drive

Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us, by Daniel H. Pink, is a riveting book that discusses the evolution of what motivates us as humans and how our view on motivation is slowly changing to meet the needs of our society. The introduction opens with a story of an experiment on what motivates us conducted on rhesus monkeys by Harry F. Harlow in 1949, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin (P. 07), and later picked up again by Edward Deci, a psychology graduate student from Carnegie Mellon University in 1969, who performed a similar experiment with two groups of college students (P. 11). In this experiment, these men looked at the differences in motivation by observing the effects of extrinsic rewards on the human psyche and collecting data on the results of some simple tests. The results were astonishing, contrary to all previous beliefs, both the humans and primates showed that after receiving extrinsic rewards their motivation to complete tasks dropped drastically. It was determined that for simple and repetitive tasks, extrinsic motivation techniques, such as the carrot and stick method, can work well; but for complex tasks requiring creativity, extrinsic motivation can have a negative outcome on the success of ones work.

Over the course of human civilization, we have transcended through at least two full stages of what drives our motivation. Originally, in motivation 1.0 (P. 30), our behavior was simple, what motivated us was the pursuit of food, shelter, and the desire to reproduce. This platform of motivation or human operating system was simple and worked effectively until the population of humanity grew so large that it became imperative for humans to interact with one another and work together i...

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...we would do or not do when attempting to start, build, or grow a business. We would not use extrinsic desires to motivate my employees. Instead we would attempt to be a Theory Y manager. As a Theory Y manager we would take more time in the hiring and recruitment process to find the best available Type I employees. We would be much more hands off, allowing for more leeway for our employees to get their jobs done. Allowing for employees to come in to work and leave when they please. Also, we would incorporate a 20 percent concept, where all employees are allowed to work on anything they want inside the company for 20 percent of their work time. Whether that is attempting to create a new product or idea, or just improving on something already available. These strategies to managing have the ability to improve productivity, job satisfaction and psychological well-being.