Adrian Gostick

Chester and I are excited to announce that we have updated and added tons of new content to The Invisible Employee and released a second edition with John Wiley. It was released officially on December 30, but we’re having some great promotions today and tomorrow for anyone who buys the book. Here are all the details:

Buy the second edition of The Invisible Employee on Jan. 14 or 15, and we’ll immediately send you these valuable tools:

*World’s Greatest Managers Audio Lesson: Chester interviews some of the world’s most successful CEOs and business leaders. It’s like stealing the playbook of the masters!
*A Carrot A Week: Receive a free subscription to 52 practical suggestions on how to provide meaningful recognition—tips you can apply today.
*Global Carrots: Heading on a business trip? Managing employees from other lands? Learn how to say “thank you” in dozens of languages.

Buy one copy and we’ll send you these resources. Buy 5 copies for your team and receive all these resources, a Garrett the Carrot plush Carrot, and a complimentary copy of the Wall Street Journal bestseller A Carrot A Day—365 recognition ideas for every day of the year.

Simply forward your e-receipt, dated today or tomorrow (Jan. 14 or 15), from Amazon or Barnes & Noble to and we’ll send you your stuff at no charge!

For more information on the book, check out this month’s newsletter found here.

Our brains learn more from rewards than from failures. Breakthrough research from a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has shown the remarkable power of rewards on the brain. The MIT study was published in the journal Neuron last summer and was summarized in this month’s Harvard Business Review.

In short, the data shows that success is a lot more informative than failure. If you receive a reward for a successful action, the brain remembers what it did right. But with failure, the brain isn’t sure what to store so it doesn’t change at all (unless there is a clear negative consequence such as the shock a child feels when sticking something into an electrical outlet).

Now neuroscientists have long known that the brain can rewire itself in response to experience—what’s known as neuroplasticity. But until this research scientists didn’t know what causes brain matter to begin changing. Positive environmental feedback in the form of a reward for success triggers plasticity. Equally important and somewhat surprising: It’s opposite, failure, has no impact on our development.

We can glean two things from this new research. First, if we are managers, know that our employees’ brains will learn when we reward them for their successes. They’ll do more of the same positive behaviors. But second, we learn that we need to pay more attention to our failures and ask ourselves why we are failing. Obviously we are not hardwired to learn from failure, and must push to ask why we failed.