster, better, and more efficiently by machines. But the same thing is happening in white-collar work.
Algorithms and machine learning can now perform many sorts of functions that used to pay pretty well – think basic accounting, basic legal practice, basic financial analysis.
The jobs of the future will require high-concept and high-touch skills – the sorts of things that are hard to outsource and hard to automate.