Daniel H. Pink's Blog, page 29

Some Drive time on NPR

The way ideas spread is pretty simple: Conversation by conversation. One engaged person talks with another engaged person — and out of that daisy chain of human interactions come new ways to navigate our lives.

One of the best and most enduring forums for conversation is public radio. And in the past week, I've had the good fortune to talk about the ideas in Drive with several National Public Radio journalists. Here's a sampler:

1. Morning Edition. A talk with Madeline Brand.

2. Talk of the...

5 goodies from The Times

Stuck on an airplane this morning, I had a chance to read today's New York Times almost from cover to cover. (Ink on paper is a pretty good technology, no? — Ed.) Five stories, most of them small and easily overlooked, made me think, smile, or wince.

1. Person of the day. When retailer H&M couldn't sell certain pieces of clothing, it mutilated the perfectly good garments and tossed them into a dumpster. Graduate student Cynthia Magnus found out, was appalled, and suggested to the company that ...

3 articles worth reading

High on the growing list of endangered media species is long-form magazine journalism. In a world of 140-character updates and 60-second video clips, do we have the attention span (and the business model) to sustain carefully-crafted 5,000-word articles?

I sure hope so. Because even in a tough environment, there's some great work coming out of magazines. Here are three pieces I read in the past two weeks with ideas and stories hard to reduce to a Tweet — and that really come to life on the...

5 Ways to Help Spread the Word

And so it begins. Today is the day that DRIVE officially launches. 

Here's what I know from previous books: These ideas will spread solely because of people like you — intelligent, forward-thinking, optimistic folks who know that the way the world really changes is conversation by conversation.

If you're up for the challenge, here are 5 ways you can spread the word:

1. Share the "Two Questions" video, the TED talk, or our super-short summaries.

2. Drop by one of our events this month in DC...

Idea of the day: Kindness class

Andy Smallman, head of the Puget Sound Community School in Seattle, has come up with a social innovation that's ingenious, inspiring, and infectious. He calls it "kindness class."

Each week students in the online course get an assignment. In week one, they do something kind for themselves. In week two, they do something kind for someone they love. And so on. Along the way, participants do something kind for a neighbor, provide something wonderful for someone to find, let everyone go ahead of ...

Quote of the day: The chance to do it

"The really good people want autonomy — you let me do it, and I'll do it. . . . That's all they want. They want a chance to do it."



– Gordon Bethune, former CEO of Continental in today's NY Times

Two simple questions that can change your life in 2010

(A "video excerpt" of Drive, created by the fantabulous Lindsey Testolin.)

Harvard Business Review on what really motivates workers

Harvard professor Teresa Amabile, whose transformative work I describe in Drive, has a fascinating piece in the (newly revamped) Harvard Business Review, which is just hitting newsstands.

Amabile tracked the day-to-day activities and motivations of several hundred workers over a few years and found that their greatest motivation isn't external incentives, but something different: Making progress (or what Drive calls "mastery" — the urge to get better and better at something that matters.)

Read ...

A Simple Idea for 2010

The year and the decade are coming to an end (three cheers for that!), which means that many people are now contemplating their New Year's resolutions. If you're among those folks, there's one resolution I hope you'll consider for your office: Radically revamping performance reviews.

New Year's resolutions and performance reviews actually have a lot in common. They're good ideas in theory, but rarely yield much in practice. They happen too infrequently to have a big impact. And in the end...

Dennis Brutus (1924 – 2009)

About a quarter of a century ago — when I was a young, impressionable Northwestern student wondering what I wanted to do with my life — I signed up for an upper-level seminar called "Writing Poetry."

It turned out that I was somewhat adept at deconstructing poems — and just plain awful at writing them. The person who helped me figure that out, and who gently urged me to apply what I'd learned in class to endeavors outside of poetry, was my professor — an extraordinary poet named Dennis...