If you want your people to work hard, produce brilliant results, and most especially, to produce a constant stream of successful innovation, you must give them recognition.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on Activity Centric Blogging. If you look through the examples of People Worksites, etc, you will see clearly that many of the blogs include the photos of the people using the system. And all the articles include by lines. This is a deliberate choice designed to give maximum recognition.

A couple of weeks ago, The Economist paper came out with an article describing bluntly how important recognition is to people.

Apparently, people who win a Nobel prize live, on average, 2 years longer than people who only get nominated, but fail to win the prize. And this is adjusting for all differences in income, etc. This result comes from a paper published by Professors Andrew Oswald and Matthew Rablen.

You can read the original paper here: Mortality and Immortality

One of the most amazing things about the paper is the final sentence of their summary:

Greater wealth, as measured by the real value of the prize, does not seem to affect life span.