Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Imagine you’re a product manager and your pay depends largely on reaching a particular sales goal for the next quarter. If you’re smart, or if you’ve got a family to feed, you’re going to try mightily to hit that number. You probably won’t concern yourself much with the quarter after that or the health of the company or whether the firm is investing enough in research and development. And if you’re nervous, you might cut corners to reach your quarterly goal. Now imagine you’re a product manager and your pay is determined by these factors: your sales for the next quarter; your sales in the current year; the company’s revenue and profit in the next two years; levels of satisfaction among your customers; ideas for new products; and evaluations of your coworkers. If you’re smart, you’ll probably try to sell your product, serve your customers, help your teammates, and, well, do good work. When metrics are varied, they’re harder to finagle.