Very interesting story about your experience with the salesforce managers. Must have been frustrating for you – and yet it is quite possible that they were right.

“People” are far from uniform, and as you know, I put considerable store by the insights we can gain by applying developmental models which, amongst other things, describe different ways people make meaning of the world. Classifying the sales forces as “that type of person” may have been precisely the right approach.

I’d seen Pink’s TED video and as so often with TED stuff, was inspired by it.

But actually, what he says supports the argument to make the sales people highly incentivised by performance. He is very careful to say bonuses work very well for simple, focussed tasks. Certainly, many sales situations are of that nature.

Alex

BTW – I’m starting to look at the idea of Holarcracy (http://www.holacracy.org/) – organizational structures that completely support what Pink is talking about.