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The Surprising Science of Motivation in Relation to Business Management

I came across another very interesting “talk” on TED.com and of course I’m sharing it with you!  Dan Pink discusses the science of motivation.  He describes behavioral science experiments (funded by the US Federal Reserve), explains their results and defines a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.  He describes an idea of reinventing the wheel of structured management that some may say sounds Utopian.  Dan Pink says, “Nope, I have proof.”  And proceeds to give a few examples of some huge players that have adapted to the idea of matching what science knows with the way they run their business. Check it out!

Michael A. Hsiung

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“Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.”

Why you should listen to him:

With a trio of influential bestsellers, Dan Pink has changed the way companies view the modern workplace. In the pivotal A Whole New Mind, Pink identifies a sea change in the global workforce — the shift of an information-based corporate culture to a conceptual base, where creativity and big-picture design dominates the landscape.

His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, is an evolutionary transformation of the familiar career guide. Replacing linear text with a manga-inspired comic, Pink outlines six career laws vastly differing from the ones you’ve been taught. Members of the Johnny Bunko online forum participated in an online contest to create the seventh law — “stay hungry.”

A contributing editor for Wired, Pink is working on a new book on the science and economics of motivation for release in late 2009.”

Because this video has no closed captioning, I have also provided the transcript:

“I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago I did something that I regret, something that I’m not particularly proud of, something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. (Laughter) Late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. (Laughter)

Now, in America law is a professional degree. You get your university degree. Then you go on to law school. And when I got to law school, I didn’t do very well. To put it mildly, I didn’t do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90 percent possible. (Laughter) Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life. I pretty much wasn’t allowed to. (Laughter)

But today, against my better judgement, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills, what’s left of those legal skills. I don’t want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses.

So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might have seen this before. It’s created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. Karl Duncker created this experiment that is used in a whole variety of experiments in behavioral science. And here’s how it works. Suppose I’m the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, “Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn’t drip onto the table.” Now what would you do?

Now many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn’t work. Somebody, some people, and I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here. Some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It’s an awesome idea. Doesn’t work. And eventually, after five or 10 minutes, Most people figure out the solution, Which you can see here. The key to to overcome what’s called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem.

Now I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University in the U.S. This shows the power of incentives. Here’s what he did. He gathered his participants. And he said, “I’m going to time you. How quickly you can solve this problem?” To one group he said, I’m going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem.

To the second group he offered rewards. He said, “If you’re in the top 25 percent of the fastest times you get five dollars. If you’re the fastest of everyone we’re testing here today you get 20 dollars.” Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation. It’s a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It’s a nice motivator.

Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. Three and a half minutes longer. Now this makes no sense right? I mean, I’m an American. I believe in free markets. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Right? (Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That’s how business works. But that’s not happening here. You’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity. And it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.

And what’s interesting about this experiment is that it’s not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over and over again, for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators, if you do this, then you get that, work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don’t work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science. And also one of the most ignored.

I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation. Particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I’m telling you, it’s not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what’s alarming here is that our business operating system — think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources — it’s built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That’s actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn’t work, often doesn’t work, and often does harm. Let me show you what I mean.

So Glucksberg did another experiment similar to this where he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Okay? Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn’t drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we’re timing for norms. You: we’re incentivizing. What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group’s butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box it’s pretty easy isn’t it? (Laughter)

If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind. That’s why they work in so many cases. And so, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well. But for the real candle problem, you don’t want to be looking like this. The solution is not over here. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility.

Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left brain work, certain kinds of accounting, certain kinds of financial analysis, certain kinds of computer programing, has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers around the world can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.

Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we’ve been talking about here, are those kinds of problems — do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we’ve built so many of our businesses, don’t work.

Now, I mean it makes me crazy. And this is not — here’s the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I’m a lawyer. I don’t believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I’m an American. I don’t believe in philosophy. (Laughter) This is a fact. Or, as we say in my hometown of Washington D.C., a true fact. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let me marshal the evidence here. Because I’m not telling you a story. I’m making a case.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues, did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games. Games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards. Small reward, medium reward, large reward. Okay? If you do really well you get the large reward, on down. What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But one the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

Then they said, “Okay let’s see if there’s any cultural bias here. Lets go to Madurai, India and test this.” Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards. What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.

Is this some kind of touchy feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No. These are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. And do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That’s the American experience.

Let’s go across the pond to the London School of Economics. LSE, London School of Economics. Alma mater of 11 Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. (Laughter) Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of paid for performance plants, inside of companies. Here’s what the economists there said, “We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things. To entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.

And the good news about all of this is that the scientists who’ve been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It’s an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they’re interesting, because they are part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery, the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose, the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.

