3. “Conduct autopsies, without blame.”
4. “Build ‘red flag’ mechanisms.” In other words, make it easy for employees and customers to speak up when they identify a problem.
More Info: Collins’s website, www.jimcollins.com, contains more information about his work, as well as excellent diagnostic tools, guides, and videos.
CALI RESSLER AND JODY THOMPSON
Who: These two former human resources professionals at Best Buy persuaded their CEO to experiment with a radical new approach to organizing work. They wrote a book about their experiences, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, and now run their own consultancy.
Big Idea: The results-only work environment. ROWE, described in Chapter 4, affords employees complete autonomy over when, where, and how they do their work. The only thing that matters is results.
Type I Insight: Among the basic tenets of ROWE:“People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or their company’s time.”
“Employees have the freedom to work any way they want.”
“Every meeting is optional.”
“There are no work schedules.”
More Info: You can learn more about ROWE at their website: www.culturerx.com.
GARY HAMEL
Who: “The world’s leading expert on business strategy,” according to BusinessWeek. He’s the coauthor of the influential book Competing for the Future, a professor of the London Business School, and the director of the California-based MLab, where he’s spearheading the pursuit of “moon shots for management”—a set of huge challenges to reform the theory and practice of running organizations.
Big Idea: Management is an outdated technology. Hamel likens management to the internal combustion engine—a technology that has largely stopped evolving. Put a 1960s-era CEO in a time machine and transport him to 2010, Hamel says, and that CEO “would find a great many of today’s management rituals little changed from those that governed corporate life a generation or two ago.” Small wonder, Hamel explains. “Most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War.” The solution? A radical overhaul of this aging technology.
Type I Insight: “The next time you’re in a meeting and folks are discussing how to wring another increment of performance out of your workforce, you might ask: ‘To what end, and to whose benefit, are our employees being asked to give of themselves? Have we committed ourselves to a purpose that is truly deserving of their initiative, imagination, and passion?’ ”
More Info: Hamel’s The Future of Management (written with Bill Breen) is an important read. For more on Hamel’s ideas and research, see www.garyhamel.com and www.managementlab.org.
The Type I Fitness Plan: Four Tips for Getting (and Staying) Motivated to Exercise
On the jacket of this book is a runner—and that’s no accident. Running can have all the elements of Type I behavior. It’s autonomous. It allows you to seek mastery. And the people who keep at it, and enjoy it most, often run toward a greater purpose—testing their limits or staying healthy and vital. To help you bring the spirit of intrinsic motivation out of the office and classroom and into another realm of your life, here are four tips for staying fit the Type I way.
Set your own goals. Don’t accept some standardized, cookie-cutter exercise plan. Create one that’s tailored to your needs and fitness level. (You can work with a professional on this, but you make the final calls.) Equally important, set the right kinds of goals. Ample research in behavioral science shows that people who seek to lose weight for extrinsic reasons—to slim down for a wedding or to look better at a class reunion—often reach their goals. And then they gain the weight back as soon as the target event ends. Meanwhile, people who pursue more intrinsic goals—to get fit in order to feel good or to stay healthy for their family—make slower progress at first, but achieve significantly better results in the long term.
Ditch the treadmill. Unless you really like treadmills, that is. If trudging to the gym feels like a dreary obligation, find a form of fitness you enjoy—that produces those intoxicating moments of flow. Gather some friends for an informal game of tennis or basketball, join an amateur league, go for walks at a local park, dance for a half-hour, or play with your kids. Use the Sawyer Effect to your advantage—and turn your work(out) into play.
Keep mastery in mind. Getting better at something provides a great source of renewable energy. So pick an activity in which you can improve over time. By continually increasing the difficulty of what you take on—think Goldilocks—and setting more audacious challenges for yourself as time passes, you can renew that energy and stay motivated.
Reward yourself the right way. If you’re really struggling, consider a quick experiment with Stickk (www.stickk.com), a website in which you publicly commit to a goal and must hand over money—to a friend, a charity, or an “anti-charity”—if you fail to reach it. But in general, don’t bribe yourself with “if-then” rewards—like “If I exercise four times this week, then I’ll buy myself a new shirt.” They can backfire. But the occasional “now that” reward? Not a problem. So if you’ve swum the distance you hoped to this week, there’s no harm in treating yourself to a massage afterward. It won’t hurt. And it might feel good.
