Reflection on Guest Talk

Prof. Larry Kiyohiro

With more than 23 years of experience in the finance and management world, he is currently the Senior Portfolio Manager at the Bank of Hawaii. He pursued Bachelor's from theUniversity of Hawaii at Manoa and Law from Gonzaga University School of Law. He has served as Executive Consultant at the HR Institute which provides consulting and training services to large Japanese companies and multinationals in Japan.

It was a really inspiring and motivating webinar. He hasn't wasted any time on other topics, he directly came to the point and started delivering. At first he talked about how to build a great and effective team and to build an effective there needs to be a great leader. Then Talked about Leadership Core skills.

Then talked about motivating people. He said two important points:

If you reward something — you should get more of that behavior.
If you punish something — you should get less of that behavior.

Then he told us about MIT's study on incentivizing people — 3 tiers of rewards - people were given mundane tasks like solving word puzzles, memorizing number patterns, etc. If they:

Performed ok — token cash prize
Well done — cash prize
Really well done — large cash prize

Typical incentive structure/motivation scheme used by companies:

Reward the top performers
Give the middle performers a little bit
Ignore the low performers

But there was still some limitation to this scheme.

If the task involved only mechanical skills, this incentive structure worked as expected.

So, Higher Pay = Better Performance

However, when the task is more complicated and requires some conceptual, creative thinking.

Here is the link of his leadership webinar: