book-notes

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel Pink

Introduction

It was long assumed that only biological drives and extrinsic motivators (rewards and punishments from the environment) powered behavior.
Extrinsic rewards can deliver a short-term boost, but the effect can wear off and reduce a person’s longer-term motivation in a project.
Intrinsic rewards are more fragile than the other two, and need the right environment to survive.

Part 1: A New Operating System

Chapter 1: The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0

“Scientific management” treated workers as part in a complicated machine, which would respond to carrots and sticks as motivators.
The absence of extrinsic rewards creates job dissatisfaction, but their presence does not create satisfaction. Intrinsic rewards do.
The carrot and stick mentality is incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and how we do what we do.
Open source, low-profit LLCs, and social businesses reflect a shift from profit maximizing to purpose maximizing.
Scientific management assumed that we are purely rational, but we do things for self-seeking, self-actualizing reasons.
We classify work as either algorithmic or heuristic; the latter requires experimenting with possibilities to devise a novel solution.
Carrots and sticks work well for algorithmic tasks, but heuristic tasks require creativity, which requires intrinsic motivation.

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

The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, or to satisfy “baseline rewards.”
The Sawyer Effect says that rewards can diminish intrinsic motivation, and thereby diminish performance, creativity, and upstanding behavior.
Contingent and expected “if-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy, leading to long-term damage.
Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That is helpful for algorithmic work, but detrimental for heuristic work.
Like a paradox, those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards create a better state of mind to eventually receive them.
Intrinsic motivation, or the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, or absorbing, is essential for creativity.
Rewards can taint altruistic or moral tasks, turning them into pure transactions with no intrinsic reward.
Making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters means that some people will take the quickest way there, along the low road.
Rewards are addictive in that once offered, they’re expected for any similar task; and once the status quo, they must be increased.
Extrinsic motivators can reduce not just breadth but depth, fostering short-term thinking and ignoring the long-term.

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

Without healthy baseline rewards, such as wages, benefits, and so on, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.
Rewards do not undermine people’s intrinsic motivation for routine tasks, because there is no such motivation to undermine.
For creative tasks where “if-then” rewards are a mistake, focus on “now that” rewards, or introduce rewards after the job is done.
But repeated “now that” rewards can become expected “if then” entitlements, thereby reducing effective performance.
Also consider intangible rewards like praise, and feedback that provides useful information.

Chapter 3: Type I and Type X

Self-Determination Theory says that our innate needs are competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and when satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy.
When we use rewards to motivate, that’s when they’re most demotivating; the less salient they are, the better.
Theory X believes in the mediocrity of the masses, and so mediocrity becomes the ceiling of what you can achieve.
Theory Y says that an interest in work is natural, creativity and ingenuity abound, and people will accept and even seek responsibility.
Type X people are driven by external rewards and deeper satisfaction is welcome but secondary.
Type I people are motivated by the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are simply a welcome bonus.
Type I’s almost always perform Type X’s in the long run, but an intense focus on extrinsic rewards can deliver fast results in the short term.
Type I’s like recognition because it is a form of feedback, but for Type X’s, recognition is a goal in itself.
Type I’s have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than Type X’s.

Part 2: The Three Elements

Chapter 4: Autonomy

A ROWE, or results-only work environment, requires that work gets done, but doesn’t focus on how, where, or when it’s done.
Autonomy is different from independence; it means acting with choice, which means it can happen while interdependent with others.
Autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.
As a boss, see issues from the employee’s perspective, give meaningful feedback, provide choice over what to do and how to do it, and encourage taking on new projects.
Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
William McKnight, the founder of 3M, had a simple credo: “Hire good people, and leave them alone.”
For nonroutine tasks, the link between how much time someone spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable.
Autonomy over your team is a tall order, which is one reason why people are drawn to entrepreneurship.
People working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams.
Encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging accountability; people must always be accountable for their work.
Assume that people want to be accountable, and that making sure they have control over their task, time, technique, and team begets this.