Drive: The Recap
This book has covered a lot of ground—and you might not be able to instantly recall everything in it. So here you’ll find three different summaries of Drive. Think of it as your talking points, refresher course, or memory jogger.
TWITTER SUMMARYg
Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.
COCKTAIL PARTY SUMMARYh
When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system—which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators—doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER SUMMARY
Introduction: The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci
Human beings have a biological drive that includes hunger, thirst, and sex. We also have another long-recognized drive: to respond to rewards and punishments in our environment. But in the middle of the twentieth century, a few scientists began discovering that humans also have a third drive—what some call “intrinsic motivation.” For several decades, behavioral scientists have been figuring out the dynamics and explaining the power of our third drive. Alas, business hasn’t caught up to this new understanding. If we want to strengthen our companies, elevate our lives, and improve the world, we need to close the gap between what science knows and what business does.
PART ONE. A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM
Chapter 1. The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0
Societies, like computers, have operating systems—a set of mostly invisible instructions and protocols on which everything runs. The first human operating system—call it Motivation 1.0—was all about survival. Its successor, Motivation 2.0, was built around external rewards and punishments. That worked fine for routine twentieth-century tasks. But in the twenty-first century, Motivation 2.0 is proving incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and how we do what we do. We need an upgrade.
Chapter 2. Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don’t Work . . .
When carrots and sticks encounter our third drive, strange things begin to happen. Traditional “if-then” rewards can give us less of what we want: They can extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity, and crowd out good behavior. They can also give
us more of what we don’t want: They can encourage unethical behavior, create addictions, and foster short-term thinking. These are the bugs in our current operating system.
Chapter 2a. . . . and the Special Circumstances When They Do
Carrots and sticks aren’t all bad. They can be effective for rule-based routine tasks—because there’s little intrinsic motivation to undermine and not much creativity to crush. And they can be more effective still if those giving such rewards offer a rationale for why the task is necessary, acknowledge that it’s boring, and allow people autonomy over how they complete it. For nonroutine conceptual tasks, rewards are more perilous—particularly those of the “if-then” variety. But “now that” rewards—noncontingent rewards given after a task is complete—can sometimes be okay for more creative, right-brain work, especially if they provide useful information about performance.
Chapter 3. Type I and Type X
Motivation 2.0 depended on and fostered Type X behavior—behavior fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones and concerned less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which an activity leads. Motivation 3.0, the upgrade that’s necessary for the smooth functioning of twenty-first-century business, depends on and fosters Type I behavior. Type I behavior concerns itself less with the external rewards an activity brings and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself. For professional success and personal fulfillment, we need to move ourselves and our colleagues from Type X to Type I. The good news is that Type I’s are made, not born—and Type I behavior leads to stronger performance, greater health, and higher overall well-being.
PART TWO. THE THREE ELEMENTS
Chapter 4. Autonomy
Our “default setting” is to be autonomous and self-directed. Unfortunately, circumstances—including outdated notions of “management”—often conspire to change that default setting and turn us from Type I to Type X. To encourage Type I behavior, and the high performance it enables, the first requirement is autonomy. People need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with), and technique (how they do it). Companies that offer autonomy, sometimes in radical doses, are outperforming their competitors.
Chapter 5. Mastery
While Motivation 2.0 required compliance, Motivation 3.0 demands engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery—becoming better at something that matters. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential to making one’s way in the economy. Mastery begins with “flow”—optimal experiences when the challenges we face are exquisitely matched to our abilities. Smart workplaces therefore supplement day-to-day activities with “Goldilocks tasks”—not too hard and not too easy. But mastery also abides by three peculiar rules. Mastery is a mindset: It requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable. Mastery is a pain: It demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice. And mastery is an asymptote: It’s impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.
