Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

  4. Describe a time when you’ve seen one of the seven deadly flaws of carrots and sticks in action. What lessons might you and others learn from that experience? Have you seen instances when carrots and sticks have been effective?

  5. How well is your current job meeting your need for “baseline rewards”—salary, benefits, a few perks? If it’s falling short, what changes can you or your organization make?

  6. Pink draws a distinction between “routine” work and “nonroutine” work. How much of your own work is routine? How much is nonroutine?

  7. If you’re a boss, how might you replace “if-then” rewards with a more autonomous environment and the occasional “now that” reward?

  8. As you think about your own best work, what aspect of autonomy has been most important to you? Autonomy over what you do (task), when you do it (time), how you do it (technique), or with whom you do it (team)? Why? How much autonomy do you have at work right now? Is that enough?

  9. Would initiatives like FedEx Days, 20 percent time, and ROWE work in your organization? Why or why not? What are one or two other ideas that would bring out more Type I behavior in your workplace?

  10. Describe a time recently when you’ve experienced “flow.” What were you doing? Where were you? How might you tweak your current role to bring on more of these optimal experiences?

  11. Is there anything you’ve ever wanted to master that you’ve avoided for reasons like “I’m too old” or “I’ll never be good at that” or “It would be a waste of time”? What are the barriers to giving it a try? How can you remove those barriers?

  12. Are you in a position to delegate any of the tasks that might be holding you back from more challenging pursuits? How might you hand off these tasks in a way that does not take away your colleagues’ autonomy?

  13. How would you redesign your office, your classroom, or your home—the physical environment, the processes, the rules—to promote greater engagement and mastery by everyone?

  14. When tackling the routine tasks your job requires, what strategies can you come up with to trigger the positive side of the Sawyer Effect?

  15. Drive talks a lot about purpose—both for organizations and individuals. Does your organization have a purpose? What is it? If your organization is for-profit, is purpose even a realistic goal given the competitive pressures in every industry?

  16. Are you—in your paid work, family life, or volunteering—on a path toward purpose? What is that purpose?

  17. Is education today too Type X—that is, does it put too great an emphasis on extrinsic rewards? If so, how should we reconfigure schools and classrooms? Is there an elegant way to reconcile intrinsic motivation and accountability?

  18. If you’re a mom or dad, does your home environment promote more Type I or Type X behavior in your child or children? How? What, if anything, should you do about it?

  19. Does Pink underplay the importance of earning a living? Is his view of Motivation 3.0 a bit too utopian—that is, is Pink, if you’ll pardon the pun, too rosy?

  20. What are the things that truly motivate you? Now think about the last week. How many of those 168 hours were devoted to these things? Can you do better?

  Your own questions:i

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  And now a tip of the hat to those who kept me motivated.

  At Riverhead Books, Jake Morrissey’s skills as an editor were matched only by his talents as a therapist. He made this a better book without making its author a crazier person. Thanks also to Geoff Kloske, who threw his support behind this project early and enthusiastically—and to Riverhead’s extraordinary production team for their skill and patience.

  Rafe Sagalyn understood the promise of this book even before I did and championed it with his usual deft touch. I’m grateful to have him as a literary agent and a friend. A huge shout-out as well to the talented Bridget Wagner, who has spread the word about Drive to publishers around the world.

  Vanessa Carr did a terrific job of finding obscure social psychology studies in the crevices of the Internet and on the dusty shelves of university libraries. Rob Ten Pas once again used his considerable talents to craft pictures to enliven my less considerable words. Sarah Rainone provided spectacular help pushing the project over the finish line during a hot and dreary summer. Remember all three of those names, folks. They’re stars.

  One of the joys of working on this book was having a few long conversations and interviews with Mike Csikszentmihalyi, Ed Deci, and Rich Ryan, who have long been heroes of mine. If there were any justice in the world, all three would win a Nobel Prize—and if that justice had a slight sense of humor, the prize would be in economics. Any errors or misinterpretations of their work are my fault, not theirs.

  It’s about at this point that authors who are parents apologize to their children for missed dinners. Not me. I don’t miss meals. But I did skip nearly everything else for several months and that forced the amazing Pink kids—Sophia, Eliza, and Saul, to whom Drive is dedicated—into a dad-less existence for a while. Sorry, guys. Fortunately, as you’ve no doubt already discovered, I need you a lot more than you need me.

  Then there’s the threesome’s mom, Jessica Anne Lerner. As always, Jessica was the first, last, and most honest sounding board for every idea I spit out. And as always, Jessica read every word I wrote—including many thousands of them aloud while I sat in a red chair cringing at their sound. For these small reasons, and many larger ones that are none of your business, this gorgeous, graceful woman leaves me slack-jawed—in awe and in love.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: THE PUZZLING PUZZLES OF HARRY HARLOW AND EDWARD DECI

  1 Harry F. Harlow, Margaret Kuenne Harlow, and Donald R. Meyer, “Learning Motivated by a Manipulation Drive,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 40 (1950): 231.

