One of my favourite TED talks is Dan Pink “On the surprising science of motivation”. I also read Dan Pink’s book Drive – The surprising truth about motivation. Why I found the book and his talk interesting is because it helped me understand something I many times found contradictory – incentive and motivation. How incentive can be a demotivating, specially when you are talking incentives in form of reward or punishment. How we attract the wrong people that is lured by the money, but does not believe in your idea. Why people can put a lot of hours of their spare time working for free on e.g. Open Source projects, but is not motivated at work where they actually get paid for developing software. Money can be a demotivator if you do not pay enough, but is not a motivator for complex tasks. There are a lot of ways to motivate people like autonomy and mastery.
Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
RSA Animate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc