Scones and Motivation

Mostly to make a joke about Thanksgiving last year, I wrote about Dan Pink and his short video on motivation: mastery * autonomy * purpose.

This past week, I watched another Dan Pink video, this time a TED Talk from 2009, on the same topic.

The video was played as part of a special meeting some of the staff had developed for the benefit of the rest of the staff. One of them noted that the meeting was itself a good example of autonomy and purpose in the workplace. 

I baked some scones for the meeting, to contribute to the overall theme. 

I got up early that morning to do the baking, and, as I zested and juiced the orange, measured and mixed the other ingredients, kneaded (ever so slightly) the dough, rolled it out and cut it into small pieces, these are the thoughts that went through my mind:

CBC has run stories (the Globe and Mail has, too) about how processed food is very bad for people. There is 'way too much salt in it, 'way too much sugar. And writers researching the food industry have been astonished to find that the food that is so bad for us is also scientifically designed so that people can't stop eating it. 

What was once solely the realm of salted peanuts is now a global nightmare of market behemoths who, to make a buck, sell products designed to make people consume far past the point of what is good for them, even to consume far past the point when their own brains tell them to stop eating. The obesity epidemic is the evidence of how good these guys are at their jobs.

I don't think Dan Pink would be surprised by this. In his video, he observes that when money is the only motivator, bad things tend to happen. Pink uses as an example the banking crisis of 2009. If he were to refresh his evidence, maybe he would point to the work of the person who blew the cover off the sugar industry, Cristin Kearns Couzens, and the New York Times writer, Michael Moss, who has published a book on how profit-seeking food conglomerates are destroying people's health. 

As the scones baked, I mulled over the aggressive imperatives of the food industry I read about in the media. I wondered what the difference was between what I was doing and what Nabisco does.

Obviously the difference is my motivation. I bake scones because people like to eat them, not because I want to make money.  But that doesn't mean that Dan Pink is right about everything. 

Pink's 2009 Ted talk repeats the phrase "there's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does." Pink means that scientific studies have shown people are not always motivated by money. 

But, the science of turning people into compulsive consumers of processed food means the opposite is also true: there is sometimes a perfect match between what science knows and what business does. 

And no one's more motivated than an addict.

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This week's picture has no connection to the text above. That's me sitting on the couch with my book, in what I think is my grandmother's house in Vancouver, British Columbia, circa November, 1961, a couple of months past my fourth birthday. The man in the middle is my uncle Roddy; the man on the left is my dad, Bill.

Have a great week!

Karen