I want to talk today only about autonomy. The 20th century came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is like — it’s not a tree. It’s a television set. Okay? Somebody invented it. And it doesn’t mean it’s going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better.

Let me give you some examples of some kind of radical notions of self direction. What this means — you don’t see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on. Because what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely. Getting the issue of money off the table. And then giving people lots of autonomy. Let me give you some examples.

How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half. (Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, “Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it’s not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want.” So that engineers use this time to come up with a cool patchwork coat, come up with an elegant hat. Then they present all of the stuff that they’ve developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and wooly all hands meeting at the end of the day. And then, being Australians, everybody has a beer.

They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It’s pretty. It’s not bad. It’s a huge trademark violation. But it’s pretty clever. (Laughter) That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed.

And it’s worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20 Percent Time. Done, famously, at Google. Where engineers can work, spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Okay? Radical amounts of autonomy, And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time. Things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.

Let me give you an even more radical example of it. Something called the Results Only Work Environment. The ROWE. Created by two American consultants, in place in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.

What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things. Now some of you might look at this and say, “Hmm, that sounds nice. But it’s Utopian.” And I say, “Nope. I have proof.”

The mid 1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives. All the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Yen. Do it because you like to do it.

Now if you had, just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, And said, “Hey, I’ve got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?” 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth, who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.

This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation. Right? This is the Thrilla’ in Manila. Alright? Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks. And who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout. Let me wrap up.

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are the natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.

And here’s the best part. Here’s the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does, If we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world. I rest my case.” -Dan Pink

If you find this to be an Idea Worth Sharing, please SHARE IT!

To Success!

Michael A. Hsiung

Water Purification Bottle Will Revolutionize Water Delivery Systems in 3rd World Countries

With cutting-edge nanotech, Michael Pritchard’s Lifesaver water-purification bottle could revolutionize water-delivery systems in disaster-stricken areas around the globe.

for video with closed captioning: click here

“During the twin tragedies of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, Ipswich water-treatment expert Michael Pritchard winced helplessly at televised coverage of throngs of refugees waiting for days for a simple drink of clean water. Stricken by the chronic failure of aid agencies to surmount this basic challenge, Pritchard decided to do something about it.

Using a non-chemical nano-filtration hollow fiber membrane with 15 nanometer pores (it is designed to block viruses), the Lifesaver bottle can make the most revolting swamp water drinkable in seconds. Better still, a single long-lasting filter can clean 6,000 liters of water. Given the astronomical cost of shipping water to disaster areas, Pritchard’s Lifesaver bottle could turn traditional aid models on their heads.”

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It is pretty amazing what some talent and a true passion to help others can turn into.   I am sure this business is taking off and it’s products are being utilized all over the world in nearly every survival situation.

I found this on TED.com today and I thought it was pretty awesome.

If you find this to be and Idea Worth Sharing… SHARE IT!

All the best,

Michael A. Hsiung

Use Twitter For Your Business!

“Twitter is a micro blogging site developed in 2006 as a social networking tool, which allowed the user to broadcast his or her status to a list of followers or friends. A pioneer in the concept of Web 2.0, Twitter along with Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia revolutionized the entire online business and fueled intense media and sociological research among the online community.

Initially developed as an instant messaging tool with a limit of 140 characters, Twitter has grown into a powerful marketing tool and is used extensively by internet marketers, SEO service providers, and website development and designing companies to promote and build a strong online presence. People swear by Twitter these days and we will discuss different ways of how to use this tool to boost your sales and improve business.

Twitter is a wonderful medium for free publicity, as it creates brand awareness and builds a relation based on trust with potential customers. An enterprise can convey it to the people about its latest product offering and future work. So instead of maintain an in house marketing and branding team, companies are getting attracted to Twitter in greater numbers than ever because of its viral nature. This type of publicity ensures greater product visibility and increases revenue.

A company can build up its own set of followers as it gives the consumers a broad platform and more choice. Classic examples are Dell and HP. Dell increased its sales by a massive scale when it started promoting their products on Twitter. Taking the cue, every company nowadays has a separate Twitter page dedicated wholly to Twitter responses and users. Twitter attracts web traffic and is changing the business landscape on a global scale.

Using Twitter wisely and strategically is every company’s prerogative to increase its SEO ROI and guarantee more hits to the web site. This is the age of social media. The more social a company is the more visitors it will attract. This is gradually becoming a challenging domain for SEO analysts and webmasters.