  2 Ibid., 233-34.

  3 Harry F. Harlow, “Motivation as a Factor in the Acquisition of New Responses,” in Current Theory and Research on Motivation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953), 46.

  4 Harlow, in some ways, became part of the establishment. He won a National Science Medal and became president of the American Psychological Association. For more about Harlow’s interesting life, see Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2002), and Jim Ottaviani and Dylan Meconis, Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love (Ann Arbor, Mich.: G. T. Labs, 2007).

  5 Edward L. Deci, “Effects of Externally Mediated Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 18 (1971): 114.

  6 Edward L. Deci, “Intrinsic Motivation, Extrinsic Reinforcement, and Inequity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 22 (1972): 119-20.

  CHAPTER 1. THE RISE AND FALL OF MOTIVATION 2.0

  1 “Important Notice: MSN Encarta to Be Discontinued,” Microsoft press release (March 30, 2009); Ina Fried, “Microsoft Closing the Book on Encarta,” CNET News, March 30, 2009; “Microsoft to Shut Encarta as Free Sites Alter Market,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2009. Up-to-date Wikipedia data are available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About.

  2 Karim R. Lakhani and Robert G. Wolf, “Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects,” in Perspectives on Free and Open Software, edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. Lakhani (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 3, 12.

  3 Jurgen Blitzer, Wolfram Schrettl, and Philipp J. H. Schroeder, “Intrinsic Motivation in Open Source Software Development,” Journal of Comparative Economics 35 (2007
): 17, 4.

  4 “Vermont Governor Expected to Sign Bill on Charity-Business Hybrid,” Chronicle of Philanthropy, News Updates, April 21, 2008.

  5 Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 23; Aspen Institute, Fourth Sector Concept Paper (Fall 2008); “B Corporation,” MIT Sloan Management Review, December 11, 2008, and http://www.bcorporation.net/declaration.

  6 Stephanie Strom, “Businesses Try to Make Money and Save the World,” New York Times, May 6, 2007.

  7 Colin Camerer, “Behavioral Economics: Reunifying Psychology and Economics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96 (September 1999): 10576.

  8 Bruno S. Frey, Not Just for the Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation (Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 1997), 118-19, ix. See also Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Well-Being (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

  9 Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee, “The Next Revolution in Interaction,” McKinsey Quarterly 4 (2005): 25-26 .

  10 Careful readers might remember that I wrote about this general topic in A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006). Look for it at your local library. It’s not bad.

  11 Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity in Context (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 119. Amabile also says that, used properly and carefully, extrinsic motivators can be conducive to creativity—a point I’ll examine more in Chapter 2.

  12 Telework Trendlines 2009, data collected by the Dieringer Research Group, published by World atWork, February 2009.

  CHAPTER 2. SEVEN REASONS CARROTS AND STICKS (OFTEN) DON’T WORK . . .

  1 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 23.

  2 Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Robert Nisbett, “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Rewards: A Test of the ‘Overjustification’ Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28, no. 1 (1973): 129-37.

  3 Edward L. Deci, Richard M. Ryan, and Richard Koestner, “A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 6 (1999): 659.

  4 Jonmarshall Reeve, Understanding Motivation and Emotion, 4th ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 143.

  5 Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Lowenstein, and Nina Mazar, “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-11, July 23, 2005 (emphasis added). You can also find a very short summary of this and some other research in Dan Ariely, “What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?” New York Times, November 20, 2008.

  6 “LSE: When Performance-Related Pay Backfires,” Financial, June 25, 2009.

  7 Sam Glucksberg, “The Influence of Strength of Drive on Functional Fixedness and Perceptual Recognition,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 63 (1962): 36-41. Glucksberg obtained similar results in his “Problem Solving: Response Competition Under the Influence of Drive,” Psychological Reports 15 (1964).

  8 Teresa M. Amabile, Elise Phillips, and Mary Ann Collins, “Person and Environment in Talent Development: The Case of Creativity,” in Talent Development: Proceedings from the 1993 Henry B. and Jocelyn Wallace National Research Symposium on Talent Development, edited by Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline, and DeAnn L. Ambroson (Dayton: Ohio Psychology Press, 1993), 273-74.

  9 Jean Kathryn Carney, “Intrinsic Motivation and Artistic Success” (unpublished dissertation, 1986, University of Chicago); J. W. Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Creative Vision: A Longitudinal Study of Problem-Finding in Art (New York: Wiley, 1976).

  10 Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity in Context (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 119; James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg, eds., The International Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18.

  11 Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, edited by Ann Oakley and John Ashton, expanded and updated edition (New York: New Press, 1997).

