Can we learn good management?

Is management consultancy a phony science? Is corporate strategy a chimera? The case for the prosecution is made forcefully in Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth, our most recent Book Club read. 

The book is part memoir of an escaped consultant and part potted history of the industry, from Frederick Taylor to Jim Peters and Peter Drucker. The case is well made, but I can’t help feeling that Stewart throws the baby out with the bathwater. 

I enjoyed the takedown of overpaid charlatans and I’m sure I’ve met a few in my career. I’m sympathetic to his view that most managers and management gurus overestimate the importance of the corporate leader. Hayek feels relevant here – no single individual is able to oversee, let alone control, the decisions and actions of hundreds or thousands of employees.  Corporate success is the consequence of more than one talented individual. 

Stewart’s also right that many corporate strategy gurus provide little evidence to back up their assertions about what matters. They usually rely on a few carefully chosen case studies which back up their claims.  I loved Richard Rumelt’s “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”, and found his advice pretty compelling, but there was nothing close to a robust testing of his methods.

However, here’s why I think Stewart goes too far. Firms exist and they exist for a reason. Some things can be produced more efficiently within organisations – thanks to specialisation and economies of scale – than they can between a number of of decentralised,atomised  individuals. The optimal size of the firm ebbs and flows with technological progress, the product lifecycle, the power of organised labour and much else. 

In my professional field of growth economics, one of the biggest recent developments has been the empirical research showing a strong correlation between the deployment of management practices and productivity at both firm and management level. Firms that implement more of the standard management procedures (such as setting targets, tracking and then reviewing performance) tend, on average, to have higher productivity. The researchers – who are highly respected within economics – suggests that as much of one-third of the UK’s productivity gap with the US could be explained by inferior corporate management. Finally, they’ve overseen rigorous trials that show a causal effect from implementing management practices to higher productivity.

This work suggests that there are some basic ‘rules’ that will yield better results, on average. This isn’t the same as saying one strategy will work for everyone, but then that’s the nature of social science. The world is a complex place and there are few certainties. But that doesn’t mean that nothing has predictive power. The phrase of one of my tutors has stuck with me:  good economic model is not a true description of the world but rather ‘the lie that reveals the truth’. This is my view with most management advice. It yields insight but it is not everything. Understand the assumptions and handle with care.

This leads to another question. If there are some basic management rules that ‘work’, at least on average, why don’t all firms use them? One answer might lie in the wealth of evidence from behavioural science that individuals often fail to follow the course that promotes their long term best interest. In particular, we tend to put off tough short term decisions. In the Knowing-Doing Gap, Pffefer and Sutton describe convincingly how these individual biases can be reinforced at the corporate level, when systems reward talking rather than doing.

As I was writing this post, an article appeared in the economics journal showing that implementing a basic checklist improved productivity in an auto repair firm. Despite this, workers only implemented the checklist under pressure from management.

The upside of down

Last week I watched a talk given by the famous American running coach, Jack Daniels. I learned a lot. My training has been very patchy of late, so one of his nuggets of wisdom particularly cheered me up.

Like most things, running training is subject to diminishing returns. The more mileage you put in, the fitter you become, but the additional gain from each extra mile gets smaller and smaller. By the time you’re on a 60 mile a week marathon schedule, an extra few miles doesn’t have much impact.

The flipside is that when you’re unfit or low on training, you fall back onto the steeper part of the curve, and every run will yield big gains. This is a helpful maxim for runners to hold on to when injury strikes.

I think it has application beyond running too. If you’re out of practice at any skill you have the opportunity to quickly regain much of what you’ve lost. And the upside of knowing nothing about a subject is that once you start working at it, you can start to accumulate knowledge very rapidly.

One challenge is how to see this glass-half full perspective rather than a more pessimistic outlook of “I’m so out of shape” or “I know nothing about this subject”. Another is how to maintain enough progress to keep motivated once we get to the plateau where the marginal gain from more effort is low. There are two approaches in running, and I think this reads across to other areas. You can increase the intensity or quality of your training, or you can work on other dimensions of fitness that complement your basic endurance and speed. In running this could include working on your core strength, flexibility, technique or mental toughness.

The relevant clip of coach Daniels can be found here.

How mindless habit prevents us doing what we know we should

The stickiness of our habits often stops us making the changes we know we should, and it is the second of the five reasons set out in The Knowing Doing Gap. Humans are creatures of habit and we tend to do what we have always done. To change we need to become more mindful of what we are doing, identify the bad habits, figure out better ones and find ways to make it easier to switch. This holds for both individuals and organisations.

