Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Traditionally carrot and stick type management has been used as a way to get employees to do what the company wants. This might work fine for routine mechanical tasks but not creative ones.

Carrot and stick motivation can extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity and dissuade good behaviors such as unethical behavior create addictions as well as encourage short term thinking.

There are tasks which really must be done where people might be “bribed” to do them, for these tasks explaining why the task is important, acknowledging it is boring plus giving people autonomy to do it as they want makes the task less painful.

Giving bonuses for work reduces intrinsic motivation where as giving random rewards afterwards does not reduce intrinsic motivation.

To boost the intrinsic motivation there are three elements.

• Autonomy :
  • over task – what they do,
  • over time – when they do it,
  • over team – who they do it with and over technique – how they do it
• Mastery :
  • is a mind set where you believe there are always things to improve on and is linked to when people are in flow – doing tasks which are slightly more challenging than you are capable of.
  • To achieve mastery requires:
    • effort,
    • grit and
    • deliberate practice.
  • Mastery is an asymptote, the closer you get to it the harder it is.
• Purpose :
  • people want to contribute to a cause greater and more enduring then themselves.
  • The goal is to make the world better – profit is just the catalysis rather than the objective,
  • what words do people use – if people say words like “we” when referring to the company they feel ownership unlike using words such as “they” and
  • policies such as allowing people to decide how they give back to the community or allowing people time to peruse their own interests

The book presented a few tools of which two of them particularly jumped out.

Flow test

• Which moment produce a feeling of “flow”? Where were you? What were you working on? Who were you with?
• Are certain time of the day more flow-friendly than others? How could you restructure your day based on your findings?
• How might you increase the number of optimal experiences and reduce the moment when you feel disengaged or distracted?
• If you’re having doubts about your job or career, what does this exercise tell you about your true source of intrinsic motivation?

Autonomy audit

• How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work – your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day?
• How much autonomy do you have over your time at work – for instance, when you arrive, when you live and how you allocate your hours each day?
• How much autonomy do you have over your team at work – that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?
• How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work – how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?