Book Summary: “Drive” by Daniel Pink

Drive is another popular book from the author of such insightful bestselling books as The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, Free Agent Nation, and A Whole New Mind. Subtitled The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Drive rebukes the long-standing belief that, after satisfying biological needs for survival, external rewards and punishments are the most important motivators for humans. Rather, Pink, drawing on four decades of scientific research on motivation, argues that internal or intrinsic rewards are the most important for enhancing performance and deepening satisfaction.

Pink calls the drive to survive Motivation 1.0, the drive to seek rewards and avoid punishment (commonly known as “the carrot and stick”) as Motivation 2.0, and the need to direct our own lives, learn and create new things. and do better for ourselves and the world as Motivation 3.0. She focuses on “the mismatch between what science knows and what business does” and examines what she purports to be the three elements of true motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Exploring some of the vast body of research on motivation, his thesis is that “organizations still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted in folklore rather than science.” . She argues that organizations continue to pursue practices such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures generally don’t work and often cause harm.

Motivation 2.0 is based on the premise that the way to improve performance, increase productivity and foster excellence is through extrinsic methods that reward the good and punish the bad. At heart there are two simple ideas: rewarding an activity will give you more and punishing it will give you less. However, Pink comments that many “real world” studies and business cases have shown that once money is eliminated as an issue (he states that “the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to to take money off the table”), carrots and sticks can accomplish the opposite of their intended goals.

Pink lists the seven reasons (“deadly flaws”) why the carrot and stick don’t work:

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivations
2. They can decrease performance.
3. They can squelch creativity.
4. They can displace good behavior
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive
7. They can encourage short-term thinking.

Unlike Motivation 2.0 and its reliance on extrinsic motivators, Motivation 3.0 is based on intrinsic motivation: the desire within ourselves that drives us to do the work we do and do it well. Motivation 3.0 relies on what Pink calls Type I behavior, which is fueled by intrinsic desires and relies on three “nutrients”: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Let’s briefly explore all three.

Regarding autonomy, Pink discussed the findings of researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who wrote that “autonomous motivation (think intrinsic) involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice, whereas controlled motivation (think in the extrinsic) involves behaving with the experience of pressure”. and demands toward specific outcomes that come from forces perceived as external to the self.” Pink writes that a sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance, in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and with whom they do it.However, encouraging autonomy does not mean discouraging accountability.

The second “nutrient” of Pink’s intrinsic motivation is mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. He writes that one source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people should do and what people can do. When what they have to do exceeds their abilities, the result is anxiety. When what they have to do is not up to their abilities, the result is boredom. Pink argues that control leads to compliance, but autonomy leads to commitment, and only commitment can produce mastery. Therefore, the goal of organizations, from a motivational perspective, should be to help employees master their jobs by aligning what an employee has to do and what he can (can) do.

Finally, Pink comments that while autonomy and mastery are essential, for proper balance and context, purpose is also needed. Self-employed employees working toward mastery perform at very high levels; but those who do it in the service of some greater goal can achieve even more. Motivation 2.0 fails to recognize purpose as a motivator and neglects a crucial part of who we are. But Motivation 3.0 seeks to recover this aspect of the human condition. “Purpose provides activation energy for living,” says psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

The central idea of ​​Drive is the mismatch between what science knows and what companies do, with Pink arguing that “the gap is wide” and “its existence is alarming”. Science shows that the secret to high performance is not our biological drive or our reward and punishment drive (carrot and stick), but our third drive: our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives (autonomy), to extend and expand our skills (domain), and make a contribution (purpose).