Been playing around with WordPress 3.0 for the last week and have found it to be a fantastic update! Can not wait to see how hard I can push this over the next few months…
Government vs. Government
This might sound like a good idea on the surface, provide incentives to those closest to the day to day operations of government, but if you look a little deeper it could seriously backfire.
First, spend a few minutes brushing up on the latest phsycology of motivation. Here’s a quick video of Dan Pink speaking about his research:
What Dan Pink has found, is that for anything other than basic assembly line type production, fincancial incentives always result in LOWER productivity, and worse moral overall.
It sounds counterintuitive, and I bet that’s what the government hopes you will think as well. It seems to me more and more that the Conservatives are a govern-by-gut party that has little interest in evidence-based descision making. Better to go with what feels right.
Now government operations not only have to worry bout how thier actions might look politically, but how anyone inside the organization might try to turn anything they do into a financial witchhunt, so they can make a few bucks. I can see how this would result in very tense working environments, and really discourage good people from entering into management.
It’s like the larger problem in our society; why would a smart kid choose engineering when she can make 10 times more money going into financial services? Great for her, but with our dwindling production of things, we’re looking at a dark future for growth if we don’t get more smart kids inventing stuff people want.
I’m sure Mr. Day thinks this is a great idea, and I’m sure many Canadians will too. Who knows, it might even work; hey, you might win the lottery too. But the evidence seem to say this just will not work at best, and at worst, toxify the public service working environment.
Best Scones Ever.
We had nothing to snack on last night, so I decided to make scones.
I found some frozen blueberries in the freezer and so I decided to make blueberry scones.
But I had no idea how to do it well. So I asked the internet and it had the answers!
Here’s my new favourite scone recipe:
