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Saw this video in our medical leadership group, came home to my wife watching it on YouTube.


Not only is Daniel Pink the man, whomever did the marker drawing is pretty frakkin' amazing, too.

Doctors: motivated by money? Change their behavior by carrots and sticks, alone? Not nearly so much as you'd think -- witness the still low rates of adopting electronic medical records, despite major subsidies and financial incentives.

But publish their achievement scores over time where they and their colleagues can see them? How good they've been at improving, and how they compare to their office mates? Watch the curves bend!

Most physicians are intrinsically motivated by an internal standard of merit, with scorecards built into their DNA. Who survives 4 years of grueling pre-med undergrad work, 4 more years debt-building med school, and 3-9 more years of residency training at ridiculously low wages? Not folks motivated by money -- you've got to be able to survive and thrive on how you score and perform.

We've all pursued things that made no sense from the standpoint of basic loss and gain. This video -- a 10 minute snippet summary of Pink's book, Drive -- explains why.

Posted July 1, 2010
Sep 07, 2010
I saw this video too and have been fascinated by it. I was fortunate enough to see Pink give a talk in person this summer on this very topic. I’ve been giving this topic a lot of thought as I try to put together compensation packages for our doc’s here at the practice.

It seems that challenge is going to be with the new batch of physician coming out of residencies.

The new generation wants to work, but they don’t want work to be their lives. They prefer for the job to accommodate their personal lives as opposed to the job dictating how they live their life.

So the question for me is, how will we hire and keep motivate the new generation of doc’s? More money? More time off? More responsibility or less? Autonomy?

I don’t have a good answer. But I think it is a matter that ought to be considered. Because it is going to be a challenge. That I’m sure of.

Brandon

Sep 07, 2010
Peter Beck Kim said...
Pink's works, "Drive" and "A Whole New Mind," address this very issue, as well as "Influencer" by Patterson, Grenny, et al.

It's definitely going to be a challenge for office leads at all levels of medical practice. And it will involve harnessing the social element -- no more LONE steely-eyed docs, saving the world for democracy one life at a time -- as well as a recasting of what it means to be in medical practice.

If the rank and file medicine of tomorrow will be a part of providers' lives instead of its sole focus, then this new generation of docs will ultimately be rewriting the rulebook.