Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

BOOK REVIEW: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink

List Price: $16 (available from Amazon for $10.88) Paperback: 272 pages Publisher: Riverhead Trade; Reprint edition (April 5, 2011) ISBN-10: 1594484805 ISBN-13: 978-1594484803 Purchase at Amazon

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Reviewed by Yank Elliott, MBA
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Drive is a book about motivation, which makes it very important for all small business entrepreneurs. It especially applies to those of us who are in affiliate programs or MLM programs. We have the opportunity and responsibility to deal with many people who seem to be totally unmotivated. This is one of the most frustrating things I, personally, have ever been forced to deal with. No matter what you do or say, and no matter how much you try to help them, they just do absolutely nothing. After reading this book, I have discovered several ideas that may possibly work. You may get some ideas of your own about how to deal with hard-to-motivate people. I hope the ideas I’m trying will have some effect both on recruiting and working with existing affiliates.

A measure of the high esteem readers have of Drive is the fact it is Number 310 on Amazon’s best seller list. I highly recommend this book to all home based entrepreneurs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Pink, the author, is a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, where he has written about topics ranging from grassroots solar power to the rise of Wikipedia. He has also written about business, technology, and economics in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and other publications. He speaks in many places including CNBC's "Power Lunch," ABC's "World News Tonight," NPR's "Morning Edition," and American Public Media's "Marketplace." And as an independent business consultant, he's advised start-up ventures and Fortune 100 companies on recruiting, business trends, and work practices. In 2011, Harvard Business Review and Thinkers 50 named him one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world.

Daniel Pink, who works as a free agent, held his last real job in the White House, where he served from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. He's also worked as an aide to U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich, an economic policy staffer in the U.S. Senate, a legal researcher in India, and a latrine builder in Botswana.

Pink received a B.A., with honors in linguistics, from Northwestern University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He is happy to say he has never practiced law.

I’ve picked up several ideas for articles from Daniel Pink’s writings for Fast Company. He stays right on the cutting edge of new technology and new thinking and manages to portray these to the public well ahead of normal media. One of the beginning ideas taught to me in my very first college management course was Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At the time Maslow took sort of a second place to the teachings of Frederick Taylor with his time and motion studies.

Many problems encountered by large corporations right this minute derive from inability to understand the change in worker attitudes away from Taylorization toward tailorizing their workplace to their own needs. The US economy has advanced in a monumental way from the conditions existing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when Taylor’s ideas prevailed. The basic economic needs at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy have mostly been met giving workers the freedom to pursue fulfilling their individual dreams, Maslow’s self-actualization.

THE BEGINNING OF A NEW WAY OF THINKING ABOUT MOTIVATION

This book is all about changes in the way people are motivated to do anything. The beginnig of this new thinking began several decades ago with an experiment to see how monkeys went about solving puzzles. The puzzles were placed in the monkey cages and left for two weeks to see what the monkeys would do. Amazingly. without any prodding or other outside influence, the monkeys started, on their own, to try and figure out how the puzzles worked. They quickly determined how the puzzzles worked, and, over the two week experiment freqently played with the puzzles, getting better at them every day.

The experimenters were amazed, but decided to go on with their study by giving the monkeys certain positive inducements to increase performance. What they found was that the monkeys responded to the outside rewards by reducing the time they played with the puzzles, and many of them began to lose interest. This result led the researchers to conclude that external rewards do not work as they are intended to do. In the monkkey experiment, outside rewards reduced the motivation to play with the puzles, rather than increase it, as was previously thought..

The chief researcher came up with a novel explanation: “The performance of the task
provided intrinsic reward.” In other words, the monkeys solved the puzzles just because they enjoyed it. This would later be called “intrinsic motivation,” and it was very radical. It was difficult for most to acknowledge a new way of motivation. Rather than battle the establishment, the researcher abandoned the subject, and nobody took it on again for 20 years.

SOME APPLICATIONS OF THE NEW MOTIVATOR

Using the new method of motivation does not do away entirely with extrinsic rewards, because people always appreciate money. What is needed is a change in the way rewards are perceived. For example, look at the explosion of open source software development. These programmers obviously need a certain amount of money, but, more importantly, they simply enjoy what they are doing. An additional intrinsic reward is the fact they may receive wide recognition for their open source work, which could lead to other lucrative jobs or recognition. Studies by some researchers in the US and Europe discovered that open source programmers were mostly motivated by the sheer joy of being creative. A majority of those in the survey said they often reached a state of maximum challenge which they called “flow.”