Humans have a well known ‘status quo bias’ and we fall back on old ways of doing things even when they are dysfunctional. Relying on what we have always done saves time and energy. I am sure that habit is the most common block on me doing the things I would like to. They simply aren’t part of my routine (yet). I know I know I know that I shouldn’t dive into my email inbox as soon as I get to work, but I usually do. And it is precisely because I usually do. It is the very opposite of being mindful, it is being mindless.

This tendency gets compounded and reinforced at an organisational level for two reasons:

• Social proof. When we are unsure about things we tend to imitate others. So unless they are disrupted, the existing ways of doing things build up a momentum all of their own.
• Pressure to justify past actions. To change is to suggest that previous ways of doing things might have been wrong.

What can be done?

I am a strong believer in routines. If you want to instil a new habit, the best thing you can do is to figure out a set time when you will do it. If you rely on it happening in the course of events, it probably won’t. If you want to break an old habit, identify what triggers the bad habit and work out in advance an alternative action. This is what I call the ‘If-Then’ strategy. If this happens, then I will do this.

Organisations can try two complementary approaches. First, identify the bad habits that exist (and possibly the good ones you want) and second, to break them.

Identifying bad habits

The goal is to build a ‘mindful organisation’ where people become more concious of what they are doing and take responsibility for whether they continue to do them. So that they ask themselves – and each other – is this meeting/team/function still valuable? There is a nice example in the book of a firm running a workshop where everyone was invited to “identify the rules, rituals and attitudes that stand in the way of doing great things fast”. Every participant then had to select two of these ‘sacred cows’ and devise a plan for dealing with them by Monday morning.

Breaking bad habits

Organisational cultures can be highly resistant to change. Leaders must go beyond occasional exhortation and demonstrate persistence and commitment. One way is to use ‘dramatic signalling’, which means publicly and explicitly breaking with convention to show others that it is OK. This is the leader as role model.

It is not enough if the leader is the only one who changes things. In most organisations, useful knowledge is decentralised, scattered among all employees. Everyone needs to be empowered to challenge the status quo, make suggestions and institute changes. An absolute pre-requisite to any of the above being successful is the establishment of trust and safety, so that people feel comfortable in challenging and questioning. This is a central to the whole book and, as it happens, is a central tenet of good coaching.

This is the third post in a series about the book The Knowing Doing Gap.

How to learn like a baby

Watching my baby boy is learning to walk is a truly wonderful experience and for the nerd in me, fascinating. I’m noticing some excellent learning habits that his dad would do well to adopt.

1. Persistence. When he falls down, he literally pulls himself up and starts again.
2. Purposeful practice. He is constantly trying something slightly more difficult than what he has already mastered, working the sweet spot of learning which exists just outside your comfort zone.
3. Focus. He is clearly operating ‘in the moment’, and I’d guess in a state of flow. He is unable to overthink anything and so is untroubled by what TIm Gallwey called ‘self 1’, the conscious logical brain that gets in the way of your automatic instincts (‘or self 2’).
4. Celebrate success. He is absolutely delighted with himself every time he makes a breakthrough.
5. Rest. His short focused practice sessions are interspersed with plenty of downtime and sleep, including a daytime nap.

Stumbling on wisdom? Ten books that changed my outlook on life

Which books have changed your outlook on life?

This post is about the books that helped me to become who I am, by changing the way I understand myself, the world and how to live to make the best use of both. It has been enjoyable to write if more difficult than I anticipated.

For one thing, there is no clear demarcation between books that have influenced me and books that haven’t.  I could easily make a case for including another ten titles. Neither are these books the best I’ve ever read, nor are they necessarily ground breaking in their field. Rather they are where I first came across, understood or was convinced by particular ideas. Taken together they don’t encompass my whole philosophy either – some of my core beliefs came from classroom learning or interaction with others. Finally, my memory may be an unfaithful guide. What has stuck with me may be a small part of each book or even an unfair or even incorrect representation of the author’s argument. It’d certainly be interesting to read them again.

So all I can say in truth is that here are some books that I’ve read, and a narrative I’ve constructed about how they affected me.

Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam
This was probably the first popular social science book I read and it had a profound impact on my intellectual journey. It convinced me that social capital – broadly human relationships and trust – are critical both to individual flourishing and well functioning societies. Over time, the book’s biggest impact on me came from its short discussion of how social capital affected human happiness. This was the first time I came across the idea of directly measuring human happiness, and understanding what influences it. This was a novel concept in the mainstream economics of the time, which tended to dismiss the notion that individual happiness (or what economists term ‘utility’) could be directly measured. Over many years I cultivated a deep interest in this subject and went on to read hundreds of articles and books.

Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
This was among the first of those books, and the one I most enjoyed reading. It is focused less on describing what makes people happy and instead explores how, when and why people can be poor judges of what promotes their own happiness. This is a critical idea for economists, since so much of economics relies on the assumption of ‘rational choice’ – individuals acting in their own best interest. This idea – and for me, this book – provide a natural bridge from ‘happiness economics’ to ‘behavioural economics’.

Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman
A bestseller of the 1990s which anticipated much of the behavioural economics ‘revolution’, yet still felt fresh when I read it in 2010. To summarise crudely, the book argues that the human brain has two systems: an ’emotional brain’ and a ‘rational brain’. These are physically as well as conceptually distinct, although interconnected. The emotional brain is triggered by episodes of strong emotion, such as fear or anger. Once triggered, it acts rapidly, much faster than the speed of rational thought, priming the brain and body to respond. Unfortunately it primes us for ancient threats – basically preparing us for fight or flight – and this can be less than helpful in today’s context. For example, an anger response floods the body with hormones that ready us to respond with physical force. A central image in the book is the ‘hijack’ of our rational thought process by our emotions.

The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
This is the most recent of the books that I’ve read, and as I’ve written this post, I can see links to others in the list. The book is about the diverse moral principles that humans across the world actually hold, not the ones we should hold. I’ve already written extensively about the book, so I will restrict myself to two new insights it gave me. First, it helped me understand how people can hold a broader and still coherent moral framework that goes beyond utilitarianism and protection of individual rights. Second, it convinced me that our moral judgement is usually based on intuition, not logical reasoning. In this sense it reinforced the messages I took from Gilbert and Goleman’s books, as well as others not on the list (such as Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.

Religion for Atheists, Alain De Botton
I am not a religious person and before reading this book I had some sympathy with the ‘New Atheists’ who see religion as not only nonsense, but also harmful. De Botton, an atheist philosopher, argues here that over the ages, religions have provided invaluable sources of practical wisdom to help people to deal with adversity, live meaningful lives, and live together effectively.  Interestingly, this strikes a chord with some of the work of Haidt and Putnam. De Botton also proposes ways that secular institutions can replace what is lost when religion wanes. I can give a real-life example that helped me. My first child was born in February and I was not attracted by a traditional christening, with its fake religosity (for me, at least). However, as De Botton points out, religious ceremonies such as weddings, funerals and christenings serve a valuable purpose in marking and commemorating life-changing events in our life. De Botton proposes that we reimagine these ceremonies in a secular context. For me and my wife, this meant understanding what was important – which was to bring together the families whose legacy our son continues, to nominate and thank his godparents (I haven’t yet heard a good secular name for these!), and to celebrate his good health. We designed our own form of ceremony and it was a wonderful occasion.

Genome, Matt Ridley
Genome was my gateway to understanding evolutionary theory and the concept of the ‘selfish gene’. Which is surprising since by this stage I’d already completed a GCSE in biology. Perhaps I wasn’t listening in class. I was mesmerised by the story of how evolution created humans and the world around us, and with individual genes at centre stage. I began to hypothesise evolutionary explanations for all kinds of human behaviour. This has been fascinating and helpful background for understanding how and why people behave ‘irrationally’, as described in Emotional Intelligence and Stumbling on Happiness.  Later, I came to view evolution as a universal algorithm – vary, amplify, select – that shapes economies and social structures too, thanks in particular to Adapt (Tim Harford) and The Origin of Wealth (Eric Beinhocker).

The Death and Life of American Cities, Jane Jacobs
Much of my professional career in public policy has been spent analysing cities, typically through an economics lens, to understand why and how they form, prosper and decline and the benefits and costs this imposes on society. Jacobs wrote the book in 1961 and it remains a fresh and insightful masterpiece. While her approach is informal and somewhat anthropological, I was surprised to find how much it supports and enhances (most of) the arguments of modern urban economics, from a different and altogether more readable perspective. There’s lots to enjoy here. I learned how the physical form of cities matters, how density is created and dissipated and how this enables cities to both support specialised services and enhance social capital. The book also reinforced my view that the idea that cities can be controlled or effectively planned from above is a fallacy, regardless of how much ‘smart’ information city leaders have at their disposal. Although Jacobs never uses the analogy, she clearly describes how cities evolve naturally, in much the same way as species.

