Reviews for Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us

The average rating for Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-02-03 00:00:00 Ryan Crocker Why am I writing this review on Goodreads, anyway? I'm not getting paid for it. There are plenty of other things I should be doing. And it's not like I have a coterie of devoted followers waiting with bated breath for my next review (in fact, the vast majority of reviews I write here get zero comments and zero "likes"). So why, then? DRIVE has the answer. I do it for me. I do it for intrinsic reasons and thumb my nose at the world of extrinsic ones. I do it because I derive personal pleasure from it, because it challenges me to summarize and critique succinctly, because I am free to be funny, irreverent, scholarly, deadpan, conventional, or wacky. Now THAT'S incentive! And you don't even have to read this whole book to get Daniel Pink's message. For one, he sums up each chapter in a pecan shell at the end of the book, so you can read that instead next time you're at Barnes & Noble. Or you can visit the TED website and watch Pink sum up his message in a speech for free. But if you want the dirty details, read the book. It's fast, it's easy, it's enlightening. The book is chiefly geared toward the business community, but has ramifications for all of us and, in my case, for the education community (where I first saw it recommended). It debunks the myth of the carrot and stick, that rewards get results and sticks get results -- always. No, no, no. Science, Pink says, proves otherwise. And he parades one case study after another to make his point. Perhaps the most salient is the encyclopedia example. Back in 1995, Microsoft paid writers big bucks to write Encarta, an encyclopedia it sold on CD and as software. Only, around 10 years later, Bill Gates' boys had to wave the white flag and fold up camp, vanquished and defeated by a competitor that paid no one -- not a bloody dime -- and offered its encyclopedia for free. That competitor? Wikipedia. Written by everyday Joes and Josephines the world over. For nothing. Then there was the Swedish blood bank. Its administrators decided to cash in by switching from a donation model to a pay-to-bleed model. What happened? Blood donations plummeted. Why? Swedes preferred to give blood for humane reasons, not for blood money. They did it for intrinsic reasons, not extrinsic ones. So what does this mean to businesses? It means the old ways of dictatorial managers overseeing not-to-be-trusted worker bees are over. If, Pink says, you give workers THREE gifts -- autonomy, mastery, and purpose -- they will work like hell for you (because it's as much for THEM). In many ways it makes sense. Given the choice, humans will work for less money if a company offers them more leeway, creative outlets, flexibility, challenges with long-term goals, camaraderie, and raison d'être's (so to speak). Pink points to our childhoods. We're all born with a built-in hunger to learn, to challenge ourselves, to WORK, but schools (and then workplaces) beat it out of us with monotony and inanity, dullness and repetition. What if you got a "FedEx Friday" every week -- a day to work on any project toward the company's cause you wished, as long as you presented your results to co-workers and admins the following Monday? That's how Post-It notes were invented by a guy at 3M. The company gave its workers time to manage and challenge themselves. Voila! In education, it amounts to adding relevancy to the classroom. What's the point? How does this connect to the world and how can it be used in the student's future? Can we give students choice, provide the tools, and turn them loose while serving as mentors? Oddly, many teachers cannot and will not because they feel like they will be ceding control AND because they will no longer be doing their job the way they have always done it and/or the way THEIR teachers always did it to THEM (oh, sins of the fathers!). So, yeah. If you don't know the lessons of DRIVE, you should jump on the Autobahn and get up to speed. Really. It's not just for work -- it's for you, too. Motivate yourself. Check it out.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-11 00:00:00 Shannon Anderson I can think of a few alternate titles for this book. "The Art of Beating a Dead Horse: Your Guide to Regurgitating the Same Point in Every Chapter" "How to Filter Years of Other People's Research into Broad Talking Points" "You Too Can Write a Book With At Least 25% Filler Material" "The Fair and Balanced Guide to Selling Your Point By Avoiding Contradictory Evidence" I jest, yet I do think the main topic of this book is important and true. I will save you the pain of reading it by stating it here: people with non-routine jobs are more effectively motivated by intrinsic rewards rather than extrinsic rewards. People work better when they can have autonomy over their work and pursue mastery of their skills. Appealing to an employee's desire for intrinsic satisfaction makes for a better long term outcome for both company and employee. The problem with Pink's book is that he says almost the exact same thing in every chapter. Instead of a progression of ideas, we instead get a boring rehash of the main point, with slightly altered words. Most of this is done by recounting specific studies that prove his main point about intrinsic motivation. However, rarely does he ever mention when intrinsic motivation doesn't work, except when he mentions "routine, non-creative jobs". I'd say that a lot of jobs out there are rather routine and non-creative, and I think it's a mistake to assume that intrinsic motivation has no application for these jobs at all. Additionally, I'm skeptical of anyone that doesn't at least mention studies that seem to contradict their main idea, which Pink never does. He builds his case by selecting slices of numerous studies, then interpreting the results to fit his narrative. Pink also talks at length about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow. I have never read "Flow", yet I hope the concept is better explained in his book, because in Pink's book it makes no sense. "Flow" is supposed to describe the mindset of a person when they are deeply involved in something (i.e. a star baseball player swinging at a pitch, an author writing a book, etc.), and Pink tries to say that our whole day should be filled with "flow" moments. Sounds okay, but sometimes I think it's good to have non "flow" moments. At any rate, this whole concept is under-explained and over-utilized in this book. The best part of this book was the concept of intrinsic motivation and how it should be applied in business. Also, it is important to note that extrinsic motivators like "if-then" rewards (e.g., 'if' we meet the sales quota, 'then' you'll receive $300) can actually be detrimental to motivation. I wish Pink would have examined the concept of intrinsic motivation in different aspects of life rather than just business. I believe, if explored more thoroughly, it could be very revealing of many different aspects of human behavior. In fact, it would be more helpful to see which motivators are best suited to specific behavioral areas. All in all, this was a poorly written book with a very interesting idea at its core.