An example of how this flow idea is being implemented is the creation, in the State of Vermont, a new legal entity know as L3C, a corporation not as we normally think of them. These corporations operate like a non-profit generating at least a little income, while its primary business is to offer signiificant social benefits. One result of this kind of operation is how North Carolina is buying abandoned furniture plants in Vermont and updating them with new technology, then leasing them to hard-pressed furniture manufacturers at a low lease rate. This makes sense because North Carolina is a major furniture producer. The object of this project is to make money and to also help a struggling region recover.

SOME REASONS FOR USING THE NEW MOTIVATION

In the past most jobs required little knowledge or creativity. They consisted mostly of routine, repititious jobs. It is now possible to send these routine jobs offshore or automate them. Most work has now passed from the routine to the creative arena requiring additional effort and thought from workers. Researchers have found that a carrot and stick approasch to motoivation works for routine jobs, but, if used for the coming era of creative work, it actually reduces the motivation of workers.

Because most work is becoming less routine and more creative, it is more enjoyable. This makes external rewards under the carrot and stick management approach less effective. Add external rewards on work that is already enjoyable and it is likely that performance will decline. The US Census Bureau says there are now over 18 million “non-employed businesses,” meaning businesses with no employeees. In order to be effective these businesses must motivate themselves. In addition, almost 34 million people telecommute, with no constant managerial oversight. In effect, they motivate themselvess because they enjoy what they are doing.

However, it makes no difference how enjoyable a job is, if the basic neeed for earning a living is not available, there will be little motivation of any kind. Researchers studying the new ways of motivation have found the best use of money, an external reward, is to take it out of the picture by providing an adequate living wage for all workers. This frees them from worrying about providing for their families and allows them to focus entirely o the work they enjoy.

Perhaps one of the best reasons for using the new motivation is to turn what is considered dreary work into fun, or play. A good example of this is explained by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. At one point Tom is confronted with the dreaded task of whitewashing Aunt Polly’s 810 square foot fence. The mear thought of whitewashing the fence made Tom’s life seemingly hollow, and his existence a burden. While thinking these gloomy thoughts, he was suddenly struck with a brilliant idea.

When Tom’s friend, Ben, comes by and makes fun of Tom for having this dreary job, Tom tells him it is a real privilege as well as a source of intrinsic motivation. When Ben asks to paint a little, Tom refuses, until Ben agrees to give his apple to Tom in return for the privilege of whitewashing. Soon, other boys show up and paint the fence several times over because they perceive it as being fun. From this episode, Mark Twain concludes that work is what someone has to do, while play is what one does not have to do. So it is in the 21st Century workplace. Author Pink calls this “The Sawyer Effect.”

CARROTS AND STICKS

Recent research by the Harvard Business School and others has indicated that widely accepted practices of setting goals should be done with caution. When goal achievemet carries some extrinsic reward, like money or acceptance into a coveted program, they often result in short term or unethical behavior. Participants will take shortcuts to achieve the goal, or do anything else, right or wrong, that will help them attain the goal. All of these activities, if not properly monitored, will result only in short term results, rather than long term learning that leads to mastery of actions. This is important because mastery is one of the prime requirements for the new motivation ideas. Goals that are set by workers themselves, rather than by some manager, are much more effective.

Daniel Pink lists what he calls “The Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrots and Sticks:”

• They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
• They can diminish performance.
• They can crush creativity.
• They can crowd out good behavior.
• They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
• They can become addictive.
• They can foster short-term thinking.

Even though today’s economies require less repetitive work, there are still millions of people who are forced to perform boring, non creative, tasks all day every day. One way the new motivation can work for these people is to use the positive outcome of the Sawyer Effect–turn the unpopular work into play.

For a workplace to use the new dimension of motivation, the first requireement is that basic needs of compensation and benefits are in place; this removes extrinsic rewards from the workplace. Now you can do whatever is needed to promote mastery, including the autonomy to work on their own, and ultiately contribute to some larger purpose. Now we have the three basic pillars of the new motivation, which is the third approach to motivation superseding carrots and sticks. They are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

ENTER TYPE I VS. TYPE X

By definition, Type X behavior is founded in external workplace rewards, while Type I is influenced by the intrinsic satisfaction of performing tasks. According to the author, Type I behavior is determined in part by universal human needs, meanig Type I individuals are born with a good portion of their behavior beliefs. Type Is depend on autonomy, mastery, and purpose; their behavior is self-directed. On the other hand, Type X people acquire their ideas from home, from school, from work, and other experiences they have encountered.

