When I got the book 'Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us', I got ready to propel it across the room in to the pile of those books that I can pretty much bet I know what they're going to tell me.

However when I saw the author was Daniel Pink, I knew it was worth a bit of time. I enjoyed his last book 'A Whole New World' because the subject matter was compelling and his toolkit section offered very useful learning tools to adapt to the new world.

Drive offers the same format - case + toolkit - and despite the title, the subject matter is equally compelling.

Here's his 100 word summary, which he calls the Cocktail Party Summary (I thought this was a clever alternative to Twitter):

When it comes to motivation, there's a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system - which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators - doesn't work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery - the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

The science is compelling on how carrot-and-stick forms of motivation just don't work in a more heuristic task culture that we live in today versus a more algorithmic task culture that was our work culture in the past. (Heuristic is those tasks that are more experimental in nature - where you are devising novel solutions to a challenge - and algorithmic tasks are those that follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion). 

Apart from Pjnk's book, there are some cool articles on this new discovery including this one from wired http://bit.ly/91C1Pt, which tackles bonuses in the banking business.

So to conclude...

Why don't carrot-and-stick type motivators work?

The list of reasons is long but here are three that caught my attention:

Control - Contingent awards "if-then" are taking away autonomy from the individual and this effectively means you feel like you are working for the man - making the man rich and he's controlling you.

Restriction - While Pink doesn't quite cover this aspect as clearly for me, what I understand is that we are motivated by the intrinsic joy of discovery and the challenge of creation and when money is thrown our way, it takes the joy away and constrains the thinking - because we have to deliver a result and invariably the result is pre-determined.

Addiction - This one's weird but fascinating. When you receive a reward, a burst of dopamine rushes to the nucleus accumbens part of the brain. This is exactly the same neurological behavior as experienced with an addiction. The feeling delights, then dissipates, then demands another dose. Rewards are like a rock of crack cocaine. The delight is short lived and the demand for an increasing scale of rewards is likely. In other words, you may get good work out of someone today by offering a reward but tomorrow the work will diminish unless the reward increases.  

What does work?

Autonomy - People want to be accountable and making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team to achieve an objective is the right way to motivate them.

Mastery - This is basically driven by three key laws: The first is mindset. If you believe that intelligence is not an entity but something that with effort can increase then you are in synch with the first law of mastery. The second is that mastery is a pain. This is about perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Mastery requires effort - difficult, painful, excruciating, all consuming effort - over a long period of time. The final law is an asymptote, which is an algebraic term for never quite reaching. Two lines get closer and closer together but never actually touch. You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really close to it but you can never touch it. 

Purpose - I always get concerned with purpose because it often leads to saving the world or Presidential levels of purpose and Pink defines it this way as well. This feels elitist to me. It's true that we are all looking for greater purpose - doing good for others - in life and companies that promote this way of helping employees are the better for it. Publicis let me take 3 months off to go to India to start a charity because that was a defined purpose for me. This makes me feel better about Publicis and motivates me more to do good work for them. However, this is about doing good around the world. I wonder whether a more basic sense of purpose could help motivation as well. In other words, how do we get purpose to a place that works within an everyday context. Doctors and nurses save lives. Teachers teach children to read. What do we do say our purpose is in advertising? Perhaps my purpose in the work I do could be to make the choice of products an easy and rewarding one for people. Or maybe my purpose is to make businesses successful through creating bonds between people and brands. I need to think about this one but we as individuals and companies should look to their purpose and encourage others to define their's because I believe this is a key driver of people's motivation. 

This post is way too long and I'm sorry about that but rather than go on here's Pink's TED speech on the subject: