Drive

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink

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Book Summary

Ch: Introduction

Motivation 1.0: Biological drives our behavior. Humans and other animals ate to sate their hunger, drank to quench their thirst, and copulated to satisfy their carnal urges.

Ch 1: The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0

Carrots and Sticks: 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.

Adding certain kinds of extrinsic rewards on top of inherently interesting tasks can often dampen motivation and diminish performance.

Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; non-routine, more interesting work depends on self-direction.

Ch 2: Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don’t Work …

Rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work. And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes.

1. Intrinsic Motivation: People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.
2. High Performance: In many instances, contingent incentives—that cornerstone of how businesses attempt to motivate employees—may be “a losing proposition.”
3. Creativity: Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But “if-then” motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people’s focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.
   • Concern for outside rewards might actually hinder eventual success.
   • The “if-then” motivators that are the staple of most businesses often stifle, rather than stir, creative thinking.
4. Good Behavior: What is true is that mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks—deploying them without understanding the peculiar science of motivation—is a very dangerous game. When used in these situations, “if-then” rewards usually do more harm than good. By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve.
5. Unethical Behavior: Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
   • The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.
   • Contrast that approach with behavior sparked by intrinsic motivation. When the reward is the activity itself—deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best—there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road. In some sense, it’s impossible to act unethically because the person who’s disadvantaged isn’t a competitor but yourself.
   • Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
6. Addiction: While that dangled carrot isn’t all bad in all circumstances, in some instances it operates similar to a rock of crack cocaine and can induce behavior similar to that found around the craps table or roulette wheel—not exactly what we hope to achieve when we “motivate” our teammates and coworkers.
7. Short-Term Thinking: The very presence of goals may lead employees to focus myopically on short-term gains and to lose sight of the potential devastating long-term effects on the organization.
   • Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.

Ch 2A: … and the Special Circumstances When They Do

Routine Tasks

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.

But “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”

While such tangible, contingent rewards can often undermine intrinsic motivation and creativity, those drawbacks matter less here. The assignment neither inspires deep passion nor requires deep thinking. Carrots, in this case, won’t hurt and might help. And you’ll increase your chances of success by supplementing the poster-packing rewards with three important practices:

1. Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary.
2. Acknowledge that the task is boring.
3. Allow people to complete the task their own way.

Non-Routine Tasks

For work that requires more than just climbing, rung by rung, up a ladder of instructions, rewards are more perilous. The best way to avoid the seven deadly flaws of extrinsic motivators is to avoid them altogether or to downplay them significantly and instead emphasize the elements of deeper motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—that we’ll explore later in the book.

The best strategy is to provide a sense of urgency and significance—and then get out of the talent’s way.

The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.

In other words, where “if-then” rewards are a mistake, shift to “now that” rewards—as in “Now that you’ve finished the poster and it turned out so well, I’d like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch.”

First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies.

Second, provide useful information. Amabile has found that while controlling extrinsic motivators can clobber creativity, “informational or enabling motivators can be conducive” to it.

For creative, right-brain, heuristic tasks, you’re on shaky ground offering “if-then” rewards. You’re better off using “now that” rewards. And you’re best off if your “now that” rewards provide praise, feedback, and useful information.

Ch 3: Type I and Type X

Self-determination theory: 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. “If there’s anything [fundamental] about our nature, it’s the capacity for interest. Some things facilitate it. Some things undermine it,” Ryan explained during one of our conversations. Put another way, we’ve all got that third drive. It’s part of what it means to be human. But whether that aspect of our humanity emerges in our lives depends on whether the conditions around us support it.

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

Type A: A particular complex of personality traits, including excessive competition drive, aggressiveness, impatience, and a harrying sense of time urgency. Individuals displaying this pattern seem to be engaged in a chronic, ceaseless, and often fruitless struggle—with themselves, with others, with circumstances, with time, sometimes with life itself.

Type B: People displaying Type B behavior were rarely harried by life or made hostile by its demands. Type B people were just as intelligent, and frequently just as ambitious, as Type A’s. But they wore their ambition differently.

Type X behavior is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which that activity leads. 

Type I: The Motivation 3.0 operating system—the upgrade that’s needed to meet the new realities of how we organize, think about, and do what we do—depends on what I call Type I behavior:

• Type I behavior is fueled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the external rewards to which an activity leads and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself.
• At the center of Type X behavior is the second drive. At the center of Type I behavior is the third drive.
• For Type X’s, the main motivator is external rewards; any deeper satisfaction is welcome, but secondary.
• For Type I’s, the main motivator is the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are welcome, but mainly as a bonus.
• Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.

Ch 4: Autonomy

ROWE—a results-only work environment

• In a ROWE workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time—or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.
• “Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work. That’s why he’d always tried to give employees a long leash.

Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a one-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.

“Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice,” they write, “whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.”

Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.

According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.

The Four Essentials

Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.

1. Task
   • Autonomy over task is one of the essential aspects of the Motivation 3.0 approach to work.
   • Example: In the spring of 2008, Atlassian announced that for the next six months, the developers could spend 20 percent of their time—rather than just one intense day—working on any project they wanted.
2. Time
   • Without sovereignty over our time, it’s nearly impossible to have autonomy over our lives.
   • In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model.
3. Technique
   • Example: Zappos doesn’t monitor its customer service employees’ call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them.
4. Team
   • Enterprising souls might be able to scratch out some autonomy over task, time, and technique—but autonomy over team is a taller order. That’s one reason people are drawn to entrepreneurship—the chance to build a team of their own.
   • Although autonomy over team is the least developed of the four T’s, the ever-escalating power of social networks and the rise of mobile apps now make this brand of autonomy easier to achieve—and in ways that reach beyond a single organization.

