How to inspire people

The answer is not another video of Steve Jobs.

Motivational quotes. Videos of Steve Jobs saying absolutely anything. Clips of a baby elephant being rescued from a river. You do not have to scroll for long on LinkedIn, a networking site ostensibly for people at work, to find "inspirational" content.

There may be people who need only to read "We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are" written in a nice font to feel amped up on a Monday morning. But there will be just as many who want to snigger or vomit. For bosses interested in how to motivate the people around them, there are better options than searching for quotes by Paulo Coelho.

At some level, advice on how to inspire employees is silly. It's usually either blindingly obvious - be good at your job, be passionate about the work, make the people on your teams feel valued - or jarringly inauthentic. But much more practical insights can be found in a forthcoming book called Inspire, by Adam Galinsky, an academic at Columbia Business School.

Take, for example, the importance of vivid imagery as a way of bringing an organization's purpose to life. Lots of firms use a succession of tediously abstract words to convey their goal: "change", "innovate", "connect", and so on. The result is less a mission than a mood board.