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WillowOne's Positions

Drive

Overview

Subtitled The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Pink argues that the carrot-and-stick model of motivation, which he calls Motivation 2.0, works for routine tasks and fails for anything requiring creativity or judgement, where rewards narrow focus, crowd out interest and invite gaming. In its place he proposes autonomy (over task, time, technique and team), mastery (the pull of getting better at something that matters) and purpose (a reason beyond the pay). The evidence comes mainly from the self-determination theory of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan and from experiments such as the candle problem, in which paying people made them slower.

Notes

A popularisation, and an honest one: Pink is clear about whose research he is summarising, and the research is real. The reason it is here is that it changed how I think about work, both my own and the way I run it for others, and that the finding generalises. If you reward a measurable proxy you get the proxy, which is the same problem that corrupts school league tables, published science and anything else with a metric attached. The book is short, the toolkit at the back is the weakest part, and the first hundred pages are worth anyone's afternoon.

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