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Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink
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The New York Times bestseller that gives readers a paradigm—shattering new way to think about motivation.
Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose-and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.
- Sales Rank: #837 in Books
- Brand: Baker and Taylor
- Model: 16293927
- Published on: 2011-04-05
- Released on: 2011-04-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.97" h x .62" w x 5.99" l, .59 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Pink makes a convincing case that organizations ignore intrinsic motivation at their peril."
-Scientific American
"Persuasive . . .Harnessing the power of intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic remuneration can be thoroughly satisfying and infinitely more rewarding."
-Miami Herald
"These lessons are worth repeating, and if more companies feel emboldened to follow Mr. Pink's advice, then so much the better."
-Wall Street Journal
"Pink is rapidly acquiring international guru status . . . He is an engaging writer, who challenges and provokes."
-Financial Times
"Pink's ideas deserve a wide hearing. Corporate boards, in fact, could do well by kicking out their pay consultants for an hour and reading Pink's conclusions instead."
-Forbes
"Pink's deft traversal of research at the intersection of psychology and economics make this a worthwhile read-no sticks necessary."
-SEED
"[Pink] continues his engaging exploration of how we work."
-Inc. Magazine
"Pink's a gifted writer who turns even the heaviest scientific study into something digestible-and often amusing-without losing his intellectual punch."
-New York Post
"A worthwhile read. It reminds us that those of us on the right side of the brain are driven furthest and fastest in pursuit of what we love."
-Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Pink's analysis--and new model--of motivation offers tremendous insight into our deepest nature."
-Publishers Weekly
"Important reading...an integral addition to a growing body of literature that argues for a radical shift in how businesses operate."
-Kirkus
"Drive is the rare book that will get you to think and inspire you to act. Pink makes a strong, science-based case for rethinking motivation--and then provides the tools you need to transform your life."
-Dr. Mehmet Oz, co-author of YOU: The Owners Manual
About the Author
Daniel H. Pink is the author of four provocative books -- including the long-running New York Times bestseller, A Whole New Mind, and the #1 New York Time bestseller, Drive. His books have been translated into 33 languages.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
The Puzzling Puzzles ofHarry Harlow and Edward Deci
In the middle of the last century, two young scientists conductedexperiments that should have changed the world— but did not.Harry F. Harlow was a professor of psychology at the Universityof Wisconsin who, in the 1940s, established one of the world’s firstlaboratories for studying primate behavior. One day in 1949, Harlowand two colleagues gathered eight rhesus monkeys for a two- weekexperiment on learning. The researchers devised a simple mechanicalpuzzle like the one pictured on the next page. Solving it requiredthree steps: pull out the vertical pin, undo the hook, and lift thehinged cover. Pretty easy for you and me, far more challenging for athirteen- pound lab monkey.
Harlow’s puzzle in the starting (left) and solved (right) positions.
The experimenters placed the puzzles in the monkeys’ cages toobserve how they reacted— and to prepare them for tests of theirproblem- solving prowess at the end of the two weeks. But almostimmediately, something strange happened. Unbidden by any outsideurging and unprompted by the experimenters, the monkeys beganplaying with the puzzles with focus, determination, and what lookedlike enjoyment. And in short order, they began figuring out how thecontraptions worked. By the time Harlow tested the monkeys ondays 13 and 14 of the experiment, the primates had become quiteadept. They solved the puzzles frequently and quickly; two- thirds ofthe time they cracked the code in less than sixty seconds.
Now, this was a bit odd. Nobody had taught the monkeys howto remove the pin, slide the hook, and open the cover. Nobody hadrewarded them with food, affection, or even quiet applause whenthey succeeded. And that ran counter to the accepted notions of howprimates— including the bigger- brained, less hairy primates knownas human beings— behaved.
