A Book Review
I was asked to read several chapters from Daniel Pink’s book “DRiVE” for a class this year. When I picked it up, I was planning on skimming the chapters and reading summaries, but once I started, I couldn’t put it down. Drive is an incredibly fascinating exploration of what motivates humans to do what they do. Focusing on the working portion of the human experience, Pink bases his arguments on the simple idea that there is a major gap between what science knows and what business does. Pink's major critique is that the current business operating system largely fails to adequately incorporate enough intrinsic motivation into the workplace. Instead, the majority of the current business operating system relies heavily on extrinsically motivating forces in the form of rewards and punishments (motivation 2.0). When we think about rewards and punishments, we intuitively know that they are designed to increase employee motivation and productivity, but Pink spends the first part of the book contradicting this fallacy and explaining how and why extrinsically motivating forces have the inverse effect. Pink explains that traditional "if-then" rewards and punishments give us less of what we want and more of what we don't want. They crush intrinsic motivation, performance, creativity, and encourage unethical behavior, addiction, and shortsightedness.
Pink laments that extrinsic motivation has its uses in tasks that are mundane or algorithmic (tasks that follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion). However, he maintains that the current business operating system is based more on heuristic operations (tasks that require innovative and creative thinking) and that extrinsic motivation is no longer sufficient.
Pink spends the second part of the book detailing his upgrade (motivation 3.0) to the currently ineffective motivational system. Pink's new approach focuses on increasing the amount of intrinsic motivation in employees and helping them find a flow state where the work gets done because they are personally motivated to do so. Pink's approach focuses on three key elements of intrinsic motivation: autonomy (the desire to direct our own lives), mastery (the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters), and purpose (the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves). Pink argues that all three must be present for an employee to find the flow state and be truly motivated to do what they are doing.
When it comes to the application of these theories to strategy, what I find so interesting and enthralling is the simple idea that things are not what they seem. Just because the majority of people assume something to be effective or true, doesn't mean it is either. Everything must be based on data and research if it is going to be truly effective in practice. There are so many insightful nuggets of information in this book that one little article can’t do it justice. It’s a pretty quick read that can change the way you think about the world of business and the science of motivation. I highly recommend it.