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.

After the brief hiatus, we’re back with Wain’s World!

And in part 5, Danny looks at the tricky area of performance management which he says is “more than the dreaded annual appraisal!”

As always, this is just 2-3mins long and contains useful tips and tricks if you’re a manager or help manage talent. You can find previous episodes here.

More about Danny here.

Part 4 of our series on developing talent. In this episode, Danny looks at building trust – which he categorizes as part credibility, part reliability and part intimacy.

Just spend 2-3mins watching to get some useful tips and tricks if you’re a manager or help manage talent. You can find previous episodes here.

You can find out more about Danny here.

Part 3 of our series in which Danny looks at strategies to convince the board and leadership to invest in initiatives that develop talent.

As always, good tips and tricks and only 2-3 mins long.

You can find out more about what Danny does here.

You can find previous episodes here.

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.

This is the second part of our seven-part series on HR and talent.

This week, Danny Wain looks at how to draw inspiration from Google to innovate in HR and talent management.

Remember, each episode is a mere 2-3 mins long, short enough for the busiest managers or talent folks. And do drop us a line if you’re interested in sponsoring this series.

You can find out more about what Danny does here. Next episode goes up next week.

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.

Two-and-half years ago we did this podcast with Danny Wain who, at the time, was in charge of learning and development at research firm RI.

Ever since then we’ve wanted to capture his considerable experience on how to get the most out of talent and share it with you in bite size chunks, something we can finally do today. We’ve filmed seven episodes which we’ll put out weekly (with a hiatus during August).

Each episode is a mere 2-3 mins long, short enough for even the busiest managers or talent folks out there (that’s right, these are aimed at anyone with line management responsibility or whose job spec involves nurturing talent). Moreover, the series will cover all sectors, not just research.

The series begins with a look at ways to make a business case for learning and development. Next week we look at how you can take advantage of Google’s approach to innovation. And then we’ll tackle some other challenges including persuasion, trust and measurement. All good stuff

This initiative has involved a significant amount of our time which we’re bringing to you free. So if there’s any potential sponsors out there who’d like to support this effort plus get your name in front of a bunch of thought-leaders, drop us a line as we’d love to work with you.

By the way, Danny’s now set up his own talent and learning and development consultancy, do check it out.

As always, we hope you enjoy this. And do please share this with as many people as possible through twitter, Facebook, email etc.

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