Scientists then knew that two main drives powered behavior. Thefirst was the biological drive. Humans and other animals ate to satetheir hunger, drank to quench their thirst, and copulated to satisfytheir carnal urges. But that wasn’t happening here. “Solution did notlead to food, water, or sex gratification,” Harlow reported.1But the only other known drive also failed to explain the monkeys’peculiar behavior. If biological motivations came from within,this second drive came from without— the rewards and punishmentsthe environment delivered for behaving in certain ways. This wascertainly true for humans, who responded exquisitely to such externalforces. If you promised to raise our pay, we’d work harder. If youheld out the prospect of getting an A on the test, we’d study longer.If you threatened to dock us for showing up late or for incorrectlycompleting a form, we’d arrive on time and tick every box. But thatdidn’t account for the monkeys’ actions either. As Harlow wrote, andyou can almost hear him scratching his head, “The behavior obtainedin this investigation poses some interesting questions for motivationtheory, since significant learning was attained and efficient performancemaintained without resort to special or extrinsic incentives.”What else could it be?
To answer the question, Harlow offered a novel theory— whatamounted to a third drive: “The performance of the task,” he said,“provided intrinsic reward.” The monkeys solved the puzzles simplybecause they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it.The joy of the task was its own reward.
If this notion was radical, what happened next only deepened theconfusion and controversy. Perhaps this newly discovered drive—Harlow eventually called it “intrinsic motivation”— was real. Butsurely it was subordinate to the other two drives. If the monkeyswere rewarded— with raisins!— for solving the puzzles, they’d nodoubt perform even better. Yet when Harlow tested that approach,the monkeys actually made more errors and solved the puzzles lessfrequently. “Introduction of food in the present experiment,” Harlowwrote, “served to disrupt performance, a phenomenon not reportedin the literature.”
Now, this was really odd. In scientific terms, it was akin to rollinga steel ball down an inclined plane to measure its velocity—only to watch the ball fl oat into the air instead. It suggested thatour understanding of the gravitational pulls on our behavior wasinadequate— that what we thought were fixed laws had plenty ofloopholes. Harlow emphasized the “strength and persistence” of themonkeys’ drive to complete the puzzles. Then he noted:It would appear that this drive . . . may be as basic and strongas the [other] drives. Furthermore, there is some reason tobelieve that [it] can be as efficient in facilitating learning.2
At the time, however, the prevailing two drives held a tight grip onscientific thinking. So Harlow sounded the alarm. He urged scientiststo “close down large sections of our theoretical junkyard” andoffer fresher, more accurate accounts of human behavior.3 He warnedthat our explanation of why we did what we did was incomplete. Hesaid that to truly understand the human condition, we had to takeaccount of this third drive.
Then he pretty much dropped the whole idea.Rather than battle the establishment and begin offering a morecomplete view of motivation, Harlow abandoned this contentiousline of research and later became famous for studies on the scienceof affection.4 His notion of this third drive bounced around the psychologicalliterature, but it remained on the periphery— of behavioralscience and of our understanding of ourselves. It would be twodecades before another scientist picked up the thread that Harlowhad so provocatively left on that Wisconsin laboratory table.In the summer of 1969, Edward Deci was a Carnegie Mellon Universitypsychology graduate student in search of a dissertation topic.Deci, who had already earned an MBA from Wharton, was intriguedby motivation but suspected that scholars and businesspeople hadmisunderstood it. So, tearing a page from the Harlow playbook, heset out to study the topic with the help of a puzzle.
Deci chose the Soma puzzle cube, a then popular Parker Brothersoffering that, thanks to YouTube, retains something of a cultfollowing today. The puzzle, shown below, consists of seven plasticpieces— six comprising four one- inch cubes, one comprising threeone- inch cubes. Players can assemble the seven pieces into a few millionpossible combinations— from abstract shapes to recognizableobjects.
The seven pieces of the Soma puzzle unassembled (left) and then fashioned into one ofseveral million possible configurations
For the study, Deci divided participants, male and female universitystudents, into an experimental group (what I’ll call GroupA) and a control group (what I’ll call Group B). Each participated inthree one- hour sessions held on consecutive days.
