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Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel Pink

Introduction

  • It was long assumed that only biological drives and extrinsic motivators (rewards and punishments from the environment) powered behavior.
  • Extrinsic rewards can deliver a short-term boost, but the effect can wear off and reduce a person's longer-term motivation in a project.
  • Intrinsic rewards are more fragile than the other two, and need the right environment to survive.

Part 1: A New Operating System

Chapter 1: The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0

  • "Scientific management" treated workers as part in a complicated machine, which would respond to carrots and sticks as motivators.
  • The absence of extrinsic rewards creates job dissatisfaction, but their presence does not create satisfaction. Intrinsic rewards do.
  • The carrot and stick mentality is incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and how we do what we do.
  • Open source, low-profit LLCs, and social businesses reflect a shift from profit maximizing to purpose maximizing.
  • Scientific management assumed that we are purely rational, but we do things for self-seeking, self-actualizing reasons.
  • We classify work as either algorithmic or heuristic; the latter requires experimenting with possibilities to devise a novel solution.
  • Carrots and sticks work well for algorithmic tasks, but heuristic tasks require creativity, which requires intrinsic motivation.

Chapter 2: Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don't Work

  • The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, or to satisfy "baseline rewards."
  • The Sawyer Effect says that rewards can diminish intrinsic motivation, and thereby diminish performance, creativity, and upstanding behavior.
  • Contingent and expected "if-then" rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy, leading to long-term damage.
  • Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That is helpful for algorithmic work, but detrimental for heuristic work.
  • Like a paradox, those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards create a better state of mind to eventually receive them.
  • Intrinsic motivation, or the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, or absorbing, is essential for creativity.
  • Rewards can taint altruistic or moral tasks, turning them into pure transactions with no intrinsic reward.
  • Making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters means that some people will take the quickest way there, along the low road.
  • Rewards are addictive in that once offered, they're expected for any similar task; and once the status quo, they must be increased.
  • Extrinsic motivators can reduce not just breadth but depth, fostering short-term thinking and ignoring the long-term.

Chapter 2A: ... and the Special Circumstances When They Do

  • Without healthy baseline rewards, such as wages, benefits, and so on, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.
  • Rewards do not undermine people's intrinsic motivation for routine tasks, because there is no such motivation to undermine.
  • For creative tasks where "if-then" rewards are a mistake, focus on "now that" rewards, or introduce rewards after the job is done.
  • But repeated "now that" rewards can become expected "if then" entitlements, thereby reducing effective performance.
  • Also consider intangible rewards like praise, and feedback that provides useful information.

Chapter 3: Type I and Type X

  • Self-Determination Theory says that our innate needs are competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and when satisfied, we're motivated, productive, and happy.
  • When we use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating; the less salient they are, the better.
  • Theory X believes in the mediocrity of the masses, and so mediocrity becomes the ceiling of what you can achieve.
  • Theory Y says that an interest in work is natural, creativity and ingenuity abound, and people will accept and even seek responsibility.
  • Type X people are driven by external rewards and deeper satisfaction is welcome but secondary.
  • Type I people are motivated by the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are simply a welcome bonus.
  • Type I's almost always perform Type X's in the long run, but an intense focus on extrinsic rewards can deliver fast results in the short term.
  • Type I's like recognition because it is a form of feedback, but for Type X's, recognition is a goal in itself.
  • Type I's have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than Type X's.

Part 2: The Three Elements

Chapter 4: Autonomy

  • A ROWE, or results-only work environment, requires that work gets done, but doesn't focus on how, where, or when it's done.
  • Autonomy is different from independence; it means acting with choice, which means it can happen while interdependent with others.
  • Autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.
  • As a boss, see issues from the employee's perspective, give meaningful feedback, provide choice over what to do and how to do it, and encourage taking on new projects.
  • Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T's: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
  • William McKnight, the founder of 3M, had a simple credo: "Hire good people, and leave them alone."
  • For nonroutine tasks, the link between how much time someone spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable.
  • Autonomy over your team is a tall order, which is one reason why people are drawn to entrepreneurship.
  • People working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams.
  • Encouraging autonomy doesn't mean discouraging accountability; people must always be accountable for their work.
  • Assume that people want to be accountable, and that making sure they have control over their task, time, technique, and team begets this.