Twitter has replaced newsletters to a large extent, and a company is offering its latest updates, news to its customers on the go and at a better pace. If it is running a website related to classifieds or web directory, it can share the updates like new items in the list. Twitter allows a business to attract a target audience to its business website or content. Searching twitter, often people try to find the persons of their interest. In this way, if you are someone offering business consulting services, people in search of your service might follow you. Twitter is a great platform for idea exchange and sharing of knowledge resources amongst interest groups, peers and associates. Now those having business blogs can easily post some new content and tweet it for view by the followers.

Twitter can help a business stay ahead of the competition. It can analyze its competitors’ marketing and branding strategies and can devise ways and means to counter those. Using Twitter, a business can reach out to maximum pool in minimum time, using minimal resources. This has certainly become a challenge for web designers and developers, who have to design websites, conforming to the strictest industry standards, so that the site comes out tops in search engine queries. SEO experts have to come up with ingenious optimization and Web Designing Services to edge out the rat race in the online world.”

see Best Syndication

Twitter came out with their own special guide on how to utilize twitter for business! 

Click here to check it out!

link to Twitter 101 for Business

If you would like to learn more about twitter and hear about my first-hand experience using twitter, CONTACT ME!

Michael A. Hsiung

www.Occent.com

(949) 999-6905

To Future Success!

Michael A. Hsiung

The Tribes We Lead

This is about an 18 minute video of entrepreneur and author Seth Godin speaking at a TED Conference earlier this year.  “Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.”

for video in closed captioning:  click here

Seth has also written a book on this topic titled: “Tribes- We Need You to Lead Us”

Who is Seth Godin?  See Seth on Wikipedia

If you find this to be an “Idea Worth Sharing,” Share it!

I will be creating a post soon about using this concept of tribes and how you can possibly use facebook and twitter to build your business!  Stay Tuned!

To Future Success,

Michael Hsiung

Network Solutions Security Breach Compromises Nearly 600,000 Credit Card Numbers

If you are a Network Solutions Merchant or are using the ‘MonsterCommerce’ shopping cart system, your customers Data has just been STOLEN. The worst part is that YOU, the merchant, could be responsible for paying the fines to Visa/Mastercard depending on how you are setup with Network Solutions.  It Is important that you are in a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant environment for your hosting, shopping cart, billing gateway, merchant account and everything else.  I can handle it ALL!

IF YOU ARE A MERCHANT THAT DOES BUSINESS CURRENTLY WITH NETWORK SOLUTIONS—–>GIVE ME A CALL TODAY AT 949-999-6905

I WILL HELP MAKE YOUR ECOMMERCE SITE MORE SECURE AND COMPLETELY CUSTOMIZED!!!

EMAIL ME:

PLEASE READ ORIGINAL REPORT REGARDING NETWORK SOLUTIONS BREACH.

“Network Solutions is investigating a breach on its servers that may have led to the theft of credit card data of 573,928 people who made purchases on Web sites hosted by the company.

Networks Solutions notified 4,343 of its nearly 10,000 e-commerce merchant customers on Friday about the breach. It affects 573,928 cardholders whose name, address, and credit card number were exposed between March 12 and June 8, said Susan Wade, a spokeswoman for Network Solutions.

Mysterious code was discovered in early June on servers hosting e-commerce customer sites during routine maintenance, she said. The company called in a third-party forensics team to help with the investigation, and the team was able to crack some of the code on July 13, determining that it could be related to credit card data, she added.

Credit card transactions were intentionally diverted by an unknown source from certain Network Solutions servers to servers outside, Network Solutions wrote in an e-mail to merchant customers.

“So we notified law enforcement and began the process of notifying our customers,” Wade said. “At this point, we don’t have a reason to believe that (the data) has been used, but we are working with the credit card companies,” nonetheless.

Network Solutions also is paying to have credit-monitoring specialist TransUnion help the merchants notify their customers according to data breach notification laws in effect in certain states. Affected consumers will get 12 months of free credit-monitoring services.

It’s unknown how the malicious code got onto the system and where it came from, Wade said.

Merchants and consumers can get more information on the Care and Protect Web site Network Solutions has set up. “We really feel terribly about this,” Wade said.

“We store credit card data in an encrypted manner, and we are PCI (Payment Card Industry)-compliant. Unfortunately, any company operating in our business could have become a victim of this type of invasion,” the company said on a blog post on the customer information Web site. “In this situation, the unauthorized code appears to have transmitted information about credit card transactions as they were being completed; it did not involve a vulnerability in the way we store data in our systems.”

The breach does not affect Network Solutions’ other businesses, which include domain registration, e-mail hosting, and online marketing.”

The Road Ahead or the Road Behind

Here is a short poem written by George Moriarty.  It was recited in John Wooden’s video that I have here on the site but after I saw it written out I figured everyone else would too.  Please enjoy and share it with others if you find it to be an “Idea Worth Sharing.”

