If you have an incredibly rewarding environment for work, you access everyones max effort for t

0:00Why do you all of these great organizations punish? Like Goldman Sachs is not fun to work at, but they have really good performance. McKinsey, same thing. The company though continues, but the tenure per employee is short. What do you do when you can't get people to be motivated by reward? It reverts to the law of least effort, which is if you can't escape a situation, then you do as little as possible to not be punished. And so then what do you do if you're the person who sets up the punishment? You raise the bar. Then people live their entire lives incredibly anxious, working around the clock, drinking because they have to basically work everything to not get punishment. And so what do you do?

0:34You create an environment where only super competent, really high functioning person can come in and within two years burn out. Because burn out just means that they got punished. But they're only able to continue with that model because there's always fresh bodies that fuel the machine. If you have an incredibly rewarding environment for work, you access everyone's max effort for the long haul. Whereas punishment accesses as much effort as is required to get above the bar of not getting punished, and that's it.