Unfinest Hour, Brendan Simms
This devastating critique of the UK’s inaction in the Bosnian war of the 1990s made a convincing case that sometimes the use of lethal force can be a more ethical choice than standing by and watching terrible things happen. Coming so soon after the horrific genocide in Rwanda, this made me something of a liberal interventionist. Subsequent events in Iraq and elsewhere have shown that the converse can be true and outside intervention can make things worse. Reflecting on all of this and more suggests three lessons more generalisable to my interest in decision-making. First, doing nothing is a choice, whether explicit or not, that has consequences – sometimes awful. Second, the consequences of our (in)action are always uncertain and in complex situations, highly so. Third, despite this, we should still make big decisions based on careful consideration, not gut instinct or wishful thinking. This means more than informed best guesses about the future and should include considering the full range of best and worst case scenarios.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey
This was the first self help book I read and I picked it up expecting advice on how to get more done in less time, but actually the book has a much deeper conception of effectiveness. Covey is much more interested – or at least interesting – on the importance of understanding your values and embedding them in what you do. Two ideas have particularly stayed with me. First, his maxim to ‘start with the end in mind’, which I have found fantastic advice, both at the level of your life, and for individual projects. Second, to focus your energy on what you can control, and not to worry about the rest.

Getting Things Done, David Allen
Now this one really is about personal productivity, and it’s a gem. There’s no getting away from it: this a deeply nerdy book that does exactly what it says on the tin, laying out an exhaustive system for getting more stuff done. I was utterly riveted by it (really) and rushed to try out his ideas. Some didn’t work for me, but I still use others today. The biggest lesson for me was that getting everything ‘out of your head’ and into an external system (basically a giant, ongoing, to-do list) can give a great sense of relief and free up your brain to do real thinking. I also internalised his ‘natural project planning method’, in which there are two critical things to know for each project: the end goal (see ‘start with the end in mind’), and; (2) your very next step. He hammers home that figuring out the very next step is the key to personal productivity. Your traditional to-do list might feature something like ‘Christmas present for Sonny’, which encompasses several steps. Allen says you will get nowhere with this. You should first figure out the very first step – which might be to ring your sister to find out what your nephew would like. Moving from vague undertakings to specific next steps is all part of clearing your head.

Writing this post has been a fascinating process, seeing how the insights from one book reappear  in others in different forms.  It has also helped me understand how my views and analytical toolkit have changed over time. Now over to you – which books have changed you?

How to Get Better at Getting Better

If you want to be a record breaker, dedication’s what you need.

Roy Castle

 We get better with practice. While my conscious brain strongly believes this statement is true, I don’t always make good on it in my day to day actions.

Practice can seem irrelevant in the ‘fixed mindset’ identified by Carol Dweck. If you believe that talent is innate, why would even try to learn and improve?

A similar conclusion could be drawn from the notion popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, that geniuses in all fields need to accumulate 10,000 hours of practice before they reach their peak. This intimidating fact could also lead you to wonder why to bother practising if 10,000 hours seems a little too much.

A first step out of this unproductive hole is to adopt Dweck’s ‘growth mindset’. From this perspective, there is always scope to improve our capability at any given task. And as an economist, I tend to believe that the marginal returns from practice diminish and that the payback is highest when you are least experienced.

A more important truth is whatever amount of time you can commit to practising, you can reap huge benefits from doing it well. As the wonderful Brain Pickings newsletter recently reported, the time spent honing a skill correlates only weakly with the degree of mastery and level of performance.

In Learn how to do anything in 20 hours, Josh Kauffman argues that getting better requires ring-fencing regular time for focused practice and then breaking down tasks into their component parts, each of which can then be individually mastered. Putting his own recommendations into practice, Kauffman reports how he was able to learn and put into practice a basic yoga meditation within just 10 hours. This is pretty inspiring to me, given how long a similar aim has sat on my to-do list without progress.

In Bounce, Matthew Syed observed that the top sports performers not only practice prodigiously, they also do so in a particular way he terms ‘purposeful practice’. This comprises two elements:

• Practising specific tasks that push the athlete to their creative and physical limits
•  Creating conditions that provide clear, objective and rapid feedback.

He cites Tiger Woods as an example, who will practice the same shot over and over again, perhaps hitting 100 balls from an identical bunker position.  Woods will observe the results himself and use a coach to provide further feedback from another angle.

