Reading now ..

I started Daniel Pink's Drive last month and while I haven't gotten very far, I certainly get the gist of one of his main arguments: many of our ideas about motivation and providing incentives for employee performance are not just outdated, they're plain wrong!

Considering this question is timely, as I'm still trying to digest Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness and I'm now reading Howard Schultz's Onward.

I'm only about on page 120 or so of Onward. In it, Schultz tells the story of how he returned as CEO of Starbuck's (after six or seven years as chairman) and began to try to right the company.

Many things about his story surprise me but one comes back to the subject of Daniel Pink's book - how do you motivate people?

One of the issues for both companies (Starbucks and Zappos), and many others, is that so much of the business is service. People in retail don't make much money. In a world in which there weren't so many other "clean" jobs retail jobs had some advantage and prestige, but that hasn't been true for decades. How do you get low-paid people to give spectacular service.

Hsieh's company was founded in San Francisco. But he moved his company to Las Vegas because he couldn't find folks who wanted to work as customer service representatives in San Francisco. He doesn't say so, but I find myself wondering if, in San Francisco, folks could live on what he could afford to pay. I guess Las Vegas was a better fit.

Interestingly, he located his warehouse in the middle of the country, which makes sense for logistical reasons, but didn't locate the rest of his company nearby. I still find that surprising -- if Las Vegas is a good location for hiring customer service representatives, why isn't Kentucky?