Drive by Daniel H. Pink: Summary and Notes
Do you really know what motivates us?
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“Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.”
Rating: 7/10
Related Books: The Sell is Human, Start With Why, A Whole New Mind, Built to Last, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
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Drive by Daniel H Pink: Short Summary
What motivates people to act as they do? There are many reasons, but the most powerful kind of motivation is intrinsic motivation. Companies, individuals, governments, schools, and even parents should seek to cultivate and encourage intrinsic motivation. An excellent book on why and how companies should be modeled for the 21st century.
Part 1: A New Operating System
Societies have operating systems. They include the laws, customs, economic arrangements, and the supposition of how the world works.
Motivation 1.0: The very first human operating system was based on survival
Motivation 2.0: As people began to cooperate, a new operating system that was based on how to respond to punishment and rewards was created
Harnessing motivation 2.0 was important for our economic development especially during the industrial revolution. Most companies still believe that the way to improve performance is to reward the good and punish the bad.
However, motivation 2.0 is incompatible with:
- How we organize what we do. Recent trends like open-source software and benefit corporations cannot be explained by extrinsic motivation
- How we think about what we do. Intrinsic motivation matters more than external motivations when making decisions
- How we do what we do. As jobs become more reliant on creative expression and less on routines, the need for extrinsic motivation decreases
