Dan Pink‘s Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, provides convincing arguments in favor of intrinsic motivation. We have had too limited a view of what drives performance and we need a whole new operating system for some of the places where science says one thing and business does another. The patches are just barely holding the old beliefs in place.
The book’s website puts it this way:
Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He demonstrates that while carrots and sticks worked successfully in the twentieth century, that’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges.
Most if-then incentive systems do more damage than good. Give somebody a contingent reward and they lose interest after a short while. That which had once been fun is transmuted into work. Pink gives one example after another of paying a contingent bonus and seeing performance decline.
Setting goals can backfire, too. People who put the goals first often cut corners to accomplish them. Also, goals fight against self-determination.
The new values displace the shareholder value maximization mandate, making its workers/partners part of the larger whole. HBS MBAs are signing a pledge to be principled and weigh the balance of profit and what feels right.
Students today do things just for the hell of it. Money is not as big a motivator as doing the right thing. They live and breathe networks. They aren’t about to stay still because they know how to leverage the powerful of information and timing.
Dan Pink, photo by Jay
Dan has a following; I expect he’ll raise enough of a ruckus that execs will take action. Higher salary and smaller bonus. Or bonus pays your contributions to charity and churches.
People need free reign in making their work what they want to do; that’s what works with intrinsicly motivated workers. The big payoff arrives when companies are doing the sort of greater good that makes a team proud.
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Very true and interesting too.
The concept of pay for performance has lost value, how much more does one need to take care of the basic needs and some luxuries too?
Enjoyment derived and shared from solving problems also makes for striving towards betterment.
Usha