External Discipline (crossposted)

[Shaman]

In the Ben Hur movie, you had slaves rowing the ship and slave drivers whipping the slaves to row faster and the slaves would follow. This is an example of using the "stick" to motivate people to follow rules.

In school, I'm sure you've had disciplinarian teachers that used threats and punishment to make her students conform to the rules. Yet another example of using the "stick" to motivate people.

More importantly, you had CHARMING teachers that got the students to conform to the rules without so much as raising their voices. This is an example of using the "carrot" to motivate people.

In the workplace, people conform to rules. And it almost does not matter whether Theory X ("stick"), Theory Y ("carrot"), or Theory Z ("carrot") management is used to motivate people to follow rules.

All of these examples have one thing in common. And that is that outside forces are used to motivate people to have discipline to follow rules.

All of these are examples of externally driven motivation. Someone besides the person is making the person follow the rules of the organization. Discipline does not come from inside the person. Rather, it is forced from outside the person.

Now let us say that you had a "poker hedge fund" of 10 employees/players that multi-table for you. Furthermore, you had two very technically knowledgeable and strategically talented players that have tilt problems. In other words, these two players cannot use INTERNAL DISCIPLINE to make themselves do the right thing once they have just taken a bad beat. Is it possible to use EXTERNAL DISCIPLINE to motivate them to not go on tilt? If so, how specifically would you do it?

I figured that if companies can make their employees follow the rules and regulations with the use of external forces, and schools can make their students follow the rules, how can it be not possible to use external forces to force players into playing disciplined poker even if they wouldn't have been able to do it all by themselves using internal motivation?

[applej25]

How would you define when the player was on tilt? Without a specific definition at what point would you know to motivate them?

[HopeydaFish]

Just whip them "Ben-Hur style" whenever they go on tilt. After a few floggings, they'd be playing ABC poker in no time.

I hear that's how Sklansky got started.