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| DRIVE (the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us) |
Author: Daniel H. Pink – Penguin Group 2009
Overview:
Most of us believe
that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards
like money. That’s a mistake-the secret to performance and satisfaction at
work, school, home, is the deeply human need to direct own lives, learn, and
create new things and to do better in life.
Drawing on four
decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch
between what science knows and what business does-and how that affects every
aspect of life.
The three key
elements of true motivation – autonomy,
mastery and purpose were discussed extensively to offer smart and
surprising techniques for harnessing them into action.
Introduction:
Human beings have a
biological drive that includes hunger, thirst, and sex. We also have another
long-recognized drive: to respond to rewards and punishments in our
environment. But in the middle of the twentieth century, a few scientists began
discovering that humans also have a third drive-what some call “intrinsic
motivation”. For several decades, behavioural scientists have been figuring out
the dynamics and explaining the power of our third drive.
Till now, business
has not caught up to this new understanding. If we want to strengthen our
companies, elevate our lives, and improve the world, we need to close the gap
between what science knows and what business does.
PART
ONE: A New Operating System
Chapter
1 ... The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0
Societies, like
computers, have operating systems-a set of mostly invisible instructions and
protocols on which everything runs. 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. Carrots encourage desired
actions while Sticks punish the undesired ones. That worked fine for routine
twentieth-century tasks. But 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. We need an upgrade.
Chapter
2 ... Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don’t Work...
When carrots and
sticks encounter our third drive, strange things begin to happen. Traditional
“if-then” rewards can give us less of what we want: They can extinguish
intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity, and crowd out
good behaviour. They can also give us more of what we do not want: They can
encourage unethical behaviour, create addictions, and foster short-term or
nearness thinking. These are bugs in our current operating system.
Chapter
2a ...and the Special Circumstances When They Do
Carrots and sticks
are not all bad. They can be effective for rule-based tasks – because there is
little intrinsic motivation to undermine and not much creativity to crush. They
can be more effective still if those giving such rewards:
i.
offer a rationale for why the task is
necessary (e.g. when staff are required to work extra-time on a non-routine
task like folding several copies of statement of accounts, inserting them in
envelopes, and making them ready for posting),
ii.
acknowledge that the task is boring, and
iii.
allow people autonomy over how they
complete the task (micro-managing people and insisting on how the paper should
be folded or how much time should be spent folding or inserting the statements
in envelopes, and so on are not necessary) – only give people a sample of the
kind of result desired and allow them run.
Chapter
3 ...Type I and Type X
Motivation 2.0
depended on and fostered Type X behavior, i.e. the behavior fuelled more by
extrinsic desires (salary, bonus, perks, etc) than intrinsic ones (achieving
set goals, solving problems, creating new things, etc) and concerned less with
the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to
which an activity leads.
Motivation 3.0, the
upgrade that is necessary for the smooth functioning of twenty-first century
business, depends on and fosters Type I behaviour. The Type I behaviour
concerns itself less with the external rewards an activity brings and more with
the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself.
For professional
success and personal fulfilment, we need to move ourselves and colleagues from
Type X to Type I. The good news is that
Type I’s are made, not born – and Type I behaviour leads to stronger performance,
greater health, and higher overall well-being.
PART
TWO: The Three Elements
Chapter
4 ...Autonomy
Our “default
setting” is to be autonomous and self-directed (consider how a 3 month old baby
is free and non compliant). Unfortunately, circumstances – including outdated
notions of “management” –often conspire to change that default setting and turn
us from Type I to Type X. Autonomy is not about “go-it-alone rely-on-nobody
individualism” but both acting on choices and being happily interdependent with
others.
To encourage Type I
behaviour, and the high performance it enables, the first requirement is
autonomy. People need autonomy over task
(what they do), time (when they do
it), team (who they do it with) and technique (how they do it).
Organizations that have found inventive, sometimes radical, ways to boost
autonomy are outperforming their competitors. However, encouraging autonomy
should not downplay accountability.
Chapter
5 ...Mastery “Mastery is not
rocket science, it is deliberate practice “
While Motivation
2.0 required compliance, Motivation 3.0 demands engagement. Only engagement can
produce mastery –becoming better at something that matters. The pursuit of
mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become
essential to making one’s way in the economy. Indeed, making progress in one’s
work turns out to be single most motivating aspect of many jobs.
Mastery begins with
“flow” -optimal experiences when the challenges we face are exquisitely matched
with our abilities. Smart workplaces supplement day-to-day activities with
“Goldilocks tasks” i.e. not too hard and not too easy tasks (targets).
Mastery abides by
three peculiar rules:
i.
Mastery is a mindset: It requires the
capacity to see ones abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable.
ii.
Mastery is a pain: It demands efforts,
grit, and deliberate practice.
iii.
Mastery is an asymptote: It is impossible
to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.
Human, by nature,
seek purpose –to make a contribution and to be part of a cause greater and more
enduring than themselves. But traditional businesses have long considered
purpose ornamental i.e. a perfectly nice accessor5y, so long as it did not get
in the way of important things. But that is changing –thanks to the rising tide
of aging baby boomers reckoning with their own mortality.
In Motivation 3.0,
purpose maximization is taken its place alongside profit maximization as an
aspiration and a guiding principle. Within organizations, this new “purpose
motive” is expressing itself in three ways: In
i.
goals that use profit to reach purpose,
ii.
words that emphasize more than
self-interest, and
iii.
in policies that allow people to pursue
purpose on their own terms.
The move to
accompany profit maximization with purpose maximization has the potential to
rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.
Conclusion:
Whether you are the
CEO or the new intern, you can help create engaging, productive and high
performing workplaces when you encourage Type I behaviour which is a way of
thinking and approach to life built around intrinsic motivators powered by
innate need to direct one’s own life, to learn and create new things, and to do
better at all times to improve the world. This gradually deemphasizes quest for
extrinsic rewards at all times.
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