Chapter 5: Mastery

Only engagement can produce mastery, which is important also in our personal lives, where personal fulfillment is paramount.
In flow, the goals are clear, the feedback is immediate, and the task difficulty is barely beyond your ability, so that the effort is its own reward.
One study has shown that the urge to master something new and engaging is the best predictor for productivity.
When what must do exceeds one’s capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what must do is below one’s capabilities, the result is boredom.
Shrewd enterprises give employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that bring some flow to otherwise mundane duties.
Mastery is a mindset, and our beliefs about ourselves and our abilities can set the abilities on what we accomplish.
Incremental theorists see intelligence as malleable, like strength; entity theorists see it as fixed, like height.
A learning goal, like speaking French, leads to mastery because one doesn’t have to prove any proficiency in order to keep trying, unlike a performance goal.
Type X embraces performance goals, prefers performance goals, and sees effort as weakness.
Type I embraces learning goals, prizes learning gaols, and sees effort as a way to improve.
Mastery requires grit, which is a perseverance and passion for long term goals, especially through the painful parts.
Master is an asymptote in that you can never fully attain it, but in the end mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.
People are more likely to reach flow at work, because it offers clear goals, immediate feedback, and challenges matched to our abilities.
We are motivated most by making progress, and so organizations should create conditions for it, shine a light on it, and celebrate it.

Chapter 6: Purpose

Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels, but achieve more in the purpose of some greater objective.
As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies.
Businesses like “for benefit” organizations, B corps, and low-profit LLCs pursue purpose, and use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.
Humanize what people say, and you may well humanize what they do.
It’s often difficult to do something exceptionally well if we don’t know the reasons we’re doing it in the first place.
Workers thirst for context, and a powerful way to provide it is to spend less time telling how and a little more time showing why.
Naive policies can replace workers’ intrinsic motivation to do the right thing with an extrinsic motivation to ensure the company isn’t sued or fined.
People with profit goals are not happier, and show increased anxiety, depression, and negative indicators, than those with purpose goals.
Satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals.
A healthy society and a healthy business begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product.

Part 3: The Type I Toolkit

Type I for Individuals: Nine Strategies for Awakening Your Motivation

To find what gives you flow, page yourself 40 random times in a week, and record what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, and whether you’re in flow.
“A great person is a sentence.” As you contemplate your purpose, craft yours, and don’t let it be a muddled paragraph.
Ask yourself “Was I a little better today than I was yesterday?” Look for small measures of improvement to keep yourself motivated.
Create a “to don’t” list, or enumerate the behaviors and practices that sap your energy, divert your focus, and ought to be avoided.
Deliberate practice seeks to maximize performance by repetition, seeking critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on where you need help.
As a compass for meaning and direction, answer in one sentence “What gets you up in the morning?” and “What keeps you up at night?”

Type I for Organizations: Thirteen Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group

Nearly everything that people do is commissioned, and so carve out a small island of non-commissioned work to flex your creativity.
To ease into a culture of 20 percent time, start with 10 percent time, for a limited period, and with a small group of receptive people.
Turn your next off-site into a “FedEx day” where something must be delivered, because real challenges invigorate more than controlled leisure.
Conduct an autonomy audit of your team, where you ask everyone to rate their autonomy over their task, time, team, and technique.
Leaders often know little about the experiences of the people working for them, but they will also do things differently if they see data.
Give yourself a performance review each month with performance and learning goals, and later identify where you’re falling short.
For self-reviews, set some small goals so you will always accomplish some tasks, understand your work in the larger purpose, and be brutally honest.
Giving employees a way to acknowledge a coworker puts the feedback control in the hands of those closest to the activity.
To relinquish control, involve employees in goal-setting for buy-in, use non-controlling language like “think about” and “consider”, and hold office hours.
Ask each person to answer “What is our organization’s purpose?” because people won’t be motivated to work if they don’t know this purpose.
Employees using “they” suggests disengagement and even alienation, while “we” suggests they are part of something significant and meaningful.
If you think people in your organization are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn’t to build tighter rules, but to hire new people.
To create flow in a team, have someone bored with his current assignment train someone else in skills he’s already mastered, and then take on a harder assignment.
Don’t ask focus on changing the whole organization. Pile up small wins, and worry less about changing everything than about doing something.
Take that first, subversive step. If things fail, don’t say a word; but if things work out, tell others.
Sell your boss not on mastery, autonomy, and purpose, but on results; and so play down the means and play up the ends.

The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way

Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and focus on the work.
The most important aspect of any communication package is fairness.
Internal fairness is paying people commensurate with their colleagues; external fairness is paying people in line with similar work in similar companies.
Paying more than average is an elegant way to bypass “if-then” rewards, and to eliminate concerns about unfairness.
Use performance metrics that are wide-ranging, relevant, and hard to game.
When the payoff for reaching targets is modest, rather than massive, it’s less likely to narrow people’s focus or encourage taking the low road.