PDF Summary:Drive, by Daniel H. Pink

...of getting the behavior you want. But a vast volume of research has gone into the opposite, in demonstrating the effect of financial incentives in improving work. Like many management books, Drive doesn’t do a complete enough job of exploring the opposing stance – in this case, surveying the vast literature on incentives.

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The experiment ran in one-hour sessions held over 3 consecutive days. In each session, a participant was given 3 puzzles. When the participant had solved 2 of 3 puzzles, Deci told the participant he had to step out for a few minutes to retrieve the 4^th puzzle, and the participant was free to do whatever she liked. Deci stepped out for precisely eight minutes and watched what the participant did when left alone. This secret observation period allowed the researchers to measure motivation – the longer someone played when unsupervised, the more motivated the person was.

Deci split participants into two groups: group A and group B. On Day 1, he treated both groups the same. On Day 2, Deci treated them differently – he told Group A that they’d be paid $1 for every puzzle they solved. Group B got no reward. Then, on Day 3, he told Group A there wouldn’t be enough money to pay for Day 3, so they would be unpaid. Once again, Group B got no reward, just more puzzles.

Here were the results (summarized, not exact):

For Group B, the play time didn’t change substantially over the 3 days....

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*   Imagine you were asked in that time to bet on which product would succeed: 1) a product made by the world’s largest software company, with an army of well-paid authors, or 2) an online community full of uncredentialed, unpaid volunteers. You wouldn’t be blamed for choosing the former.
*   This example generalizes to open source projects like Linux and Apache, where contributors are driven strongly by unpaid motivations.

• New corporate structures that de-emphasize profit are emerging, like the “low-profit limited liability company” or the “B corporation,” both of which emphasize social good rather than profit maximization. This growing movement suggests that people aren’t driven entirely by financial rewards.
• People often leave lucrative jobs to take lower-paying ones that provide a clearer purpose or are more inherently enjoyable.

Note that extrinsic rewards are not totally absent from the examples above. For example, open-source contributors gain experience and resume line items that enhance earning potential later. But this isn’t a direct and immediate reward, so standard operant conditioning models don’t apply.

Recognizing Motivation 2.0’s limits are...

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Extrinsic rewards also quash the cognitive dissonance that comes with unrewarded work. Cognitive dissonance works like this - when volunteering, a person subconsciously reasons, “well I’m not getting paid for this work, so if I’m working hard, I must enjoy it.” Once a person starts getting paid, she instead reasons, “well, I don’t really enjoy the work, but it’s fine since I’m getting paid.”

Rewards Decrease High Performance

Researchers have found that financial incentives can decrease overall performance.

In one experiment, economists paid workers in rural India to play several games requiring motor skills (like throwing tennis balls at a target), creativity (unscrambling anagrams), or concentration (recalling a large number). Workers were given different levels of rewards – 4 rupees (one day’s pay), 40 rupees, or 400 rupees (5 months’ pay).

Surprisingly, the 40-rupee group performed no better than the 4-rupee group, and the 400-rupee group actually performed worse. (Shortform note: the book doesn’t explain why getting paid more decreases performance, but it’s possible that higher pay reduces intrinsic motivation, which then reduces the desire to perform...

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• Try to avoid the “if-then” reward, where you announce beforehand that the reward is conditional on completion of the creative task. Instead, give an unexpected reward given after the task is finished. Because it’s unexpected, the reward is less likely to undermine intrinsic motivation while the task is being completed.
• Use nontangible rewards. Instead of cash, give positive feedback, which unlike money can actually increase intrinsic motivation.
• Provide useful feedback. Be specific and praise effort and strategy, rather than the outcome. For example, rather than saying, “great job, you completed the task like I said,” say “The initiative you took was inspiring, and I like your design choice here.”

All these rewards can increase employee happiness without dampening intrinsic motivation.

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• Type I’s still care about money and recognition. You can’t expect Type I’s to work for free - they require a baseline compensation to remove money as a consideration point. But after a certain point, compensation is less a driver for Type I’s and more a form of recognition or feedback about performance.
• Type I’s have greater physical and mental health. Studies show that people who prefer autonomy and intrinsic motivation have higher psychological health and better relationships than Type X people. (Shortform note: It’s unclear whether this is correlation or causation. Healthier people may be in a better position to get more creative jobs that allow for more intrinsic motivation.)

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To develop an intrinsically motivating environment, you need to allow people to rekindle their autonomy. Counter-intuitively, people who are given more freedom may be even more accountable for their work, not less (maybe because when given more trust and freedom, they don’t want to let their employer down).

For best results, people need to have autonomy over four major dimensions of their work: the task, the time, the technique, and the team.

Autonomy Over Tasks

In typical work environments, the entirety of what you work on is decided. Instead, people should enjoy some autonomy in choosing what they work on.

One common way to implement this is by giving 20% time to employees to work on any project they want. The only requirement is that the project should further the goals of the organization somehow.

In some cases, this has seemed to unleash employee creativity:

• In the mid-20^th century, 3M gave technical staff 15% free time. Post-its arose from this free time.
• For much of its early history, Google gave 20% time to employees, leading to famous projects like Gmail, Orkut, and Google Translate.
• Georgetown University...

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The book states there are three psychological components to Mastery.

1) Mastery Requires the Growth Mindset

Some people tend to believe that they’re born with the intelligence they have, and that people don’t get any smarter with work. “I’ve just never been any good at math and I never will be.” This is the fixed mindset you should avoid.

To successfully master something, you instead need to adopt the growth mindset – a belief that your intelligence and abilities are not fixed, that you have the potential to get better at whatever you want to.

People with different mindsets treat challenges differently:

• Fixed mindset people interpret failures as just confirming evidence that they’re not good at something. Growth mindset people interpret failures as feedback to use to get better.
• Fixed mindset people see effort as a negative sign that you’re not good at something – that’s why you need to struggle. Growth mindset people see effort as the way to get better.
• Fixed mindset people tend to set performance goals for themselves, like grades or promotions. Growth mindset people tend to set goals centered around progress and learning, with...

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• When discussing goals of management, think beyond sterile words like “value” and “differentiation.” Reach for deeper ideals like honor, truth, justice, and beauty.
• Use the pronoun test to gauge your work environment – do people describe the company in terms of “we,” or in terms of “they?”
• Always explain why something needs to be done. This prevents work from feeling purposeless.
• Donate some company profits to charity, since spending money on others seems to increase our well-being. Even better, give employees autonomy over deciding where they want to send their share of the donation pool.
• Combine purpose with autonomy: give workers 20% time to work on a socially meaningful project.

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1. Understand your weaknesses, and direct your effort there.
2. Apply full concentration and effort. It’s going to be mentally and physically exhausting - but that’s why most people don’t do it, and that’s how you’ll get better.
3. Receive immediate and informative feedback. This will point out how to improve.
4. Repeat, with discipline. Mastery is the sum of thousands of small events, done day in and day out.

Improving Intrinsic Motivation In Your Organization

Here are strategies to improve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in your organization.

Give 20% Time for Self-Chosen Projects

If 20% time is too extreme of a transition, just start with 10% time, limited to a receptive small group of people.

Turn an Off-Site into a Fedex Day

Many off-sites fee like awkward forced-fun days. Instead, set aside the day for when employees can choose what to work on, with the only rule being that they must deliver. They can deliver a new idea, a prototype, a better process, or more.

Conduct Anonymous Surveys of Autonomy and Purpose

Ask questions like “how much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work” and “what is our organization’s purpose?” If you’re a...