Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Daniel H. Pink

About the author

Dan Pink is a best-selling author of seven books, which have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. Pink was host and co-executive producer of “Crowd Control,” a television series about human behavior on the National Geographic Channel that aired in more than 100 countries. He has appeared frequently on NPR, PBS, ABC, CNN, and other TV and radio networks in the US and abroad.

He has been a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired as well as a business columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. His articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The New Republic, Slate, and other publications. He was also a Japan Society Media fellow in Tokyo, where he studied the country’s massive comic industry.

In 2019, London-based Thinkers 50 named him the 6th most influential management thinker in the world. Before venturing out on his own 20 years ago, Dan worked in several positions in politics and government, including serving from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. He received a BA from Northwestern University, where he was a Truman Scholar and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a JD from Yale Law School. Pink and his wife live in Washington, DC. They are the parents of three children.

Source: www.danpink.com

Summary in one sentence

In today’s economy, where 70% of job growth is in areas centered on tasks that require experimentation and iteration, the most important factors underpinning motivation are no longer rewards and punishments, but instead are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

More complete summary

Key topic 1: Three iterations of motivation

Motivation 1.0, which originated with the first humans and prevailed until relatively recently in human history, was focused on survival.
Motivation 2.0, which had its origins in early human societies, rose to prominence in the early 20^th It was based on seeking rewards an avoiding punishments. Key features of motivation 2.0 in the workplace:
- Profit maximization
- Routine, unrelenting work that is directed by others
- Extrinsic motivation: “If you do x, you will get y”
- Its goals can have dangerous side effects, like maximizing profit at all costs (think Gordon Gekko)
Motivation 2.1 came into play in the latter part of the 20^th century and introduced incremental improvements in motivation, such as worker safety and other labor laws
Motivation 3.0, which has been emerging over the past 10-20 years, is more sophisticated. Its key tenets, in the workplace and elsewhere, are:
- Purpose maximization
- Creative, interesting work that is self-directed
- Intrinsic motivation: “Now-that you have done x, I will recognize you with y”. Note that it’s important to not let these “now-that” rewards become so regular that they turn into “if-then” rewards of Motivation 2.0. To be most effective, they should include praise, feedback, and useful information
- Its goals focused on attaining mastery and are healthy

Key point 2: The rising prominence of “heuristic” vs. “algorithmic” work

The importance of Motivation 3.0 is driven by the fact that routine, formulaic, and instruction-based “algorithmic” work has increasingly been automated or offshored to lower cost locations. Algorithmic work now makes up only about 30% of job growth in developed economies. More and more of work – and 70% of job growth – is becoming “heuristic” in nature, requiring more experimentation, iteration, and self-management. As a consequence, Motivation 2.0 tenets (such as pay) don’t have the same impact as in past generations. Importantly, Pink makes the point that “The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.” More generally, Pink lays out what he calls the seven deadly flaws of “carrot and stick” motivators that form the basis of Motivation 2.0:

They can extinguish intrinsic (self) 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

For those interested in the psychological ties to Pink’s theses, he probes more deeply into self-determination theory, citing the three universal human needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

Key point 3: Type I (intrinsically motivated) and Type X (extrinsically motivated) environments

Type I as a renewable resource, since it comes from within. Its key nutrients are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Intrinsic motivation is self-directed and connected to a larger purpose, i.e., being better and better at something that matters.
In Type I environments, managers relinquish control and give autonomy support. They:
- See issues from employee’s point of view
- Give meaningful feedback and information
- Provide ample choice over what to do and how to do it
- Encourage employees to take on new projects
- Involve people in goal setting
- Use noncontrolling language
- Hold office hours, making themselves available to employees on their own terms
In such environments, employees have autonomy over their task, time, technique, team
Type X, by contrast, is a limited resource, since it comes through others, rather than from within
In Type X environments, managers relish control. They
- See issues from the company’s or their own point of view
- Are more prescriptive in when and how to perform tasks
- Keep employees doing what they are currently doing and hoard resources
- Set goals in a top-down fashion
- Use controlling language
- Hold meetings on their terms
The cost of these Type X environments is enormous. According to Gallup, 50% of people are not engaged in their work and 20% are actively disengaged, at an economic cost of $300B

Key point 4: Autonomy

Some of the early proponents of an intrinsic motivation environment were several HR professionals at Best Buy, who popularized the notion of a results-only work environment (ROWE). In such an environment:

There are no set work schedules
Every meeting is optional
People at all levels are empowered to stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or their company’s time
Employees have the freedom to work in any way they want

In a similar spirit, Tom Kelley, the founder of design firm IDEO, says, “The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive – and autonomy can be the antidote.”