Insightfully, Syed observes that purposeful practice appears to be adopted far less in normal working lives than in sport.  This is a pity when so much of the improvement in sport is zero-sum (an ‘arms race’), while in our working and personal lives it can be positive sum. If an athlete becomes the best in the world, he squeezes a competitor out of the medals. If I get better at my job, or as a friend or husband, this should have a positive effect on those around me.

So, how can we make use of these insights?

To improve as a coach

• Breaking down coaching into its constituent parts and practising those parts (or trying new techniques) that stretch me to my limit
• Obtaining clear and regular feedback, by recording and listening back to sessions (with the client’s permission of course).

To help clients

• Help them to identify the specific elements of tasks that they find challenging – and encourage them to practice these.
• Enable and encourage clients to obtain clean, precise feedback from themselves and from me as their coach, and to seek it out from others

As a civil servant

• Again, trying to identify specific components of my job to see which would benefit from specific practice (eg presenting or speaking effectively in meetings).
• Obtaining clear, constructive feedback from others immediately after practising new methods (eg directly after the meeting or presentation)

As a runner

• I have been trying my hand at running drills which seek to improve my running style and efficiency.  I find these very hard – which reinforces the value of practising them!
• Strength and conditioning work to provide core strength to support the running action.

A final, radical thought, arises from Syed’s description of the time-honoured learning process of aspiring chess players. They study old games between grandmasters, recreating each move and challenging themselves to think about what to do next. Syed reports that doctors have benefited from a similar technique where they study warning signs repeatedly over a short time period and learn what happens.

Why not do this in coaching? In theory, you could create a database of anonymised master coach conversations and enable aspiring coaches to consider what they would ask next. Of course, good coaching relies on building rapport, but this could help us to learn about techniques.

Why Mindset Matters

I first came across Carol Dweck’s work on mindset in Bounce, Matthew Syed’s book on sports psychology, and shortly afterwards on EconTalk, the economics podcast. I believe it is also highly relevant for coaching.

Dweck’s message is simple yet powerful.  She contrasts two types of mindset that people hold, the Fixed Mindset (FM) and the Growth Mindset (GM). In the FM, we believe that our ability in any field is largely fixed and unalterable, a function of natural talent.  In the GM by contrast, we believe we can get better at anything, through practice and effort.

Dweck and her collaborators have demonstrated the real world benefits of holding and cultivating a Growth Mindset, for children, parents, coaches and managers.  Her book is liberally sprinkled with a mixture of robust laboratory evidence and persuasive anecdotes that bring the findings to life.

While most of us are a mixture of both mindsets in different contexts, we tend one or the other.  I know that I held a FM for very many things as a child and have realised that in some cases I still do.  Dweck argues that it is possible to change one’s mindset and her experiments have demonstrated that it is relatively easy to prompt people to think in a GM or FM way, at least for short time periods.

Reading the book has certainly affected my thinking. I have believed until recently that I am ‘bad’ at languages and at driving and there is little I can do about it. This book has challenged me to think harder about this and in fact I don’t believe it any more. I think that I could improve with practice. This is not the same as saying I’m going to start learning French again!

The GM/FM dichotomy may be somewhat simplistic but I find it a fascinating lens through which to view one’s own life and think it is a coaching tool with huge potential.  Here are some thoughts prompted by Dweck’s book:

• Can a client get much benefit from coaching if they believe their talent is fixed?  As a coach, how can you help your client to believe that they can get better at something and that their effort makes a difference.
• Praise for effort and strategies, rather than for innate talent as this helps condition people to put in effort. Dweck particularly emphasises the importance of this for parents and teachers.
• The GM changes the nature of failure. In a FM, failure can define you – it ‘proves’ you are no good. In a GM, failure is simply something you can use to learn and improve. Once again the NLP phrase comes to mind: ‘there is no failure, only feedback’.
• When clients present problems about relationships, encourage them to adopt a GM in thinking about how the three elements of the relationship can be improved: how they act, about how the other party acts, and about how the relationship itself works.
• How can organisations create a GM environment? Dweck suggests that managers can relatively easily be taught to adopt a GM. Maintaining this over the long term will be harder and require consistent role modelling by senior managers and rewards for GM behaviours

I find Dweck’s message immensely powerful and liberating.  It has already had a profound effect on how I think about my own learning.

