What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers' diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that is critical to performance) than making progress in meaningful work. If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the workday, it's a good bet that he or she achieved something, however small. If the person drags out of the office disengaged and joyless, a setback is likely to blame. This progress principle suggests that managers have more influence than they may realize over employees' well-being, motivation, and creative output. The key is to learn which actions support progress-such as setting clear goals, providing sufficient time and resources, and offering recognition-and which have the opposite effect. Even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. On the flip side, small losses or setbacks can have an extremely negative effect. And the work doesn't need to involve curing cancer in order to be meaningful. It simply must matter to the person doing it. The actions that set in motion the positive feedback loop between progress and inner work life may sound like Management 101, but it takes discipline to establish new habits. The authors provide a checklist that managers can use on a daily basis to monitor their progress-enhancing behaviors.

HBR's annual ideas collection, compiled in cooperation with the World Economic Forum, offers 10 fresh solutions with the potential for a huge positive impact on business and the world. Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer reveal what their research shows is the true key to employee motivation-and it's not what most managers focus on providing. Ronald Dixon proposes that the real performance breakthrough in health care will come when the medical community adopts the everyday communications technologies patients already use. Lawrence M. Candell asks why the U.S. has a Lincoln Laboratory to put public-spirited experts across the table from profit-motivated defense contractors, but no such entity to do the same in the financial sector. Eric Bonabeau, Alpheus Bingham, and Aaron Schacht urge players in the pharmaceutical industry to treat drugs as information assets; big pharma could orchestrate drug-development networks to promote innovation. Jack D. Hidary describes a market solution to achieve what no government handout can in the greening of existing buildings. Robert E. Litan and Lesa Mitchell advocate that universities' technology transfer offices loosen their monopolistic grip on their scientists' taxpayer-funded discoveries. Bill Jensen and Josh Klein urge frustrated professionals to "hack work" by adopting the mind-set and tool kit of the hacker to achieve the positive outcomes their employers want but make difficult to achieve. Sendhil Mullainathan notes that we have the tools to spot bubbles about to burst, but individual firms have little incentive to sound the alarm. Why not appoint a "bubbles committee"? Paul Romer proposes that "charter cities" be established to show the citizens of failed and languishing states the merits of market economies and to provide an option for change. Carne Ross questions why only nation-states are allowed to shape international affairs and reveals the need for independent diplomacy.

Anyone in management knows that employees have their good days and their bad days--and that, for the most part, the reasons for their ups and downs are unknown. Most managers simply shrug their shoulders at this fact of work life. But does it matter, in terms of performance, if people have more good days than bad days? Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's new stream of research, based on more than 12,000 diary entries logged by knowledge workers over three years, reveals the dramatic impact of employees' inner work lives--their perceptions, emotions, and motivation levels--on several dimensions of performance. People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (passion for the work), and more favorable perceptions of their work, their team, their leaders, and their organization. What the authors also found was that managers' behavior dramatically affects the tenor of employees' inner work lives. So what makes a difference to inner work life? When the authors compared the study participants' best days to their worst days, they found that the single most important differentiator was their sense of being able to make progress in their work. The authors also observed interpersonal events working in tandem with progress events. Praise without real work progress, or at least solid efforts toward progress, had little positive impact on people's inner work lives and could even arouse cynicism. On the other hand, good work progress without any recognition--or, worse, with criticism about trivial issues--could engender anger and sadness. Far and away, the best boosts to inner work life were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and their managers appropriately recognized that work.

If you're like most managers, you've worked with people who swear they do their most creative work under tight deadlines. You may use pressure as a management technique, believing it will spur people on to great leaps of insight. You may even manage yourself this way. If so, are you right? Not necessarily, these researchers say. When creativity is under the gun, it usually ends up getting killed, the authors say. They recently took a close look at how people experience time pressure, collecting and analyzing more than 9,000 daily diary entries from individuals who were working on projects that required high levels of creativity and measuring their ability to innovate under varying levels of time pressure. The authors describe common characteristics of time pressure and outline four working environments under which creativity may or may not flourish. High-pressure days that still yield creativity are full of focus and meaningful urgency--people feel they are on a mission. High-pressure days that yield no creativity lack such focus--people feel they are on a treadmill, forced to switch gears often. On low-pressure days that yield creativity, people feel as though they are on an expedition--exploring ideas rather than just identifying problems. And on low-pressure days that yield no creative thinking, people work on autopilot--doing their jobs without engaging too deeply. Managers should avoid extreme time pressure when possible.