100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

your personal innovation
to find more ways
to keep score. That way, people will link it to you and
know how much it means to you. Is there anything that
you want improved? Find ways to track it, to keep score.
The love of games that is in every human being is some-
thing that you can tap into. The more you measure things,
the more motivated your people are to win those games.
36. Manage the
Fundamentals First
Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things and I’ll show
you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things.
—Lawrence D. Bell, Founder, Bell Aircraft
The Rodney Mercado motivational methods are not
only the most effective methods for teaching music, but
for anything else.
Professor Mercado was a genius in 10 different fields,
including mathematics, economics, sociology, anthropol-
ogy, and music history.
Scott recalls: Once, I was surprised to be getting an
economics lesson inside my music lesson. Mercado turned
to me and said, “Well, Scott, you know, math is very, very
simple. It’s all based on addition. But most people lose
sight of that. So if you learn how to do one plus one equals
two, everything in math flows from that. Everything.”
He was always focusing on fundamentals.

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Like the time he came to assist our chamber group in
preparing to perform a piece. Under his guidance, we
spent the entire hour working on the first two measures
of this piece. We kept going over and over them, and
each time he would ask us to explore a new possibility.
“How would you like to create more sound here?” he
would ask. And then he would give us ideas on how we
could possibly do that. And by the end of the hour, all we
had done was work on two measures of a piece that prob-
ably had 80 measures of music. Then, at the very end, he
said, “Okay, now let’s play the whole thing.”
The entire performance and our entire group were
transformed. We played the whole thing beautifully!
That showed me the power of fundamentals. Don’t
gloss over them. Slow your people down and do things
step by step, getting the basics right, getting the funda-
mentals in place.
We were coaching a client recently in his company-
wide managers’ meeting, and two people didn’t show up
on time for the meeting. The CEO wanted to rush through
the meeting and “talk to the people who didn’t show up”
later.
But we slowed him down and had the whole group
focus, slowly and fundamentally, on how to handle this
tardiness and absenteeism and lack of commitment from
these two managers. In the process, we had a number of
breakthrough moments for other managers on the na-
ture of commitment, and a newer, more creative policy
emerged.
Manage the Fundamentals First

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37. Motivate by Doing
People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do
something, and those people who sit still and inquire,
why wasn’t it done the other way?
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
Most managers don’t do things according to priority—
they do things according to feelings. That’s how their day
is run. (This, by the way, is exactly how infants live. They
live from feeling to feeling. Do they feel like crying? Do
they feel like laughing? Do they feel like drooling? That’s
an infant’s life.)
Professional managers fall into two categories: doers
and feelers.
Doers do what needs to be done to reach a goal that
they themselves have set. They come to work having al-
ready planned out what needs to be done.
Feelers, on the other hand, do what they