“Drive” by Daniel Pink

Posted: March 14th, 2010 | | 1 Comment »

by Daniel Pink

9/10

Elevator Pitch: The current system of motivating employees is broken. Science has proved that just offering more money doesn’t work, but business hasn’t followed suit. People will do their best work when the have Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

Overview: I bought this book because of two reasons. First, because I work with a lot of companies on their hiring practices and employee development. It has been very valuable to be able to work this content into our conversations on an employee by employee basis. Secondly, (and maybe this should have been firstly since it is how I found out about the book) I watched this TED talk by the author and was floored.

Even after watching this talk, the book is still worth the read. It is amazing to read the research about and most surprisingly, how much the “business world” has ignored this research…

There are many practical business applications from this book, but the simplest has got to be that employees make “safer” and “less creative” decisions when their compensation is tied directly to their work. The research is there to back this statement, but none were more telling than the research into commissioned vs noncommissioned work. Non-Commissioned work has always been better, more famous, more meaningful and has made the most impact than work done for $.

So this begs the immediate question, if we want a creative, brilliant or even just genius innovation… how do we motivate our staff? The book has a lot of great thoughts on this, but the one that I am taking away is one that has been used and proven valuable by many cutting-edge companies… this is the idea of giving employees work time to come up with new innovations. Some companies (Google included) give their staff as much as 20% of their work week to work on whatever project they want. Many of Google’s top innovations (Gmail, Maps, etc…) have come from this time.

So here is the challenge…. Start doing this! “Begin it now!”

Favorite Quotes:

-”Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others – sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on- can sometimes have dangerous side effects.

-”The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.”

-“Hire good people and leave them alone.”

-”Only engagement can produce mastery. And the pursuit of mastery has become essential in making one’s way in today’s economy…. more than 50% of employees are not engaged at work.”

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