Implementing Autonomy

Accountability: Encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging accountability. Whatever operating system is in place, people must be accountable for their work. But there are different ways to achieve this end, each built on different assumptions about who we are deep down.

Scaffolding: If we pluck people out of controlling environments, when they’ve known nothing else, and plop them in a ROWE or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they’ll struggle. Organizations must provide, as Richard Ryan puts it, “scaffolding” to help every employee find his footing to make the transition. 

Different aspects: What’s more, different individuals will prize different aspects of autonomy. Some might crave autonomy over a task; others might prefer autonomy over the team.

“The course of human history has always moved in the direction of greater freedom. And there’s a reason for that—because it’s in our nature to push for it,” Ryan told me. “If we were just plastic like [some] people think, this wouldn’t be happening. But somebody stands in front of a tank in China. Women, who’ve been denied autonomy, keep advocating for rights. This is the course of history. This is why ultimately human nature, if it ever realizes itself, will do so by becoming more autonomous.”

Ch 5: Mastery

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.

Where Motivation 2.0 sought compliance, Motivation 3.0 seeks engagement. 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.

Flow

• The highest, most satisfying experiences in people’s lives were when they were in flow.
• Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself the most delicious reward. That balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences. In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But more than that, they were engaged. They were, as the poet W. H. Auden wrote, “forgetting themselves in a function.”
• “The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences, or business.”

Goldilocks tasks

• Challenges that are not too hot and not too cold, neither overly difficult nor overly simple.
• When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom.
• Goldilocks tasks offer us the powerful experience of inhabiting the zone, of living on the knife’s edge between order and disorder,

It’s also possible to turn work into play. Some tasks at work don’t automatically provide surges of flow, yet still need to get done. So the shrewdest enterprises afford employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that bring a little bit of flow to otherwise mundane duties. “Even in low-autonomy jobs,” Wrzesniewski and Dutton write, “employees can create new domains for mastery.”

The three laws of Mastery

1. Mastery Is a Mindset
   • Dweck’s signature insight is that what people believe shapes what people achieve. Our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of our abilities—what she calls our “self-theories”—determine how we interpret our experiences and can set the boundaries on what we accomplish.
   • According to Dweck, people can hold two different views of their own intelligence. Those who have an “entity theory” believe that intelligence is just that—an entity. It exists within us, in a finite supply that we cannot increase. Those who subscribe to an “incremental theory” take a different view. They believe that while intelligence may vary slightly from person to person, it is ultimately something that, with effort, we can increase. To analogize to physical qualities, incremental theorists consider intelligence as something like strength. (Want to get stronger and more muscular? Start pumping iron.) Entity theorists view it as something more like height. (Want to get taller? You’re out of luck.)
   • In one view, intelligence is something you demonstrate; in the other, it’s something you develop.
   • Type X behavior often holds an entity theory of intelligence, prefers performance goals to learning goals, and disdains effort as a sign of weakness. Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters. Begin with one mindset, and mastery is impossible. Begin with the other, and it can be inevitable.
2. Mastery Is a Pain
   • The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets’ ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait known as “grit”—defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain.
   • “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.”
   • “Being a professional,” Julius Erving once said, “is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”
3. Mastery Is an Asymptote
   • You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cézanne, you can never touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully.

Oxygen of the soul: Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a serious psychiatric disorder. The experiment suggests that flow, the deep sense of engagement that Motivation 3.0 calls for, isn’t a nicety. It’s a necessity. We need it to survive. It is the oxygen of the soul.

Children careen from one flow moment to another, animated by a sense of joy, equipped with a mindset of possibility, and working with the dedication of a West Point cadet. They use their brains and their bodies to probe and draw feedback from the environment in an endless pursuit of mastery. Children seek out flow with the inevitability of a natural law. So should we all.

Ch 6: Purpose

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.

“Purpose provides activation energy for living,” psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi told me in an interview. “I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.”

We’re learning that the profit motive, potent though it is, can be an insufficient impetus for both individuals and organizations. An equally powerful source of energy, one we’ve often neglected or dismissed as unrealistic, is what we might call the “purpose motive.” This is the final big distinction between the two operating systems. Motivation 2.0 centered on profit maximization. Motivation 3.0 doesn’t reject profits, but it places equal emphasis on purpose maximization.

These “not only for profit” enterprises are a far cry from the “socially responsible” businesses that have been all the rage for the last fifteen years but have rarely delivered on their promise. The aims of these Motivation 3.0 companies are not to chase profit while trying to stay ethical and law-abiding. Their goal is to pursue purpose—and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.

Failing to understand this conundrum—that satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals—can lead sensible people down self-destructive paths. If people chase profit goals, reach those goals, and still don’t feel any better about their lives, one response is to increase the size and scope of the goals—to seek more money or greater outside validation. And that can “drive them down a road of further unhappiness thinking it’s the road to happiness,” Ryan said.

A healthy society—and healthy business organizations—begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product of its attainment.

The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.