  12 Carl Mellström and Magnus Johannesson, “Crowding Out in Blood Donation: Was Titmuss Right?” Journal of the European Economic Association 6, no. 4 ( June 2008): 845-63.

  13 Other research has found that monetary incentives are especially counterproductive when the charitable act is public. See Dan Ariely, Anat Bracha, and Stephan Meier, “Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 07-9, August 2007.

  14 Bruno S. Frey, Not Just for the Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation (Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 1997), 84.

  15 Nicola Lacetera and Mario Macias, “Motivating Altruism: A Field Study,” Institute for the Study of Labor Discussion Paper No. 3770, October 28, 2008.

  16 Lisa D. Ordonez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Braverman, “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting,” Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 09-083, February 2009.

  17 Peter Applebome, “When Grades Are Fixed in College-Entrance Derby,” New York Times, March 7, 2009.

  18 Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,” Journal of Legal Studies 29 ( January 2000).

  19 Gneezy and Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,” 3, 7 (emphasis added).

  20 Anton Suvorov, “Addiction to Rewards,” presentation delivered at the European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, October 25, 2003. Mimeo (2003) available at http://www.cemfi.es/research/conferences/ewm/Anton/addict_new6.pdf.

  21 Brian Knutson, Charles M. Adams, Grace W. Fong, and Daniel Hommer, “Anticipation of Increasing Monetary Reward Selectively Recruits Nucleus Accumbens,” Journal of Neuroscience 21 (2001).

  22 Camelia M. Kuhnen and Brian Knutson, “The Neural Basis of Financial Risk Taking,” Neuron 47 (September 2005): 768.

  23 Mei Cheng, K. R. Subramanyam, and Yuan Zhang, “Earnings Guidance and Managerial Myopia,” SSRN Working Paper No. 854515, November 2005.

  24 Lisa D. Ordonez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Braverman, “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting,” Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 09-083, February 2009.

  25 Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole, “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation,” Review of Economic Studies 70 (2003).

  CHAPTER 2A. . . . AND THE SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES WHEN THEY DO

  1 Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard M. Ryan, “Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in Education: Reconsidered Once Again,” Review of Educational Research 71, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 14.

  2 Dan Ariely, “What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?” New York Times, November 20, 2008.

  3 Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity in Context (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 175.

  4 Deci, Ryan, and Koestner, “Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in Education.”

  5 Amabile, Creativity in Context, 117.

  6 Deci, Ryan, and Koestner, “Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in Education.”

  7 Amabile, Creativity in Context, 119.

  CHAPTER 3. TYPE I AND TYPE X

  1 Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55 ( January 2000): 68.

  2 Meyer Friedman and Ray H. Rosenman, Type A Behavior and Your Heart (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 4.

  3 Ibid., 70.

  4 Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise: 25th Anniversary Printing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 33-34.

  5 Ryan and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being.”

  CHAPTER 4. AUTONOMY

  1 Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, “Facilitating Optimal Motivation and Psychological Wel
l-Being Across Life’s Domains,” Canadian Psychology 49, no. 1 (February 2008): 14.

  2 Valery Chirkov, Richard M. Ryan, Youngmee Kim, and Ulas Kaplan, “Differentiating Autonomy from Individualism and Independence: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Internalization of Cultural Orientations and Well-Being,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 ( January 2003); Joe Devine, Laura Camfield, and Ian Gough, “Autonomy or Dependence—or Both?: Perspectives from Bangladesh,” Journal of Happiness Studies 9, no. 1 ( January 2008).

  3 Deci and Ryan, “Facilitating Optimal Motivation and Psychological Well-Being Across Life’s Domains,” citing many other studies.

  4 Paul P. Baard, Edward L. Deci, and Richard M. Ryan, “Intrinsic Need Satisfaction: A Motivational Basis of Performance and Well-Being in Two Work Settings,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34 (2004).

  5 Francis Green, Demanding Work: The Paradox of Job Quality in the Affluent Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  6 “Atlassian’s 20% Time Experiment,” Atlassian Developer Blog, post by Mike Cannon-Brookes, March 10, 2008.

  7 Quoted in Harvard Business Essentials: Managing Creativity and Innovation (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003), 109.

  8 The observation comes from former 3M executive Bill Coyne, quoted in Ben Casnocha, “Success on the Side,” The American: The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, April 2009. A nice account of 3M’s practices appears in James C. Collins and Jerry L. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperBusiness, 2004).

  9 Erin Hayes, “Google’s 20 Percent Factor,” ABC News, May 12, 2008.

  10 V. Dion Hayes, “What Nurses Want,” Washington Post, September 13, 2008.

  11 Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfi llment (New York: Free Press, 2004), 178; Paul R. Verkuil, Martin Seligman, and Terry Kang, “Countering Lawyer Unhappiness: Pessimism, Decision Latitude and the Zero-Sum Dilemma at Cardozo Law School,” Public Research Paper No. 19, September 2000.