Here’s how the sessions worked: Each participant entered a roomand sat at a table on top of which were the seven Soma puzzle pieces,drawings of three puzzle configurations, and copies of Time, The NewYorker, and Playboy. (Hey, it was 1969.) Deci sat on the opposite endof the table to explain the instructions and to time performance witha stopwatch.
In the first session, members of both groups had to assemble theSoma pieces to replicate the configurations before them. In the secondsession, they did the same thing with different drawings— onlythis time Deci told Group A that they’d be paid $1 (the equivalentof nearly $6 today) for every configuration they successfully reproduced.Group B, meanwhile, got new drawings but no pay. Finally,in the third session, both groups received new drawings and had toreproduce them for no compensation, just as in session one. (See thetable below.)
The twist came midway through each session. After a participanthad assembled the Soma puzzle pieces to match two of the threedrawings, Deci halted the proceedings. He said that he was going togive them a fourth drawing—but to choose the right one, he neededto feed their completion times into a computer. And— this being thelate 1960s, when room- straddling mainframes were the norm anddesktop PCs were still a decade away— that meant he had to leavefor a little while.
On the way out, he said, “I shall be gone only a few minutes, youmay do whatever you like while I’m gone.” But Deci wasn’t reallyplugging numbers into an ancient teletype. Instead, he walked toan adjoining room connected to the experiment room by a one- waywindow. Then, for exactly eight minutes, he watched what peopledid when left alone. Did they continue fiddling with the puzzle,perhaps attempting to reproduce the third drawing? Or did they dosomething else— page through the magazines, check out the centerfold,stare into space, catch a quick nap?
In the first session, not surprisingly, there wasn’t much differencebetween what the Group A and Group B participants did duringthat secretly watched eight- minute free- choice period. Both continuedplaying with the puzzle, on average, for between three and ahalf and four minutes, suggesting they found it at least somewhatinteresting.
On the second day, during which Group A participants were paidfor each successful configuration and Group B participants were not, theunpaid group behaved mostly as they had during the first free- choiceperiod. But the paid group suddenly got really interested in Soma puzzles.On average, the people in Group A spent more than five minutesmessing with the puzzle, perhaps getting a head start on that thirdchallenge or gearing up for the chance to earn some beer money whenDeci returned. This makes intuitive sense, right? It’s consistent withwhat we believe about motivation: Reward me and I’ll work harder.Yet what happened on the third day confirmed Deci’s own suspicionsabout the peculiar workings of motivation— and gently calledinto question a guiding premise of modern life. This time, Deci toldthe participants in Group A that there was only enough money topay them for one day and that this third session would therefore beunpaid. Then things unfolded just as before— two puzzles, followedby Deci’s interruption.
During the ensuing eight- minute free- choice period, the subjectsin the never- been- paid Group B actually played with the puzzlefor a little longer than they had in previous sessions. Maybe theywere becoming ever more engaged; maybe it was just a statisticalquirk. But the subjects in Group A, who previously had been paid,responded differently. They now spent significantly less time playingwith the puzzle— not only about two minutes less than duringtheir paid session, but about a full minute less than in the firstsession when they initially encountered, and obviously enjoyed, thepuzzles.
In an echo of what Harlow discovered two decades earlier, Decirevealed that human motivation seemed to operate by laws that rancounter to what most scientists and citizens believed. From the officeto the playing field, we knew what got people going. Rewards—especially cold, hard cash— intensified interest and enhanced performance.What Deci found, and then confirmed in two additionalstudies he conducted shortly thereafter, was almost the opposite.“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, thesubjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” he wrote.5 Rewardscan deliver a short- term boost— just as a jolt of caffeine can keepyou cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off— and,worse, can reduce a person’s longer- term motivation to continue theproject.
Human beings, Deci said, have an “inherent tendency to seekout novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities,to explore, and to learn.” But this third drive was more fragile thanthe other two; it needed the right environment to survive. “Onewho is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivationin children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate onexternal- control systems such as monetary rewards,” he wrote in afollow- up paper.6 Thus began what for Deci became a lifelong questto rethink why we do what we do— a pursuit that sometimes puthim at odds with fellow psychologists, got him fired from a businessschool, and challenged the operating assumptions of organizationseverywhere.