Interestingly, William McKnight, president and chair of 3M, had this figured out back in the 1930s and 1940s, well before the rest of us. His simple credo was “Hire good people and leave them alone.”

Associated examples and suggested exercises:

Offer “FedEx Days”, where employees can work on anything they want, but they have to deliver something – such as a new idea, a prototype of a product, or a better internal process – the following day
Autonomy audit – ask everyone to rate (0-10)
- How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work – your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day?
- How much autonomy do you have over your time at work – for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day?
- How much autonomy do you have over your team at work – to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?
- How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work – how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?

Key point 5: Mastery

The desire for intellectual challenge, i.e., the ability to master something new and engaging, is the best predictor of productivity. In creating such an environment, it’s important to create what Pink calls Golidlocks tasks that are not overly difficult (which creates anxiety) nor overly simple (which creates boredom). He describes this as “walking the tightrope between accident and discipline.”

In such environments, employees often have two types of goals:

Performance goals – things they must demonstrate
Learning goals – things they are working to develop

He emphasizes the focusing benefit of mastery, noting that “If you set a goal of becoming an expert in your business, you would immediately start doing all kinds of things you don’t do now.”

He describes mastery as a mindset, citing Carol Dweck’s research on that topic, and quoting her as saying, “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life.” He acknowledges that mastery requires “grit” – perseverance and passion for long-term goals. He also describes it as an asymptote, meaning that while you get closer and closer to perfection, you never quite reach it.

He offers several supporting quotes:

From storied long-distance runner Sebastian Coe: “Throughout my athletics career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at that moment – whether next week, next month, or next year. The improvement was the goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.”
From NBA legend Julius Erving: “Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them”
From puzzle guru Will Shortz: “Try to pick a profession in which you enjoy even the most mundane, tedious parts. Then you will always be happy.”

Associated examples and suggested exercises:

Conduct a flow audit. Set a reminder to go off at 40 random times in a week. Each time, write down what you’re doing, how you’re feeling and whether you’re in “flow.” Record your observations, look at the patterns, and consider the following questions
- Which moments produced feelings of flow? Where were you? What were you working on? Who were you with?
- Are certain times of day more flow-friendly than others? How could you restructure your day based on your findings?
- How might you increase the number of optimal experiences and reduce the moments when you felt disengaged or distracted?
- If you’re having doubts about your job or career, what does this exercise tell you about your true source of intrinsic motivation?
Pick something to practice deliberately, changing an input to your performance (such as what you eat before a road race), setting new (and more granular) goals, and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time
Ask yourself each day, “Was I a little better today than yesterday?”
Use oblique cards – off-hand or off-topic questions (originally created by musical artists Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt) to look at a topic creatively and push yourself out of a mental rut. Multiple versions of such cards can be purchased today.

Key point 6: Purpose

Emphasizing purpose is ultimately about conveying to people why they should do something rather than how they should do something. Pink distinguishes between “we companies” (which have a strong shared sense of purpose) and “they companies” (which have a weaker shared sense of purpose). As an exercise, he suggests asking employees to write down the company’s purpose and then sharing as a group what they each wrote down.

As individuals, it’s equally important that we have a strong sense of our own purpose, i.e., our “why.” We should consider what gets us up in the morning and what keeps us up at night. Pink cites leading business thinker Tom Peters’ suggestion that we should all have a “to don’t” list, an inventory of behaviors and practices that sap energy, divert focus, and ought to be avoided.

Key point 7: Getting to Motivation 3.0

Pink concludes by making several suggestions for companies and managers looking to create an intrinsically motivated, Motivation 3.0 environment:

Start small – pile up small wins, worry less about trying to change everything than about doing something beneficial
Be strategically subversive – spark action by people frustrated with the status quo
Emphasize results rather than process
Recognize that praise is feedback, not an award ceremony, and best delivered in private

TAGS: Motivation, Autonomy, Flow