On Sway: The irresistible pull of irrational behavior

Airplane time is slow time. You can either look out of the window and admire at how little the scenery changes and how temporary the human effects to the landscape appears to be, at least by day time, or you can read a book and focus on nothing but the book.

I happened to read Sway: The irresistible pull of irrational behavior, by the Brafman brothers on a cross country flight and it made for fascinating reading. Of the many astute observations made by the authors, the chapter on Compensation and Cocaine stayed with me. We have all experienced first hand the joy of doing something simply because you believed that doing it was the right thing to do. You were motivated, went over and above the call of duty and usually sacrificed comfort, ego and personal gains to make things happen. At the other end of the spectrum is a financial rewards system in the corporate world where the rewards are meant to motivate you to behave a certain way. The authors describe the altruism center and pleasure center as two distinct areas of the brain only one of which can function at any point in time. Whenever the pleasure center is stimulated (with greed, cocaine, rewards etc.), the altruism center goes dormant.

As a leader trying to motivate people, I have seen this first hand. Teams will work hard because they believe that they are doing the right thing. If you introduce a notion of financial reward for the work being performed, then people tend to revisit everything and see whether it makes sense to spend the time for the reward. I guess if the reward is obscene it will drive behavior, but most rewards are simply carrots so that makes the whole approach of trying to motivate someone on that premise somewhat questionable.

Rather than compensation driving behavior, maybe it ought to be that behavior drives long term compensation. That way, the teams and their managers do the extra yards because it is the right thing to do , and rather than showing any immediate appreciation, you make sure that those teams are compensated correctly on a long term basis.

The book on the whole is an easy read while being insightful at the same time. Like with other books of this genre (Outliers, Blink etc.), you wonder how much supporting research material was discarded by the authors because it did not fit the theory. But all in all, there is something very aha! about this book.