The Road Ahead or the Road Behind

Sometimes I think the fates must grin as we denounce them and insist,
The only reason we can’t win is the fates themselves have missed.
Yet, there lives on the ancient claim – we win or lose within ourselves,
The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow’s game.
So you and I know deeper down there is a chance to win the crown,
But when we fail to give our best, we simply haven’t met the test
Of giving all and saving none until the game is really won.
Of showing what is meant by grit, of fighting on when others quit,
Of playing through not letting up, it’s bearing down that wins the cup.
Of taking it and taking more until we gain the winning score,
Of dreaming there’s a goal ahead, of hoping when our dreams are dead,
Of praying when our hopes have fled.  Yet, losing, not afraid to fall,
If bravely we have given all, for who can ask more of a man
than giving all within his span, it seems to me, is not so far from – Victory.
And so the fates are seldom wrong, no matter how they twist and wind,
It’s you and I who make our fates, we open up or close the gates,
On the Road Ahead or the Road Behind.

-George J. Moriarty

Ideas Worth Sharing

Michael A. Hsiung

Neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor – “A Stroke of Insight”

This is another amazing video I found on TED.com.  Neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor describes her massive stroke, and the experience watching her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one.  She explains her jaw dropping experience and the epiphany she had when it was all said and done.  It is a very moving video.  It talks about taking conscious control of your thoughts and how you use your brain.  Enjoy! And remember, if you find this to be an “Idea Worth Sharing,” please share it!

for video with closed captioning: click here

Concern Foundation’s 35th Annual Block Party Fundraiser at Paramount Studios

“Beginning as a small and swanky fundraiser with A-list celebrities in the early 1970s, the Block Party has been Concern’s most lucrative fundraiser since the start. The evolution of the Block Party has seen that of varied locations, starting with Rodeo Drive in 1973 through 1996 when Concern moved the fundraiser to Paramount Studios. The Block Party has seen celebrity and musical talent over the years such as Andy Williams, Sonny & Cher, Liza Minnelli, the Lennon Sisters, Connie Stevens, Dick Shaw, Minnie Riperton, Les Brown, Natalie Cole, Monty Hall and so many more. The catering for the fundraiser has had the support of some of Los Angeles’ best restaurants including the Grill on the Alley, Lawry’s Prime Rib, Pink’s, La Provence Patisserie, Factor’s Famous Delicatessen, Il Cielo, Fogo de Chao, La Cachette, Chaya Brasserie, Mr. Cecil’s California Ribs, Il Moro and many other renowned LA restaurants. For three years after 9/11, the Block Party found its home at the Petersen Automotive Museum on the Miracle Mile while private events were barred from movie studios. The Block Party has now returned to Paramount Studios and continues to have an attendance of 3,500 to 4,000 guests each year. Los Angeles magazine has joined the team as a corporate sponsor and has brought the fundraiser and our organization to an even higher level of credibility since 2005. This fundraiser has been the arms and the legs of Concern Foundation as it has helped our organization raise well over $41 million dollars in the 41 years Concern has been in the community.”

see Concern Foundation website

The Occent Family with the Derek Alpert, President of the Concern Foundation

Occent Merchant Services is a proud corporate sponsor of this amazing non-profit organization.  The Concern Foundation is a true rarity in the nonprofit world as it maintains an administrative overhead of 5% or less. This means 95 cents of every dollar donated actually goes to cancer research!  They are able to do this because they are primarily an organization driven by passionate volunteers!

Occent is honored to create the new website for the Concern Foundation

www.concernfoundation.org

This was a fantastic event that raised over 1.3 Million dollars for cancer research!  It’s amazing what can happen when passionate individuals come together to make big things happen.  The food was incredible, the entertainment was great and we were all in good company!   Here are a few more pictures from the Block Party!

The Gates

Paramount Studios Backlot

The Treeman

Lawry’s Prime Rib

Pink’s Hot Dog

Perfect Day Out!

Bryan Tepus, Aija Robertson, Michael Hsiung, Scott Vickers

AWESOME

Thank you Concern Foundation for throwing incredible event!

Ken Robinson “Talks” Says Schools Kill Creativity

I have been stumbling across a lot of very interesting videos that I am able to share with you all.  This video was filmed in 2006 at a TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Conference.  What Ken Robinson had to say definitely struck a chord with me.   Watch the video and if you like it, share it!

For video in closed captioning: click here

Michael Hsiung started a new category today- Ideas Worth Sharing

Contact or Follow me to keep track of the ideas I find that are worth sharing!

To OUR Success,

Michael A. Hsiung