Dan Pink speaking at this year’s TED Global in Oxford.

He takes us through a wealth of evidence – built up over four decades – which demonstrates that financial incentives tend to focus the mind and as such only tend to be productive on left-brain tasks, i.e. “problems with a clear set of rules and a single solution.”

In contrast, when financial incentives are offered to people to solve more right-brain tasks – those that are more conceptual in nature and require greater use of cognitive power – the incentives actually make the problem harder to solve because they narrow the focus when the solution tends to be on the periphery and so the solver needs to be thinking more holistically and laterally.

The issue, says Pink, is that we’ve known about these flawed links between problem-solving and financial incentives for decades, and yet despite that they endure. And more and more of the work we do is shifting to right-brain thinking as we delegate the routine, rule-based stuff to computers and outsourcing agents.

The solution: offer incentives based on intrinsic motivators. Specifically, autonomy (e.g. Google’s 20% time), mastery, and purpose.

John Kearon, Chief Juicer at BrainJuicer, explains how he is turning research on its head by shifting the focus from asking people to explain their own behaviour, to using peoples’ innate social abilities to comment on the behaviour of others.

A pioneer in the use of wisdom of crowds in research (since 2004), he also reveals the results of experiments in mass ethnography, mass anthropology and co-creation.

Filmed at the BrainJuicer/HSBC London Summerfest in June 2009 (disclosure: we produced the vid).

More videos from this event here.

Faris Yakob, EVP and chief technology strategist at ad. agency McCann Erickson, takes us through his six rules of social media engagement which he believes brands should follow to offer something more meaningful and powerful to people.

Filmed at the BrainJuicer/HSBC London Summerfest in June 2009 (disclosure: we produced the vid).

More videos from this event here.

We filmed this at a recent AQR ethnography training event.

It’s 15mins of edited highlights featuring useful tips and rich examples, drawn from a jam-packed 3-hour* training session run by ethnography expert Siamack Salari (of EverydayLives) and semiotics expert Greg Rowland (of Greg Rowland Semiotics). Enjoy!

You can also find a brief writeup of the event here.

More AQR coverage here.

* In fact the training ran all day, the bit we didn’t show was the half-day devoted to worked examples with full delegate participation

Mark Earls, author of Herd, talks about why copying is the important new paradigm for encouraging behavioural change.

Filmed at the BrainJuicer/HSBC London Summerfest in June 2009 (disclosure: we produced the vid).

More videos from this event here

BrainJuicer’s Chief Juicer John Kearon is a regular on the conference circuit.

After noticing that many events tend to mainly attract agencies, he began to wonder whether there was a way to significantly increase the client quotient.

Well, a few weeks ago he ran his inaugural Oktoberfest, a one-day event in London and Amsterdam with a hand-picked line up of ‘innovators’ as speakers. Each intimate gathering attracted over 100 clients.

The events were free and in true bootstrap fashion John partnered with Unilever and Philips to host the events and provide refreshments.

John Griffiths blogged about the London event. And we were asked to film, the result being the 17m highlight clip below (from 6hrs worth of material) which we hope you enjoy.

 STARRING 

• Andrew Gaule, Founder, The H-I Network
• BV Pradeep, Dove team, Unilever
• Jaroslav Cir, CMI director, Rexona (Unilever)
• John Kearon, Chief Juicer, BrainJuicer
• Mark Earls, Herdmeister, Herd Consulting
• Michael Spencer, MD, Sound Strategies

London:

Amsterdam Conference

Famed planner John Grant is now well known as a sustainability consultant. But not only in the environmental sense – he holds strong views on the sustainability of brands in an era of greater transparency and accountability. An era in which brands are being compelled to stand for something relevant in peoples lives.

John is one of the keynotes at the upcoming trends conference Consumer Alchemy ‘08. Hosted by Gfk Roper, here’s a short teaser we prepared earlier.

And below you’ll find the actual podcast chat (c. 20mins) with two other keynotes as they talk through trends they are seeing and what brands are doing, and can do, to capitalise on these trends (as usual, there’s a full list of talking points after the fold).

 STARRING 

• John Grant, independent brand strategy consultant (blog)
• Nick Chiarelli, global trends expert, GfK Roper Consulting
• Pamela Hamilton, head of creative development, ITV Imagine

(more…)

 I think all the research industry should adopt a CFO, because what the CFO wants to know is not whether that ad. tested better than that ad., but does the whole program move us ahead in making brands more valuable in peoples’ lives and therefore dropping to the bottom line. (Alan C. Middleton)

ESOMAR’s 2008 Congress is nearly upon us and in this exclusive preCast, BrainJuicer Chief Juicer John Kearon chats with three of the keynotes about how cultural and technological changes are impacting peoples’ lives, and how the disciplines of marketing, branding and research need to adapt to keep pace with such change.

John is joined by former senior JWT executive Alan C. Middleton, popular anthropologist Grant McCracken, and design entrepreneur Richard Eisermann.

Listen to the podcast here

 STARRING 

• Alan C. Middleton, Assistant Prof. of Marketing and Executive Director, Executive Education Centre, Schulich School of Business, York University
• Grant McCracken, Anthropologist, Research Affiliate, MIT
• Richard Eisermann, Co-founder, Prospect
• John Kearon, Chief Juicer, BrainJuicer (host)

Listen to other podcasts in this series

(more…)

That’s the question conductor Benjamin Zander asks in this, yet another beautifully powerful and funny session from TED.

We’re not massive classical music fans. But if we had Benjamin Zander teaching us things may have been different. Not content with simply creating classical music fans, Benjamin talks of creating a better world through the power of music.

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

A leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, Benjamin Zander is known for his charisma and unyielding energy — and for his brilliant pre-concert talks.