“It was controversial,” Deci told me one spring morning fortyyears after the Soma experiments. “Nobody was expecting rewardswould have a negative effect.”
This is a book about motivation. I will show that much of whatwe believe about the subject just isn’t so— and that the insights thatHarlow and Deci began uncovering a few decades ago come muchcloser to the truth. The problem is that most businesses haven’tcaught up to this new understanding of what motivates us. Too manyorganizations— not just companies, but governments and nonprofitsas well— still operate from assumptions about human potential andindividual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rootedmore in folklore than in science. They continue to pursue practicessuch as short- term incentive plans and pay- for- performance schemesin the face of mounting evidence that such measures usually don’twork and often do harm. Worse, these practices have infiltrated ourschools, where we ply our future workforce with iPods, cash, andpizza coupons to “incentivize” them to learn. Something has gonewrong.
The good news is that the solution stands before us— in thework of a band of behavioral scientists who have carried on the pioneeringefforts of Harlow and Deci and whose quiet work over thelast half- century offers us a more dynamic view of human motivation.For too long, there’s been a mismatch between what scienceknows and what business does. The goal of this book is to repair thatbreach.
Drive has three parts. Part One will look at the fl aws in ourreward- and- punishment system and propose a new way to thinkabout motivation. Chapter 1 will examine how the prevailing viewof motivation is becoming incompatible with many aspects of contemporarybusiness and life. Chapter 2 will reveal the seven reasonswhy carrot- and- stick extrinsic motivators often produce theopposite of what they set out to achieve. (Following that is a shortaddendum, Chapter 2a, that shows the special circumstances whencarrots and sticks actually can be effective.) Chapter 3 will introducewhat I call “Type I” behavior, a way of thinking and an approach tobusiness grounded in the real science of human motivation and poweredby our third drive— our innate need to direct our own lives, tolearn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and ourworld.
Part Two will examine the three elements of Type I behavior andshow how individuals and organizations are using them to improveperformance and deepen satisfaction. Chapter 4 will explore autonomy,our desire to be self- directed. Chapter 5 will look at mastery,our urge to get better and better at what we do. Chapter 6 willexplore purpose, our yearning to be part of something larger thanourselves.
Part Three, the Type I Toolkit, is a comprehensive set of resourcesto help you create settings in which Type I behavior can fl ourish.Here you’ll find everything from dozens of exercises to awakenmotivation in yourself and others, to discussion questions for yourbook club, to a supershort summary of Drive that will help youfake your way through a cocktail party. And while this book ismostly about business, in this section I’ll offer some thoughts abouthow to apply these concepts to education and to our lives outside ofwork.
But before we get down to all that, let’s begin with a thoughtexperiment, one that requires going back in time— to the days whenJohn Major was Britain’s prime minister, Barack Obama was a skinnyyoung law professor, Internet connections were dial- up, and a blackberrywas still just a fruit.
Most helpful customer reviews
4442 of 4649 people found the following review helpful.
Biased and selective presentation of important ideas
By Wally Bock
Before plunking down your credit card for a copy of Drive, by Dan Pink, consider making do with just his TED talk. The talk contains the substance of this book without the excess padding.
The book has about 250 pages. One hundred fifty or so of those are for the basic content. It includes the Introduction and Parts I and II (chapters one through six).
The other hundred pages are a "Toolkit." This includes some material that didn't seem to fit anywhere else, a glossary, a recap of Drive, twenty conversation starters (useful at cocktail parties), a reading list, and a fitness plan. That's forty percent of the book. And none of it helps you put what you've read to work.
The core points of the book are covered in the TED talk. You can listen to it in about fifteen minutes or read it in about ten. You won't get the fitness plan or the conversation starters. You will get the essence of Pink's message.
If you're a boss or concerned about leadership, you need to become familiar with that message. The ideas are important. Pink's rendering of them, for good or ill, will define and influence the discussion of motivation in business for quite a while.
