Friday, May 14, 2010
Incentives and Motivation
Daniel Pink is the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It's an excellent book and I recommend it. The above clip is a summary of some of the book's findings and obviously has repercussions for creative fields like animation. It also ties into the bottom-up vs. top-down aspects of comics and animation that I mentioned in the addendum to my post about TCAF and Animation.
(If the text is too small to read on your screen, you can either hit the fullscreen button at the bottom right of the video, or you can watch the video on YouTube here. And doesn't this presentation beat the heck out of Powerpoint?)
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11 comments:
Best post I have seen in a long time. Anywhere!
Is the postee agreeing with everything in that video?
Please comment
I found the ideas interesting, even thought they were proven to a certain degree if you have ever been in a freelance situation where animators are paid by the piece. Those who go for the money incentive will produce a lot of garbage that will be barely passable. In some cases, where the footage was so high that producers were reluctant to give the animator any revisions. Those who applied themselves and did good work produced less and were paid less.
It's just an example, but I thought what the fil advanced made a lot of sense and the execution was very entertaining.
I hope this helps more than my rougher previous post.
While I find Daniel Pink's lecture and theory quite interesting, I suspect that what many of us who watch this video are responding to more emotionally is the brilliant cartoon work that accompanies it. Yet, sadly and ironically, the cartoonist is not sharing in any glory, his identity unknown. Once again the writer gets all the attention while the artist toils away in obscurity.
And what are your thoughts on how this motivation theory affects student learning for creative stuff like animation?
It was a good video, I enjoyed it!
Another video by this fellow was featured on Scott McCloud's blog the other day and McCloud was lamenting the same thing about giving the cartoonist credit. The cartoonist is Andrew Park who I believe is the director at Cognitive Media. And I agree! Excellent cartooning!
Mark: Thanks for posting the link. His points really resonate.
Hey Nick, thanks for the info on cartoonist, Andrew Park. I found his creative illustrating of the lecture points to be just mesmerizing! By the way, Nick, I was looking to say hello to you last week at TCAF, but you seemed to be constantly surrounded by admiring fans and I didn't want to butt in. I hope you sold a bunch of your books!
Maybe this is why Eastern Bloc animators were able to produce better work... low pay, but great job stability, (ironically) less interference from above, and a strong sense of purpose (giving children what they need, rather than necessarily what they want).
An odd notion of what is and isn't socialism here. Socialism is ownership of the means of production by the community as a whole, and administration of those means for some notion of the benefit of that community. Under private ownership of those means, holders are free to use whatever incentive system they want; meanwhile, socialism has often attempted to use meritocratic rewards. And the Federal Reserve system represent the means whereby the issuance of money is controlled by the state, ostensibly for the general welfare; indeed it represents a sort of socialism (albeït one to which many socialists would object).
Perhaps more importantly, Pink has confused the general notion of profit with the special case of pecuniary profit. While the mainstream of economic theory has assumed that firms are pecuniary profit maximizers, economists across most schools of thought have doubted that individuals can be well-modelled as such, which is exactly why economists were testing such a simplification.
Man, I'll think I'll buy that book
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