Squashing creativity with rewards

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

A great story posted by Curt Rosengren useful for two things.

First in case you ever feel a pressing need to Squash a Chimpanzee’s Creativity, this is how to do it.

Second, of even more value, this is a neat way to squash human beings’ creativity too: reward them for it. That will come out of left field for most people, but not those who’ve read the brilliant book, Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn.

Share Post

More Posts

February 2025 update

People have been facilitated before: boredom, stillness, recovering attention and the undercurrents of life

No comment

The value of not always saying something helpful

Beyond writing

Writing stuff down can easily remove us from practical reality and suppress our intuition

Inauthentic marketing: case study

An example of inauthentic direct mail, from Lincoln Financial Group. The elements that eat away at the credibility of the sender and the effect on this reader.

The volatile chemistry of trust

Interesting research from Stanford suggests that exciting brands get more trusted after making mistakes and putting them right whilst more “sincere” brands start with more trust but lose it more easily. Perhaps the sensible interpretation is that second-guessing customers can be a waste of time!

Authenticity: you can’t fake it

Thanks (again) to John Porcaro for linking me to the Customer Evangelists’ blog where I found this: OLD SCHOOL: Ad agency pays teen bloggers to

In praise of um… er….. deeper meaning

Once again, it turns out that what we do naturally has more value than we realise; whereas clever contrivances intended to “improve” our effectiveness often just destroy significance… and make us less well understood! A good lesson for all those presentation trainers and “image consultants” out there!

Follies of ranking

John Porcaro blogsmore evidence of the dangers of running businesses by crude interpretations of numbers… how superficial metrics can cover a rich tapestry of human

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Another addict…

My friend Jack Yan always insisted that mobile phones and blogging were two 21st Century phenomena he could do without. He still holds out on moblile phones but has allowed

Johnnie Moore

Canadian disguise

Thanks to Aleah’s blog for pointing to Traveling abroad? Disguise yourself as Canadian For $24.95 T-shirtKing.com offers the “Go Canadian” package, full of just the kind of things an American

Johnnie Moore

Comments

A few days back I reported Christopher Carfi’s focus on the comments as being a better guide to what to read here. I have to admit this has had a

Johnnie Moore

Ruzuku interview

A couple of weeks ago, Rick Cecil interviewed me for his blog, Ruzuku. I was pleased to do it because I thought his other interviews there were fascinating – this