This is not the book for anyone wanting a quick hit of external motivation to reach a short-term goal. Daniel H. Pink disdains the easy ways out of carrots and sticks, grades and monetary incentives. Instead, Drive details the theory and implementation of what he calls “Motivation 3.0,” where the reward is the task itself—as long as we can turn the work into play by doing it how, when, and with whom we want, as well as work toward mastery of a skill while we do. Oh, and don’t forget: The work better be meaningful, too.
Sound like a tall order? Compared to the traditional motivators like bonuses and certificates, it is, but as Pink argues, it may be the only way to keep ourselves and the people around us engaged in our increasingly creative and self-directed work lives. For Pink, the three great motivators are autonomy, mastery, and purpose, all of which must come from inside us rather than be imposed by others. In this slim volume, he gives the reader lucid explanations of what he means by each term, evidence for why it matters drawn from psychological and case studies, and examples of its implementation in the real world. These include “20 percent time” at companies like Google and 3M, which gives employees greater autonomy over their tasks and time, or hospital cleaning staff who seek out new areas of mastery like chatting with patients to make their hospital stay less frightening.
Pink’s tips for turning your “Type X” (extrinsically motivated) self or workplace into a “Type I” (intrinsically motivated) one run the gamut from simple to complex. At one end, there’s asking yourself each day if you came closer to mastery of a skill than the day before. At the other, it’s implementing something like Netflix’s vacation non-policy, where the only rule is that employees get their work done, and otherwise can take whatever time off they want.
Pink also explains, again with extensive reference to clinical studies, how mixing external rewards/punishments and internal motivation frequently backfires, as with a Swedish study that showed fewer people donated blood when they were paid to do so. On the other hand, he acknowledges that for routine tasks that don’t involve altruism or require much creative thinking, where people must only “race down an obvious path, the carrot waiting for them at the finish line encourage[s] them to gallop faster.” While he urges readers to follow his methods, Pink has a refreshing lack of myopia about his subject material.
While it isn’t a quick fix, this is the book for anyone wanting to learn—or remind themselves—what really drives us all, so that with even a few tweaks, work can become more fulfilling, successful, and even fun.
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Daniel H. Pink
New York: Riverhead Books, 2009
Adam Grant’s New York Times Best Seller Give and Take has been heralded by Daniel Pink as “A rare work that will shatter your assumptions about how the world works and keep your brain firing for weeks after you turned the last page.” As a brain scientist, I can pretty much guarantee that unless you’re dead, your brain will be firing with or without this awesome book, BUT Grant absolutely delivers for despondent scientists and physicians who are under increasing pressures to produce, turn away from mentoring others and focus on the bottom lines of getting grants and seeing more patients.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell offers leadership advice through storytelling in this collection of anecdotes and true tales. Each short chapter derives a lesson from an incident encountered in his military and political service, and occasionally from private life. Often chatty and rarely preachy, the text is as enjoyable as it is informative.
Which do you think would help the germ of a thought grow into a brilliant idea: Talking about it with others, who have their own sparkling thoughts and brilliant ideas, and recombining the best parts of each to make them as strong as possible; or locking it away without sunlight and water? If you chose the first option, you’ve stumbled on to Steven Johnson’s central argument: “we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.”
Although it’s now almost five years old, Send remains an invaluable guide to emailing appropriately to staff, superiors, friends and relatives. Oh, and with advice like “If you’re working with weasels, watch their e-mails like a hawk,” it’s pretty funny, too.