The rise of Type I motivation has provided the basis for an entirely new way of working called ROWE, results only work environment. This idea is as radical as the ideas of Saul Alinsky. Why? A ROWE workplace has no schedules, people may show up whenever they want, or not at all. All they have to do is get their job done. How, where, and when workers do their job is left entirely up to them. One reason ROWE seems to work is because outside influences, like feeling bad about leaving work early to watch a child play ball, is taken off the tablle, similar to taking money out of the picture by first providing adequate pay and benefits.

Another benefit from new motivation thinking requires managers to explain why things are done in a certain way, rather than just telling people to do them anyway. When workers know why they should perform certain tasks, they normally do a much better job.

THE INFLUENCE OF AUTONOMY

Another offshoot of the new motivation is the concept of “20% time.” This is time some companies, Google , for instance, allow their workers to work on pet projects that may have nothing to do with what they are supposed to be doing for the company. Google says more than half its new products started during this 20% time. Autonomy over work apparently is a powerful motivator. Netflix is another company that has made waves with its vacation policy: it has no vacation policy. So long as the work gets done, employees can take off whenever they want for as long as they want.

New motivation ideas are powerful. The opposite of autonomy, the new motivation idea, is control, the old way of motivation. These ideas point in different directions—control brings compliance, while autonomy leads to engagement, which creates the desire to master the subject, that is, to get better and better at something that matters.

ABOUT MASTERY

Flow is an essential part of mastery, but it can happen in an instant, while mastery may take decades. There are three laws of mastery:

1.    Mastery is a mindset. Whatever you think you can do, you will do.

2.    Mastery is a pain, better defined as “grit,” perseverance, and a passion for long-term goals.

3.    Mastery is an asymptote, meaning it’s like a straight line continually approaching but never quite meeting a curve. In other words, mastery can never be completely achieved.

Flow is very important to gaining mastery. Because mastery can never be quite achieved, there must be something to propel a person on through the grit period; this is flow. Esperiments have been conducted where paricipants were deprived of doing things they most enjoy. Almost immediately upon deprivation, the participants showed signs of fatigue and lost interest in everything arouund them. Indeed, flow is the oxygen of the soul; humans cannot survive without it.

ENTER THE THIRD LEG, PURPOSE

100 baby booomers will retire every 13 minutes, every hour, of every day, until 2024. All of them have started thinking about their lives, how much time they have left, and how they miight make a difference in the world. All these boomers will cause an avalanche of purpose like the world has never known.

Purpose provides the balance leg that holds up autonomy and mastery. People who have autonomy produce at very high levels, but they seem to do even better when they are woking for some higher purpose. The most productive and most satisfied people are those who connect with a cause larger than themselves.

THE REST OF THE BOOK

Having built the foundation for the new theory of motivation, what he calls Type I managemet, the author devotes the rest of the book to a discussion of underlying research and resulting new ideas. He also discusses nemerous examples of how various companies have become much more productive by using Type I ideas.

There are also sections on Type I tools you can use to implement the new ideas. Even though most of the work world still adheres to the carrot an stick reward system, there are many things we can do to bring autonomy, mastery, and purpose into our workplace. The author provides many exercises to help you do this.

The author, at the end, offers a Twitter Summary: “Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.”

CONCLUSION

Daniel Pink, the author, is known for his writing about over the edge, gtound breaking, subjects. Drive is a thunderous response to current carrot and stick rewards determined solely by management. All of us who went through business school were canstantly drilled in the time and motion studies and resulting management ideas so prevalent from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

Looks like we will have to relearn how to manage for the 21st Century.

There are many things home based entrepreneurs can use from this book. Motivation is a frustrating problem for those who have affiliates, and a similar problem exists for motivating customers. Read the book and pick out a few ideas you can use; it’s worth your time.

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© Yank Elliott. All rights reserved worldwide.
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Yank is a home-based entrepreneur and freelance business writer living in Hurricane Alley, North Carolina, USA. His Website is http://www.furriwhalesworld.com. Contact Yank at globalbiz@furriwhalesworld.com.