The Motivation Toolkit: How to Align Your Employees' Interests with Your Own - Hardcover

Kreps, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393254097 ISBN 13: 9780393254099

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

Synopsis

Renowned Stanford economist David M. Kreps reveals the fundamental principles of employee motivation.

Getting your employees to do their best work has never been easy. But it is a particular challenge for knowledge workers, who must attend to many different tasks and whose to-do list is often ambiguous, requiring outside-the-box thinking. Lists of dos and don’ts are rarely effective. Instead, your best bet is to align their interests with your own―the heart of motivation―and set them free to use their own drive and creativity on their, and your, behalf.

But how do you align their interests with your own? How do you avoid incentive schemes that warp priorities, encourage perfunctory and sloppy work, or cause unethical behavior?

In The Motivation Toolkit, economist and management expert David Kreps offers a variety of tools, drawn from the disciplines of economics and social psychology, that you can adapt to your specific situation to achieve better motivation. This starts with understanding both the economic and social relationship your employees have with their work, their jobs, and your organization, then using that understanding to find economic or psychological motivators that will work.

Whatever your business, and whether you’re a newly minted manager, a seasoned executive hungry for your employees’ best work, or a curious leader looking for new ways to be effective, The Motivation Toolkit will prove a useful and enlightening read.

About this title

About the Author:

David Kreps is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at the Stanford Business School, where, over a forty year career, he has taught courses from Decision Making Under Uncertainty to Managerial Economics to Operations to Human Resource Management.  A leading economic theorist, he is a past recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of six previous books, including Microeconomics for Managers, Game Theory and Economic Modeling, and Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (with James Baron). He lives in Stanford, California.

Review:

“Understanding motivation is a critical and integral part of successful management and leadership. In The Motivation Toolkit, David Kreps has done the impossible: written a thorough, thoughtful, and insightful book on this important topic. Highly recommended for the leadership of all organizations―corporations, government entities, nonprofits, partnerships, start-ups and more.”
- Robert A. Jeffe, chairman and founder of the Central American Healthcare Initiative, former senior vice president of General Electric, and board member of GE Capital

“With characteristic rigor and insight, David Kreps explains the foundations, both economic and psychological, of the relationship between employer and employee, and provides the serious leader with a flexible toolkit they can tailor to their situation.”
- John Donahoe, CEO of ServiceNow and former CEO of eBay

“Artfully details the enormous complexities involved in achieving employee alignment, and provides a variety of situation-dependent tools to help ensure that an organization’s human capital is empowered to meet its long-term objectives.”
- Steven A. Denning, chairman of General Atlantic

“More and more people today are ‘knowledge workers.’ These employees now make decisions in conditions of significant ambiguity and uncertainty, which require that they exercise judgment once demanded only by very senior management. Written in conversational language from a pragmatic perspective, The Motivation Toolkit updates our thinking about this new generation of workers. Essential reading for leaders of start-ups, mega-global corporations, social sector organizations, and any student of management.”
- William F. Meehan III, Lafayette Partners Lecturer in Strategic Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a director emeritus of McKinsey & Company

“This short book is quite long on practical advice about motivation, a complex subject that is often oversimplified. Drawing on his comprehensive expertise, as well as revealing studies of how high-performing executives and ambitious MBA students respond to various motivators, David Kreps gives managers a number of thoughtful tools.”
- Gene Sykes, managing director at Goldman Sachs and CEO of LA2028 Olympic and Paralympic Bid Committee

“A stunning example of management education, The Motivation Toolkit integrates a Nobel-caliber game theorist’s insights from economics and social psychology to produce clear frameworks and actionable recommendations for managers and academics alike.”
- Robert S. Gibbons, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, MIT

“If you are going to read one, ten, a thousand, or ten thousand books on economics in your lifetime, The Motivation Toolkit should be Number One on your list. Why? Because David Kreps describes motivations with intriguing subtlety―and exactly as they are.”
- George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economic

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0393254097
• ISBN 13: 9780393254099
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272