Although ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference concluded last week, I want to encourage everyone to take advantage of the free recording  of the general closing session from Great Ideas with Daniel Pink. Pink, who’s the author of bestselling “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” had a great session and discussed how the concept of motivation and rewards are more complex for humans than we may think.

I downloaded the presentation and took the time to watch it since I wasn’t at Great Ideas and only followed the tweets with hashtag #ideas10. I know others have blogged about their own takeaways, but I wanted to include a few of my own thoughts.

1. Dan Pink is a great speaker. He’s entertaining and truly knows what he’s talking about.

2. Higher rewards lead to worse performance. This may sound counter-intuitive, so if you’re curious, listen to Pink explain why.

3. Allowing employees pursue their own projects 20 percent of the time leads to innovation and engagement (two HUGE association buzzwords!). Google follows this model, and it led to Gmail and many other Google products we all use today.

4. Everyone wants to be a master at their trade/job/career/whatever. Humans crave progress no matter what the reward. It’s intrinsic.

What’s unique about Dan Pink is that his speaking at Great Ideas was crowdsourced. ASAE & The Center issued a survey to members and attendees, who overwhelmingly said they want to hear from Dan at the conference.

This is a fantastic presentation that I think association professionals of all ages and experience levels can benefit from. It’s definitely worth your time.