Alfie Kohn

Cited in Remote — Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson via his book Punished by Rewards. Kohn’s argument — that trying to conjure motivation through rewards (the carrot) or threats (the stick) is “terribly ineffective” and in fact counterproductive — backs the Remote thesis on managing distributed teams: the only reliable way to muster motivation is to let people work on the things they care about, with people they care about. There are no shortcuts.

Context: Alfie Kohn is an American author and lecturer on education, parenting, and human behavior, best known for Punished by Rewards (1993), which critiques behaviorist incentive systems and argues that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation.

Where this appears

• Remote — Office Not Required — cited (via Punished by Rewards) for the claim that rewards and threats fail to conjure motivation