2010 IFT Annual Meeting & Food Expo
The annual Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Meeting and Food Expo was held July 17-20, 2010, in Chicago. IFT reports it had some 21,500 registrants (including attendees and exhibitors), with 1,047 exhibitors in 2,146 booths. Additionally, approximately 115 sessions and 1,900 technical presentations were scheduled (of which nearly 1,500 were poster presenters). While many offered insights into basic research conducted by students, others provided information on consumer trends and even ways to improve workplace performance. Such was take-away information garnered from the keynote speech, “Drive--What the Science of Motivation Can Teach You About High Performance,” by Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.
Pink offered that traditional ways of motivating employees, what basically amounts to a “carrot and stick” approach that one would take with a donkey (where the carrot is a financial reward and the stick is punishment), are not effective for employees responsible for complex organizational tasks requiring higher-end cognitive skills. Instead, studies show employees with such complex work objectives perform best when they have autonomy, mastery and purpose. For example, giving people autonomy means encouraging them to have ownership of their actions. It means allowing them the resource of time and letting them choose tasks, deciding when and how to do them. Pink added that working towards this approach, annual performance reviews would be replaced by reviews in which employees set their own shorter-term goals and then report to management on their progress.