You Have Read Daniel Pink, Now See Him in Action

Aboard a recent Singapore Airlines flight, the Designing Leaders crew was thrilled to see that our favorite business thinker, Daniel Pink, now has a TV show. “Crowd Control,” a documentary series on the National Geographic Channel, had a few episodes on the SQ inflight entertainment system, and it’s classic Pink. In the series he looks at the challenges of changing human behavior and looks for methods that help lead people toward desired behavior using internal motivation. In the episode we saw just before landing, he considered the problem of cars speeding on a US highway, resulting in a higher-than-normal accident rate. Rather than focusing on the “stick” of tickets, fines, and other enforcement mechanisms, Pink looked for a “carrot,” and found one in the form of a “musical highway” — grooves are cut into the road in such a way that, when people drive over them at the correct speed, they play a song.

This is the kind of creativity we have come to expect from Daniel Pink, and it’s nice to get it in video form and not have to wait for him to write his next book. If you cannot get the National Geographic channel where you are, and you don’t regularly fly Singapore Airlines, the show does have a YouTube channel.