Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

By Cannon-Brookes’s back-of-the-blog calculations, seventy engineers, spending 20 percent of their time over just a six-month period, amounted to an investment of $1 million. The company’s chief financial officer was aghast. Some project managers—despite Atlassian’s forward-thinking ways, the company still uses the m-word—weren’t happy, because it meant ceding some of their control over employees. When a few wanted to track employees’ time to make sure they didn’t abuse the privilege, Cannon-Brookes said no. “That was too controlling. I wanted to back our engineers and take it on faith that they’ll do good things.” Besides, he says, “People are way more efficient about 20 percent time than regular work time. They say, ‘I’m not going to [expletive]ing do anything like read newsfeeds or do Facebook.’