Drive:
The Surprising Truth About
What Motivates Us
by
Daniel H. Pink
Chief
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Basic Premise
• There’s a mismatch between what
science knows and what business does
• External, carrot-and-stick motivators
don’t work and often do harm
• Video Links:
Animated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
TED Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
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Alternative
• Three essential elements
1. Autonomy — The desire to direct our
own lives
2. Mastery — The urge to make progress
and get better at something that matters
3. Purpose — The yearning to do what we
do in the service of something larger
than ourselves
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Three Drives
• Per Harry Harlow and Edward Deci:
– Human beings have a biological drive that
includes hunger, thirst, and sex
– Second drive — To respond to rewards and
punishments in our environment
– Third drive — What some call “intrinsic
motivation”
– “When institutions — families, schools,
businesses, and athletic teams — focus on
the short-term and opt for controlling people’s
behavior,” they do considerable long-term
damage
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Big Idea – Motivation/Hygiene
Theory
• “Hygiene factors”—such as salary, security, and
status—were crucial for avoiding job
dissatisfaction
• Had little impact on job satisfaction
• Satisfaction depended on “growth or motivator
factors” — things like interesting work, greater
responsibility, and the opportunity to grow
• Organizations that tried to boost performance by
using hygiene factors — by offering bonuses or
holding out the prospect of a promotion — were
playing a game they couldn’t win
• The better approach -- focus on job enrichment
and make the work itself more challenging and
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Ideas
meaningful
Big Idea – Motivation/Hygiene
Theory
• Baseline Rewards are things like salary,
contract payments, benefits, and a few perks
that represent the floor for compensation
• If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate
or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness
of her situation or the anxiety of her
circumstance, making motivation of any sort
extremely difficult
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The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0
• The first human operating system — call it
Motivation 1.0 — was all about survival
• Its successor, Motivation 2.0, was built around
external rewards and punishments. That worked
fine for routine twentieth-century tasks.
• In the twenty-first century, Motivation 2.0 is
proving incompatible with how we organize what
we do, how we think about what we do, and how
we do what we do
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Carrots and Sticks
• Seven Deadly Flaws
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
They can diminish performance
They can crush creativity
They can crowd out good behavior
They can encourage cheating, shortcuts,
and unethical behavior
6. They can become addictive
7. They can foster short-term thinking
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Carrots and sticks aren’t all bad
•
Can be effective for rule-based routine
tasks
1. little intrinsic motivation to undermine and
not much creativity to crush
2. More effective if you offer a rationale for
why the task is necessary, acknowledge
that it’s boring
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Carrots and sticks aren’t all bad
•
For nonroutine conceptual tasks
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“Now that” rewards — noncontingent
rewards given after a task is complete —
can sometimes be okay for more creative,
right-brain work
Especially if they provide useful
information about performance
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Question:
When have you seen carrots and
sticks work? Or not work?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
They can diminish performance
They can crush creativity
They can crowd out good behavior
They can encourage cheating, shortcuts,
and unethical behavior
6. They can become addictive
7. They can foster short-term thinking
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Type I (Intrinsic) and Type X
(Extrinsic) Behavior
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•
Motivation 2.0 depended on and fostered
Type X (Extrinsic) behavior – concerned
with the external rewards to which an
activity leads
Motivation 3.0 depends on and fosters
Type I (Intrinsic) behavior – concerned
more with the inherent satisfaction of the
activity itself
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Type I (Intrinsic) and Type X
(Extrinsic) Behavior
•
The good news is that Type I’s are made,
not born—and Type I behavior leads to
stronger performance, greater health, and
higher overall well-being
True, in your experience?
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Autonomy
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Our “default setting” is to be autonomous and
self-directed
Unfortunately, circumstances conspire to
change that default setting and turn us from
Type I to Type X
To encourage Type I behavior, and the high
performance it enables, the first requirement is
autonomy
Organizations that have found inventive,
sometimes radical, ways to boost autonomy
are outperforming their competitors
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Questions:
How has autonomy worked as
a motivator in your company?
Or not worked?
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Mastery
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Motivation 2.0 required compliance
Motivation 3.0 demands engagement
Mastery begins with “flow” — optimal
experiences when challenges are matched to
our abilities
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–
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Mastery is a mindset -- It requires the capacity to
see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely
improvable
Mastery is a pain -- It demands effort, grit, and
deliberate practice
Mastery is an asymptote -- It’s impossible to fully
realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating
and alluring
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Questions:
When/where have you seen
instances of mastery or “flow”
in your life?
In your company?
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Purpose
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Humans, by their nature, seek purpose
In Motivation 3.0, purpose maximization is
taking its place alongside profit maximization as
an aspiration and a guiding principle.
This “purpose motive” is expressing itself in
three ways:
–
–
–
In goals that use profit to reach purpose
In words that emphasize more than self-interest
In policies that allow people to pursue purpose on
their own terms
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Questions:
What’s your company’s purpose?
Are you on a personal path
toward purpose?
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Jim Collins – Good to Great
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“Expending energy trying to motivate
people is largely a waste of time”
The right people will be self-motivated
“How do you manage in such a way as not
to de-motivate people?”
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Jim Collins – Self-motivation Culture
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“Lead with questions, not answers”
“Engage in dialogue and debate, not
coercion”
“Conduct autopsies, without blame”
“Build ‘red flag’ mechanisms”
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3.0 Ideas – FedEx Days
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Created by the Australian software
company Atlassian
One-day bursts of autonomy
Allow employees to tackle any problem
they want
Show the results to the rest of the
company at the end of twenty-four hours.
Why the name? Because you have to
deliver something overnight.
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3.0 Ideas – ROWE
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Results-only work environment (ROWE)
The brainchild of two American
consultants, a ROWE is a workplace in
which employees don’t have schedules
They don’t have to be in the office at a
certain time or any time
They just have to get their work done
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3.0 Ideas – 20 Percent Time
•
An initiative in place at a few companies in
which employees can spend 20 percent of
their time working on any project they
choose
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Drive:
The Surprising Truth About
What Motivates Us
by
Daniel H. Pink
We Share Ideas