Creating better feedback loops

When I come across a famous saying or paragraph that I find particularly astute or amusing, I like to capture it in a single electronic document that is growing steadily larger. This is my version of  a ‘commonplace book’, a device that according to Wikipedia, was popularised by John Locke. Perhaps the most insightful quote in the whole of my commonplace book comes from Owen Barder:

“As policy-makers we should not try to design a better world. We should try to make better feedback loops”

Barder’s quote stems from his study of complexity and evolutionary economics, though I see it as essentially Hayekian.  I don’t agree with everything that Hayek wrote or that his modern followers propose. I do believe that he made some profound insights. Hayek’s critique of socialism was that the world is so complex and information so dispersed and fragmented that it is not possible for a social planner, however benevolent, to coordinate an economy effectively. Moreover, any attempt to do so inevitably ends in tyranny. Hayek’s insight is now some 70 years old but remains relevant even in today’s market-oriented societies.   

A firm in a competitive market faces a strong feedback loop because if consumers don’t like their product, they will soon know about it. In public services (and private monopolies) this loop is weaker. In the quest to establish and strengthen these loops, economists have advocated the development of quasi-markets. In practice, this has meant breaking up monopolies and extending choice and competition in public services.

Policy-makers also fall foul of Hayek when they believe (as they often do) that they know how the world is going to pan out, and therefore that it is easy to design the best possible policy. In general the world has far too many moving parts to make any prediction more than a best guess.  Barder argues a better approach is to abandon the aim for perfection first time round and instead to build mechanisms that enable us to learn about how effective the policy is. This allows changes to be made and institutions adapted in the light of new information.

How does this apply to coaching?

A core function of coaching is to give the client a better feedback mechanism, thus enhancing their awareness and enabling them to learn and improve their performance. Coaches can enable the operation of feedback loops at multiple levels, including:

• Listening to clients and playing back what they hear, highlighting any discrepancies or misalignment with the client’s goals, values or previous behaviour or statements;
• Observing the clients’ actions and providing direct feedback if asked (for example if the client is seeking to improve their presentation skills), and;
• Encouraging clients to report back on the actions they have previously committed to and what result they have had.

If I can find ways to extend, deepen and strengthen these loops, I believe I can become a more effective coach and more helpful to my client.

I see another implication for coaches. If the world is too complex to predict, then we should be is cautious about believing, or allowing our clients to believe, that any particular course of action is a panacea. However sensible and desirable an action seems to be in advance, it may not be as effective as envisaged and could even prove counter-productive. This suggests encouraging clients to consider what they will do if their chosen method doesn’t work, and what else they might try instead.  It also reinforces the benefits of reviewing actions and progress in subsequent coaching sessions. 

Motivating knowledge workers – can coaching help?

On the advice of a coaching mentor, I recently read Drive by Daniel Pink,  a short book on motivation in the era of the ‘knowledge worker’. I found his synopsis compelling, even though his pop-science style grated at times (in particular his repeated use of the expression “science knows”). Pink argues against managers who try to promote effective performance through a ‘traditional’ combination of supervision and monetary incentives.

Pink first sets up a simplistic model, influenced by classical economics, in which individuals are motivated by financial returns. He argues that too many organisations use this model in the way they manage people. This is something of a straw man. Most organisations realise that other things matter to their employees and economists like Bruno Frey have long been arguing that monetary incentives can have unwelcome side effects. This can include distorting behaviour away from productive work that isn’t measured, and even undermining workers’ ‘intrinsic’ motivation to do a good job.

For all that, the book neatly summarises the insights of others and highlights the idiocy of taking classical economics as gospel truth, rather than as a very useful and powerful analytical tool. In my job, I have seen a movement towards performance related pay in many public services. This is a complex area, but at the very least I believe it carries some risks given the difficulty of measuring all the things we care about and the danger of undermining the high level of intrinsic motivation that most public service workers have. Pink argues that the traditional motivators are much less effective for knowledge workers than for employees in a factory setting. The complexity of knowledge work means it is difficult to effectively supervise, monitor and measure what a worker is doing. Much knowledge work is also creative, and true creativity requires intrinsic motivation. Pink sets out three key motivators for knowledge workers:  autonomy, purpose and mastery.

Coaching becomes extremely powerful in this world. Good coaches will:

• Promote the client’s autonomy by raising awareness and encouraging them to take responsibility for their own lives.
• Work with clients to help them identify and sustain their purpose and values, and to find ways to align their life and work with this.
• Often work with clients to improve performance and achieve mastery over specific tasks such as presentation skills. Indeed, one of the seminal texts of personal coaching, Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis, was all about how to achieve mastery.