DRIVE

Daniel H Pink

MSRP $26.95, 256 Pages.

Published by Riverhead.

What really motivates people is the quest for autonomy, not rewards.

Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people--at work, at school, at home. It's wrong. As Daniel H. Pink explains in his new and paradigm- shattering book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today's world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

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 our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it's precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today's challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:

*Autonomy- the desire to direct our own lives
*Mastery- the urge to get better and better at something that matters
*Purpose- the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Along the way, he takes us to companies that are enlisting new approaches to motivation and introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are pointing a bold way forward.

Drive is bursting with big ideas-- the rare book that will change how you think and transform how you live.

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Customer Reviews

Drive by Daniel H. Pink

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In his newest installment, Pink tackles motivation, tracing its evolution and, using a software analogy, asserting the need for a radically new way of looking at the topic, which he dubs Motivation 3.0. Practiced by Type I leaders, it relies on autonomy, mastery and purpose to get results. Many of the ideas on which he bases his premise are not new - we've known that the old carrot and stick are not particularly effective in the 21st century - but Pink does give us plenty to think about. He also presents ideas that will make some readers bristle. Does your organization pay employees to spend 20% of their time on whatever they want instead of on the work at hand? Whether you can agree with everything he supports or not, Pink uses interesting life stories and research studies to support the case for a new way of motivating others.

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Mostly right, not as rigorous as I'd like

Rating

This book explores some of the complexities of what motivates humans. It attacks a stereotype that says only financial rewards matter, and exaggerates the extent to which people adopt that fallacy. His style is similar to Malcolm Gladwell's, but with more substance than Gladwell.

The book's advice is likely to cause some improvement in how businesses are run and in how people choose careers. But I wonder how many bosses will ignore it because their desire to exert control over people outweighs their desire to create successful companies.

I'm not satisfied with the way he and others classify motivations as intrinsic and extrinsic. While feelings of flow may be almost entirely internally generated, other motivations that he classifies as intrinsic seem to involve an important component of feeling that others are rewarding you with higher status/reputation.

Shirking may have been a been an important problem a century ago for which financial rewards were appropriate solutions, but the nature of work has changed so that it's much less common for workers to want to put less effort into a job. The author implies that this means standard financial rewards have become fairly unimportant factors in determining productivity. I think he underestimates the importance they play in determining how goals are prioritized.

He believes the changes in work that reduced the importance of financial incentives was the replacement of rule-following routine work with work that requires creativity. I suggest that another factor was that in 1900, work often required muscle-power that consumed almost as much energy as a worker could afford to feed himself.

He states his claims vaguely enough that they could be interpreted as implying that broad categories of financial incentives (including stock options and equity) work poorly. I checked one of the references that sounded like it might address that ("When performance-related pay backfires"), and found it only dealt with payments for completing specific tasks.

His complaints about excessive focus on quarterly earnings probably have some value, but it's important to remember that it's easy to err in the other direction as well (the dot-com bubble seemed to coincide with an unusual amount of effort at focusing on earnings 5 to 10 years away).

I'm disappointed that he advises not to encourage workers to compete against each other, but offers no evidence about its effects.

One interesting story is the bonus system at Kimley-Horn and Associates, where any employee can award another employee $50 for doing something exceptional. I'd be interested in more tests of this - is there something special about Kimley-Horn that prevents abuse, or would it work in most companies?

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Worth the time and money

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If you're questioning to read Drive let me add my validation. Drive is worth your time and money. I don't want to tell you the details of the book, only my experience.

My thoughts before I read the book were that it was a business development book. Drive is a business book, but it is much more. Anyone looking to understand how to motivate themselves or others will have 100's of pages of valuable insight.

I know you'll enjoy this book as much as I did. An entire review of this book you can find on my book review website [...]

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Fantastic read!

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Drive is an excellent book that facilitates informed introspection and analysis of others. A very entertaining read and definately a book that helps one ask the right the questions. Brilliant!

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An interesting look into what motivates us to work

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I love books that give me `aha' moments. This book was one. I've read a lot about the new generations and how managing them is different. Part of me thought that these people don't want to work hard or put in their time and they want instant gratification.

Now I'm starting to get it. Daniel Pink explains that the very nature of work has changed from routine tasks to knowledge-based work. The carrot and stick way of motivating worked okay for routine work, but it can actually be de-motivating for knowledge-based work.
To be successful in today's word, you need to engagement and mastery. Another way of looking at this is being in the `flow.' The challenge is how to motivate employees for this.

A particularly effective method is allowing employees to spend a set amount of time each week working on personal interest projects. The key is that they have to product something at the end, e.g. a prototype, a new process, etc.

Daniel gives some interesting examples of successful companies doing just this. Google lets employees spend 20% of their time on their own projects. This is how Gmail and Google news were created. So it works.

Humans need a higher purpose for their life and if a company can capture this, they'll have productive employees.

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