He does get the big picture right. He says that people would prefer activities where they can pursue three things.
Autonomy: People want to have control over their work.
Mastery: People want to get better at what they do.
Purpose: People want to be part of something that is bigger than they are.
This matches research that I've done with class members for over twenty-five years. They discuss a time when "it was great to come to work" and then create a description of what those times are like. The descriptions vary slightly in wording but always include the following.
Productivity.
Community.
Interesting and meaningful work.
Clear and reasonable expectations.
Frequent and usable feedback.
Consistency.
Fairness.
Maximum control possible over work life.
I'm describing the kinds of workplaces where intrinsic motivation happens. Pink is describing three things that provide that kind of motivation. In most highly effective workplaces, it's the boss that is the most important force creating an environment when intrinsic motivation can happen.
Top management sets the basic compensation and benefits structure. If that isn't perceived as fair and consistent, natural intrinsic motivation won't kick in.
It's your individual supervisor who has the biggest effect on your daily working environment. That's why there are pockets of excellence in otherwise horrid companies and why even the best companies have workers who are unhappy and teams that are unproductive.
This book won't give you the connection from concept to workplace. But Pink does deliver many key ideas that matter.
Key Idea: There is a difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Key Idea: Intrinsic motivators are more powerful.
Key Idea: If you use monetary rewards to get people to perform the way you want, those rewards may have the opposite effect.
These are important things for a boss to know, but if you only have Drive to guide you, you will get some things very wrong.
The examples that are used are heavily weighted toward academic and consulting studies. It's not apparent that Pink talked to a single worker or frontline supervisor. The book would have been more helpful if he had.
There are some pre-requisites to having intrinsic motivation kick in. Pink mentions in passing that there needs to be fair compensation in place. That's true, but it's not an "oh-by-the-way" point. It's Maslow's Hierarchy in work clothes.
Throughout the book, Pink equates "monetary" incentives with "extrinsic motivation." That ignores praise, promotion, preferment (in scheduling, eg), the admiration of peers, time off, and a host of other positive incentives. It also skews the discussion toward academic studies and away from the real workplace.
Pink also presents the issue as if it were intrinsic motivators (good) versus extrinsic motivators (not good). In the TED talk he even says "This is the titanic battle between these two approaches."
That's not how things work in the real world. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and their effects interact. You don't have a simple choice of which lever to pull. You have to understand and influence a complex system.
Those shortcomings are important. They derive from one of the most important things to understand if you've going to study this material critically and turn it to good use.
Pink has written this book like a political speech. He writes to make a point, not to present a balanced argument.
Like a good speech writer, Pink uses language that implies value judgments. He uses terms like "humanistic psychology" for things he agrees with. When he doesn't agree he uses terms like "rat-like seeking."
Like a good speech writer, Pink makes sweeping statements without providing support for them. "Sometimes" and "a surprisingly large proportion of the time" are used with no indication of what they actually mean. He says that sales quotas "can be effective," but doesn't tell you when or how often.
Like a good speech writer, Pink leaves out things that don't support his simplified message. There's no mention of studies that support the use of rewards in business settings.
Like a good speech writer, Pink boils his facts down to only the ones that support his argument. If all you read was Drive, you would think that the work of Deci and Ryan is about the superiority of intrinsic motivators to extrinsic in all situations.
But their work is more complex than Pink describes it. It includes analysis of effective extrinsic motivators as well as extrinsic motivators that are counter-productive.
Like a good speech writer, pink, picks up studies from one sphere and applies them elsewhere without telling you what he's doing. Deci and Ryan have done admirable and important work, but it's on motivation in personal development, not in the workplace.
Like a good speech writer, Pink ignores contradictions. He describes a horrid, slave ship workplace ruled by carrots and sticks. Later he mentions that most "flow" experiences happen at work.
Pink tells us about "20 percent" time for creativity at Google and Atlassian. But he doesn't discuss why they only offer their intrinsic reward of creativity to engineers and not the other workers in the company.
