Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

This offbeat off-day gave birth to several ideas for new products and plenty of repairs and patches on existing ones. So Cannon-Brookes decided to make the practice a permanent part of the Atlassian culture. Now, once a quarter, the company sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want—only this time, “to get them out of the day to day,” it must be something that’s not part of their regular job. At two P.M. on a Thursday, the day begins. Engineers, including Cannon-Brookes himself, crash out new code or an elegant hack—any way they want, with anyone they want. Many work through the night. Then, at four P.M. on Friday, they show the results to the rest of the company in a wild-and-woolly all-hands meeting stocked with ample quantities of cold beer and chocolate cake. Atlassian calls these twenty-four-hour bursts of freedom and creativity “FedEx Days”—because people have to deliver something overnight. And deliver Atlassians have. Over the years, this odd little exercise has produced an array of software fixes that might otherwise never have emerged. Says one engineer, “Some of the coolest stuff we have in our product today has come from FedEx Days.” This isn’t a pay-for-performance plan, grounded in the mechanistic assumptions of Motivation 2.0. It’s an autonomy plan, nicely tuned to the alternate strains of Motivation 3.0. “We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you...