Chapter 6. Purpose
Humans, by their nature, seek purpose—a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional businesses have long considered purpose ornamental—a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn’t get in the way of the important things. But that’s changing—thanks in part to the rising tide of aging baby boomers reckoning with their own mortality. In Motivation 3.0, purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle. Within organizations, this new “purpose motive” is expressing itself in three ways: in goals that use profit to reach purpose; in words that emphasize more than self-interest; and in policies that allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms. This move to accompany profit maximization with purpose maximization has the potential to rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.
Drive: The Glossary
A new approach to motivation requires a new vocabulary for talking about it. Here’s your official Drive dictionary.
Baseline rewards: Salary, contract payments, benefits, and a few perks that represent the floor for compensation. If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation or the anxiety of her circumstance, making motivation of any sort extremely difficult.
FedEx Days: Created by the Australian software company Atlassian, these one-day bursts of autonomy allow employees to tackle any problem they want—and then show the results to the rest of the company at the end of twenty-four hours. Why the name? Because you have to deliver something overnight.
Goldilocks tasks: The sweet spot where tasks are neither too easy nor too hard. Essential to reaching the state of “flow” and to achieving mastery.
“If-then” rewards: Rewards offered as contingencies—as in, “If you do this, then you’ll get that.” For routine tasks, “if-then” rewards can sometimes be effective. For creative, conceptual tasks, they invariably do more harm than good.
Mastery asymptote: The knowledge that full mastery can never be realized, which is what makes its pursuit simultaneously alluring and frustrating.
Motivation 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0: The motivational operating systems, or sets of assumptions and protocols about how the world works and how humans behave, that run beneath our laws, economic arrangements, and business practices. Motivation 1.0 presumed that humans were biological creatures, struggling for survival. Motivation 2.0 presumed that humans also responded to rewards and punishments in their environment. Motivation 3.0, the upgrade we now need, presumes that humans also have a third drive—to learn, to create, and to better the world.
Nonroutine work: Creative, conceptual, right-brain work that can’t be reduced to a set of rules. Today, if you’re not doing this sort of work, you won’t be doing what you’re doing much longer.
“Now that” rewards: Rewards offered after a task has been completed—as in “Now that you’ve done such a great job, let’s acknowledge the achievement.” “Now that” rewards, while tricky, are less perilous for nonroutine tasks than “if-then” rewards.
Results-only work environment (ROWE): The brainchild of two American consultants, a ROWE is a workplace in which employees don’t have schedules. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time or any time. They just have to get their work done.
Routine work: Work that can be reduced to a script, a spec sheet, a formula, or a set of instructions. External rewards can be effective in motivating routine tasks. But because such algorithmic, rule-based, left-brain work has become easier to send offshore and to automate, this type of work has become less valuable and less important in advanced economies.
Sawyer Effect: A weird behavioral alchemy inspired by the scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom and friends whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence. This effect has two aspects. The negative: Rewards can turn play into work. The positive: Focusing on mastery can turn work into play.
20 percent time: An initiative in place at a few companies in which employees can spend 20 percent of their time working on any project they choose.
Type I behavior: A way of thinking and an approach to life built around intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivators. It is powered by our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Type X behavior: Behavior that is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones and that concerns itself less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which that activity leads.
The Drive Discussion Guide: Twenty Conversation Starters to Keep You Thinking and Talking
These days authors might get the first word. But they don’t—and shouldn’t—get the last word. That’s your job. So now that you’ve read this book, go out and laud or lash it on your blog or your favorite social networking site. But if you want to make the ideas in Drive truly come t
o life, talk them over in person—with some colleagues from work, friends at school, or your book club. That’s how the world changes—conversation by conversation. Here are twenty questions to get your conversation going. 1. Has Pink persuaded you about the gap between what science knows and what organizations do? Do you agree that we need to upgrade our motivational operating system? Why or why not?
2. How has Motivation 2.0 affected your experiences at school, at work, or in family life? If Motivation 3.0 had been the prevailing ethic when you were young, how would your experiences have differed?
3. Do you consider yourself more Type I or Type X? Why? Think of three people in your life (whether at home, work, or school). Are they more Type I or Type X? What leads you to your conclusions?
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