Like a good speech writer, Pink sets up the straw man of "Motivation 2.0" so that he's easy to knock down. And, inconvenient truths are sometimes mentioned in passing and then never heard from again.
The Bottom Line
You should learn what's in this book because, for better or worse, it is influencing the conversation about what makes a great workplace. But because of the presentation and selective use of facts, you can't rely on this book alone to help you do a better job as a boss.
392 of 460 people found the following review helpful.
Just as important as "A Whole New Mind"
By Amazon Customer
Daniel Pink's new book follows well in the tradition of "A Whole New Mind," as he picks up on a new trend and explains it well. This time it's the apparent paradox of motivation - why do some people like Google pay their staff to regularly work on projects of their own choosing when they could be working hard on what they were hired to do?
Pink shows that there has always been monetary motivation, but that has lost its attractiveness as we've moved from the "top-down" management system to the more heuristic style (workers being free to decide how to do their jobs). He points out that repetitive jobs lend themselves more to traditional rewards, whereas money doesn't seem to motivate innovation.
I used to work for a major corporation (which we'll call "EMC," because that is their name). Pretty much everyone I met had responsibility for something, to the degree that supervisors were enablers - you went to them and told them what to do. Supervisors could (and sometimes did) give you reasons why not, but they weren't about to come into your cubicle and micromanage you. And the wider your responsibility, the harder you worked.
This system was totally unlike anything I'd come across before. Most businesses would act as though their employees couldn't be trusted. And although I was looking behind me nervously, I shone in this environment, and now I realized that's what they wanted from me.
Pink mentions Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (if that's new to you, look it up on Wikipedia), and I think he is right that now that there's a relatively well-paid group of workers, they can ask for something more than basic salary. As Pink puts it, we need to feel that the work we do is worthwhile, and thus we move to the top of Maslow's pyramid and realize esteem and self-actualization.
Hopefully you will have recognized some of the tenets of your organization. However, I think it's unlikely that all Pink's principles will have been adopted, so get this book now. It gives you a great deal to think about, and in the last section, Pink quotes people that have influenced his thinking.
Whether you run a company or see yourself as "just an employee," you need to read this. It shows pretty much everything to know about what will drive you or your staff to much better performance. It involves more than having an employee of the week, and you may find that if you work in a place that doesn't use these principles you may have to change jobs. But it will be worth it.
206 of 242 people found the following review helpful.
A Real Winner
By John Chancellor
Daniel Pink has written a highly interesting and very informative book on the truth about what motivates us.
He uses a very interesting analogy - comparing motivation to different generations of operating software. Motivation 1.0 the basic operating system for the first few thousand years was based on the primary needs of the human - food, shelter, clothing and reproduction. Eventually we moved to Motivation 2.0 - basically the carrot and the stick - reward and punishment worked fairly well for a time.
But according to Pink and other scientists, reward and punishment no longer work in most situations. We need to move to Motivation 3.0.
Pink goes into great detain about why the carrot and stick motivation does not work. "The traditional `If then' rewards can give us less of what we want. They extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity and crowd out good behavior. The can encourage unethical behavior, create addictions and foster short-term thinking. These are the bugs in our current operating system."
The "if then" reward/punishment system does work under very limited conditions. Pink explores these.
He then introduces the I Type and X Type behavior - named for intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Type I behavior concerns itself less with external rewards and more with doing things for the joy of doing them.
There are three elements to the I Type behavior: Autonomy - we all long to be autonomous - to have control over our lives and destiny. To the extent that we don't have autonomy we feel something missing. The second element is Mastery. We need to learn to master the tasks we are undertaking. The third element is Purpose. We need to "buy in" to why we are doing things. There needs to be a reason.
The final section of the book is a Toolkit section where there are strategies for individuals, companies, tips on compensation, suggestions for education and suggested reading.
This is highly entertaining and thought provoking. At some time we all face the challenge of trying to motivate others. For the most part we have relied on the reward/punishment approach. You will learn why this does not work and a better approach to motivation no matter who you are working with.
The book is well written and there are many references to back up the claims made. I highly recommend this book.
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