Let me give you two examples of companies that have
explicitly attempted to move to the, to the right side.
To the, towards, tapping much more into intrinsic drivers of motivation.
One is an American software company called TopCoder.
Many of you will not have heard of TopCoder.
It is it's a mid-sized company and
it's deliberately built on a very unusual set of principles.
Founded by a chap called Jack Hughes.
He had the bright idea that he didn't actually have to employ developers.
He didn't have to put people on his payroll,
as software developers because of a thousands of people around the world
who are happy to develop software essentially for
free, when they work in these so called open source software movements like Linux.
So he said to himself,
what is it that motivates people to join one of these software communities?
Well, they're clearly not doing it for the money.
What they're doing it for is the need for belonging.
Perhaps to be part of a community.
And particularly for the need for what we can call recognition.
They want, because most of them actually are, you know, typically young males.
They're very competitive.
Lots of testosterone.
They like to compete.
They like to joust.
They like to win.
A lot of them are gamers.
And what he figured out was that he could tap into that desire for recognition and
for victory by creating a series of tournaments, for developing software.
So rather than the traditional model which is where you have an army of
software developers and you break down the, the, the programming job into
a bunch of components, and you get people to develop the pieces of it.
He said to himself, what we need to do instead is to
break the software challenge into components, but then to put each of
those components out on a website as a miniature tournament or a competition.
And he would create these tournaments, where perhaps it would over the next week
or two, he would say, we want teams of people to compete to create
the perfect code, the best code possible to solve this particular challenge.
And we will give a prize to the team that comes up with the best code.