LEADERSHIP LIBRARY
Drive
Daniel Pink
IN BRIEF
Organizations are typically built around a view of humans as slackers who only respond to extrinsic rewards and punishments. This ignores the intrinsic drive that most people have and that propels them toward creativity and mastery. Pink provides several suggestions for how to better leverage that motivation.
Key Concepts
Our organizational views on human motivation are built on outdated beliefs
“In our very early days—I mean very early days, say, fifty thousand years ago—the underlying assumption about human behavior was simple and true. We were trying to survive.” (p. 16)
“We also had a second drive—to seek reward and avoid punishment more broadly. And it was from this insight that a new operating system—call it Motivation 2.0—arose.” (p. 16)
“For as long as any of us can remember, we’ve configured our organizations and constructed our lives around its bedrock assumption: The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad.” (p. 17)
“Our current operating system has become far less compatible with, and at times downright antagonistic to: how we organize what we do; how we think about what we do; and how we do what we do.” (p. 20)
When extrinsic rewards are applied, they can undermine intrinsic motivation, especially for tasks requiring creativity
“The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.” (p. 33)
“In other words, rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work.” (p. 35)
“For routine tasks, which aren’t very interesting and don’t demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without the harmful side effects.” (p. 60)
Self-determination theory says that humans desire competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
“Together Deci and Ryan have fashioned what they call ‘self-determination theory (SDT).’ Many theories of behavior pivot around a particular human tendency: We’re keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags of psychosexual conflicts. SDT, by contrast, begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.” (p. 69)
The three elements on intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose
“The fundamentally autonomous quality of human nature is central to self-determination theory (SDT). As I explained in the previous chapter, Deci and Ryan cite autonomy as one of three basic human needs. And of the three, it’s the most important—the sun around which SDT’s planets orbit. (p. 87)
“Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. And this distinction leads to the second element of Type I behavior: mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters.” (p. 108)
“Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more. The most deeply motivated people—not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied—hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.” (p. 131)
Quotables
“Kahneman and others in the field of behavioral economics agreed with my professor that economics was the study of human economic behavior. They just believed that we’d placed too much emphasis on the economic and not enough on the human.” (p. 25)
“Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.” (p. 76)
“Type I behavior is a renewable resource.” (p. 78)
“Sure, some companies have oiled management’s gears, and others have sanded off its rough edges. But at its core this technology hasn’t changed much in more than a hundred years. Its paramount goal remains compliance, its central ethic remains control, and its chief tools remain extrinsic motivators. That leaves it largely out of sync with the nonroutine, right-brain abilities on which many of the world’s economies now depend.” (p. 86)
“Only engagement can produce mastery. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential in making one’s way in today’s economy.” (p. 109)
“Or as Deci put it, ‘The typical notion is this: You value something. You attain it. Then you’re better off as a function of it. But what we find is that there are certain things that if you value and if you attain them, you’re worse off as a result of it, not better off.’” (p. 142)
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