Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

If we want to strengthen our organizations, get beyond our decade of underachievement, and address the inchoate sense that something’s gone wrong in our businesses, our lives, and our world, we need to move from Type X to Type I.

For Type I’s, the main motivator is the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are welcome, but mainly as a bonus.

Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.

Type I is the natural state—the default setting—for most human beings. By contrast, Type X behavior is something people learn through their experiences at home, in school, and at work.

Any Type X can become a Type I.

one reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes people’s focus off money, which allows them to concentrate on the work itself.

Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.

in a rapidly changing economy, it is also critical for professional, personal, and organizational success of any kind.

People must be paid well and be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don’t much affect performance and motivation. Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise—and employees’ spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE’s staunchest advocates.

“More companies will migrate to this as more business owners my age come up. My dad’s generation views human beings as human resources. They’re the two-by-fours you need to build your house,” he says. “For me, it’s a partnership between me and the employees. They’re not resources. They’re partners.” And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.

Think about “management” for a moment—both the word and the very notion. Where did it come from? Somehow we assume that management is like the ocean—that, for our purposes, it’s always been here. But take a step back and think again. Management didn’t emanate from nature. It wasn’t handed to us from God. It’s something that somebody invented.

our basic nature is to be curious and self-directed.

As I explained in the previous chapter, Deci and Ryan cite autonomy as one of three basic human needs. And of the three, it’s the most important—the

Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human concept rather than a western one.

A sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude. According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.

The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.

Most twenty-first-century notions of management presume that, in the end, people are pawns rather than players.

Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word “management” onto the linguistic ash heap alongside “icebox” and “horseless carriage.” This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.

“If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features.” And what a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of these essential features is autonomy—in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian’s experience shows, Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.

what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with

The billable hour is a relic of Motivation 2.0.

If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption—that people want to do good work—then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it.

weed out those who aren’t fit for a Motivation 3.0–style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique.

FAST Agile

Ample research has shown that people working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams.

See, for example, S. Parker, T. Wall, and P. Hackson, “That’s Not My Job: Developing Flexible Employee Work Orientations,” Academy of Management Journal 40 (1997): 899–929.

Motivation 2.0 assumed that if people had freedom, they would shirk—and that autonomy was a way to bypass accountability. Motivation 3.0 begins with a different assumption. It presumes that people want to be accountable—and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is the most effective pathway to that destination.

because most workplaces still reverberate with the assumptions of the old operating system, transitioning to autonomy won’t—often can’t—happen in one fell swoop. If we pluck people out of controlling environments, when they’ve known nothing else, and plop them in a ROWE or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they’ll struggle. Organizations must provide, as Richard Ryan puts it, “scaffolding” to help every employee find his footing to make the transition.

FAST Agile

We’re born to be players, not pawns. We’re meant to be autonomous individuals, not individual automatons. We’re designed to be Type I. But outside forces—including the very idea that we need to be “managed”—have conspired to change our default setting and turn us into Type X. If we update the environments we’re in—not only at work, but also at school and at home—and if leaders recognize both the truth of the human condition and the science that supports it, we can return ourselves and our colleagues to our natural state.

Lewin's Behaviour Equation

the first law of mastery: Mastery is a mindset.

consider goals. Dweck says they come in two varieties—performance goals and learning goals. Getting an A in French class is a performance goal. Being able to speak French is a learning goal.

Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more. The most deeply motivated people—not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied—hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.

Purpose, Noble/worthy cause

the profit motive, potent though it is, can be an insufficient impetus for both individuals and organizations. An equally powerful source of energy, one we’ve often neglected or dismissed as unrealistic, is what we might call the “purpose motive.”

Motivation 2.0 centered on profit maximization. Motivation 3.0 doesn’t reject profits, but it places equal emphasis on purpose maximization.

Neither generation rates money as the most important form of compensation.

Motivation 3.0, by contrast, is expressly built for purpose maximization.

A CENTRAL IDEA of this book has been the mismatch between what science knows and what business does. The gap is wide. Its existence is alarming.

the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice—doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.

bringing our understanding of motivation into the twenty-first century is more than an essential move for business. It’s an affirmation of our humanity.

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?

FAST Agile

Type X bosses relish control. Type I bosses relinquish control.

For all the talk about culture, alignment, and mission, most organizations do a pretty shabby job of assessing this aspect of their business.

what if we flipped our thinking—and designed our workplace policies for the 85 percent rather than the 15 percent?

a web of rules that assumes good faith—as most autonomy-centered policies do—can actually encourage good behavior.

Be strategically subversive. Almost none of the innovative practices you’ve read about came from the top. Most began the same way: One smart person couldn’t take it any longer and decided to bend the rules or play the game a slightly different way.