Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Despair Inc (http://diy.despair.com/motivator.php [inactive]) Big Huge Labs (http://bighugelabs.com/motivator.php) Automotivator (http://wigflip.com/automotivator/)

1. How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work—your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day? 2. How much autonomy do you have over your time at work—for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day? 3. How much autonomy do you have over your team at work—that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate? 4. How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work—how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?

calculate separate results for task, time, team, and technique.

At the beginning of a month, set out your goals—both performance goals and learning goals. Then, at the end of the month, call yourself to your office and give yourself an appraisal. How are you faring? Where are you falling short? What tools, information, or support might you need to do better?

anybody at any time can award a colleague a fifty-dollar bonus. Instead of a once-yearly acknowledgment from a boss who might not remember your heroic deed, these modest bonuses allow colleagues to recognize good work instantly—and that, in turn, can create an environment in which feedback bursts through the dry sands of office life.

1. Involve people in goal-setting.

2. Use noncontrolling language.

3. Hold office hours.

Do employees refer to their company as “they” or as “we”?

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. • Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential. • The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

“Is there one thing I can do tomorrow in my own domain to make things a little better?”

when organizations use rewards like money to motivate staff, “that’s when they’re most demotivating.” The better strategy is to get compensation right—and then get it out of sight. Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.

Getting the internal and external equity right isn’t itself a motivator. But it is a way to avoid putting the issue of money back on the table and making it a de-motivator.

The pay-more-than-average approach can offer an elegant way to bypass “if-then” rewards, eliminate concerns about unfairness, and help take the issue of money off the table.

if you promise a preschooler a fancy certificate for drawing a picture, that child will likely draw a picture for you—and then lose further interest in drawing.

And they’re hauling out a wagon full of “if-then” rewards—pizza for reading books, iPods for showing up to class, cash for good test scores. We’re bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement.

Set aside an entire school day (or a family vacation day) and ask kids to come up with a problem to solve or a project to tackle. In advance, help them collect the tools, information, and supplies they might need. Then let them have at it. The next morning, ask them to deliver—by reporting back to the class or the family on their discoveries and experiences. It’s like Project Runway—only the kids come up with the project themselves, and the reward at the end of the day is the chance to share what they’ve created and all they’ve learned along the way. Already, dozens of schools have been experimenting with FedEx days—for students and teachers—and the results have been impressive.

At the beginning of a semester, ask students to list their top learning goals. Then, at the end of the semester, ask them to create their own report card along with a one- or two-paragraph review of their progress. Where did they succeed? Where did they fall short? What more do they need to learn?

By linking money to the completion of chores, parents turn an allowance into an “if-then” reward.

So keep allowance and chores separate, and you just might get that trash can emptied. Even better, your kids will begin to learn the difference between principles and payoffs.

But done wrong, praise can become yet another “if-then” reward that can squash creativity and stifle intrinsic motivation.

Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence.

kids who understand that effort and hard work lead to mastery and growth are more willing to take on new, difficult tasks.

Make praise specific

Instead of bathing them in generalities, tell them specifically what they’ve ...

Why am I learning this? How is it relevant to the world I live in now?

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

“Contrary to what we usually believe . . . the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation BY EDWARD L. DECI WITH RICHARD FLASTE

Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet BY HOWARD GARDNER, MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, AND WILLIAM DAMON

Type I Insight: Goodwin sheds light on Lincoln’s Type I leadership skills. Among them: • He was self-confident enough to surround himself with rivals who excelled in areas where he was weak. • He genuinely listened to other people’s points of view, which helped him form more complex opinions of his own. • He gave credit where it was due and wasn’t afraid to take the blame.

Once a Runner BY JOHN L. PARKER, JR.

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace BY RICARDO SEMLER

JIM COLLINS Who: One of the most authoritative voices in business today and the author of Built to Last (with Jerry Porras), Good to Great, and, most recently, How the Mighty Fall.

Type I Insight: Collins suggests four basic practices for creating a culture where self-motivation can flourish: 1. “Lead with questions, not answers.” 2. “Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.” 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.

www.jimcollins.com,

Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It

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.

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 make progress and get better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

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.”

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 auto...

Are you Type I or Type X? Take the comprehensive, free online assessment at www.danpink.com/drivesurvey