Chapter 5: Mastery

  • Only engagement can produce mastery, which is important also in our personal lives, where personal fulfillment is paramount.
  • In flow, the goals are clear, the feedback is immediate, and the task difficulty is barely beyond your ability, so that the effort is its own reward.
  • One study has shown that the urge to master something new and engaging is the best predictor for productivity.
  • When what must do exceeds one's capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what must do is below one's capabilities, the result is boredom.
  • Shrewd enterprises give employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that bring some flow to otherwise mundane duties.
  • Mastery is a mindset, and our beliefs about ourselves and our abilities can set the abilities on what we accomplish.
  • Incremental theorists see intelligence as malleable, like strength; entity theorists see it as fixed, like height.
  • A learning goal, like speaking French, leads to mastery because one doesn't have to prove any proficiency in order to keep trying, unlike a performance goal.
  • Type X embraces performance goals, prefers performance goals, and sees effort as weakness.
  • Type I embraces learning goals, prizes learning gaols, and sees effort as a way to improve.
  • Mastery requires grit, which is a perseverance and passion for long term goals, especially through the painful parts.
  • Master is an asymptote in that you can never fully attain it, but in the end mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.
  • People are more likely to reach flow at work, because it offers clear goals, immediate feedback, and challenges matched to our abilities.
  • We are motivated most by making progress, and so organizations should create conditions for it, shine a light on it, and celebrate it.

Chapter 6: Purpose

  • Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels, but achieve more in the purpose of some greater objective.
  • As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies.
  • Businesses like "for benefit" organizations, B corps, and low-profit LLCs pursue purpose, and use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.
  • Humanize what people say, and you may well humanize what they do.
  • It's often difficult to do something exceptionally well if we don't know the reasons we're doing it in the first place.
  • Workers thirst for context, and a powerful way to provide it is to spend less time telling how and a little more time showing why.
  • Naive policies can replace workers' intrinsic motivation to do the right thing with an extrinsic motivation to ensure the company isn't sued or fined.
  • People with profit goals are not happier, and show increased anxiety, depression, and negative indicators, than those with purpose goals.
  • Satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals.
  • A healthy society and a healthy business begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product.

Part 3: The Type I Toolkit

Type I for Individuals: Nine Strategies for Awakening Your Motivation

  • To find what gives you flow, page yourself 40 random times in a week, and record what you're doing, how you're feeling, and whether you're in flow.
  • "A great person is a sentence." As you contemplate your purpose, craft yours, and don't let it be a muddled paragraph.
  • Ask yourself "Was I a little better today than I was yesterday?" Look for small measures of improvement to keep yourself motivated.
  • Create a "to don't" list, or enumerate the behaviors and practices that sap your energy, divert your focus, and ought to be avoided.
  • Deliberate practice seeks to maximize performance by repetition, seeking critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on where you need help.
  • As a compass for meaning and direction, answer in one sentence "What gets you up in the morning?" and "What keeps you up at night?"

Type I for Organizations: Thirteen Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group

  • Nearly everything that people do is commissioned, and so carve out a small island of non-commissioned work to flex your creativity.
  • To ease into a culture of 20 percent time, start with 10 percent time, for a limited period, and with a small group of receptive people.
  • Turn your next off-site into a "FedEx day" where something must be delivered, because real challenges invigorate more than controlled leisure.
  • Conduct an autonomy audit of your team, where you ask everyone to rate their autonomy over their task, time, team, and technique.
  • Leaders often know little about the experiences of the people working for them, but they will also do things differently if they see data.
  • Give yourself a performance review each month with performance and learning goals, and later identify where you're falling short.
  • For self-reviews, set some small goals so you will always accomplish some tasks, understand your work in the larger purpose, and be brutally honest.
  • Giving employees a way to acknowledge a coworker puts the feedback control in the hands of those closest to the activity.
  • To relinquish control, involve employees in goal-setting for buy-in, use non-controlling language like "think about" and "consider", and hold office hours.
  • Ask each person to answer "What is our organization's purpose?" because people won't be motivated to work if they don't know this purpose.
  • Employees using "they" suggests disengagement and even alienation, while "we" suggests they are part of something significant and meaningful.
  • If you think people in your organization are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn't to build tighter rules, but to hire new people.
  • To create flow in a team, have someone bored with his current assignment train someone else in skills he's already mastered, and then take on a harder assignment.
  • Don't ask focus on changing the whole organization. Pile up small wins, and worry less about changing everything than about doing something.
  • Take that first, subversive step. If things fail, don't say a word; but if things work out, tell others.
  • Sell your boss not on mastery, autonomy, and purpose, but on results; and so play down the means and play up the ends.

The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way

  • Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and focus on the work.
  • The most important aspect of any communication package is fairness.
  • Internal fairness is paying people commensurate with their colleagues; external fairness is paying people in line with similar work in similar companies.
  • Paying more than average is an elegant way to bypass "if-then" rewards, and to eliminate concerns about unfairness.
  • Use performance metrics that are wide-ranging, relevant, and hard to game.
  • When the payoff for reaching targets is modest, rather than massive, it's less likely to narrow people's focus or encourage taking the low road.