For many businesses, setting targets and offering bonuses and other monetary incentives is the way to motivate people. These incentives work well when people are doing repetitive and automated tasks. Employees don't need to use creativity to accomplish the tasks and the results can be improved with bonuses. This is something that Pink calls Motivation 2.0.
In today's business the repetitive tasks are in minority and most of our work require creative thinking and you are not likely to come across the same tasks from one day to the next. In this kind of environment bonuses and target based incentives are more likely to reduce the quality of the work and to demotivate people than to increase long term productivity. This means we need different ways to motivate people and this Pink calls Motivation 3.0.
For the creative workforce, work itself is the motivator. Salary needs to be fair compared to similar positions within the company and compared to the other companies in the market place. Money is not the motivator, but it can be the demotivator.
To motivate people it's important to give them autonomy and possibilities to improve their skills so they can reach towards the mastery of their art. People want also to feel that their job is filling a purpose higher than the bottom line. Autonomy means autonomy over what is done, when it's done, how it's done and which whom it's done. When people are able to decide for themselves they will perform better and are more motivated. Creative knowledge workers want to become better in their craft everyday and employers have to make sure this is possible in the organization, otherwise these people get demotivated and are likely to move to another company.
In Drive, Pink describes how some innovative companies have responded to the challenges of motivating creative workforce and these examples are the most valuable part of the book. This book really makes you think how you should organize your workplace and how to make your fellow employees motivated in their work. Not all incentive plans are bad, but it's important to acknowledge what kind of rewards are given, for what tasks and when.
The last part of Drive is The Type I Toolkit. The toolkit section has some practical guidelines to implement the Motivation 3.0 into your organization, into school and into your own life. The Toolkit is a nice addition to the book and helps you to take the theory into practice.
Pink has also a good list of books to read to dig deeper into this topic, enjoy.
- Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse
- Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalay
- Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
- Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
- Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalay and William Damon
- Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Goodwin
- The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal by David Halberstam
- Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn
- Once a Runner by John L. Parker Jr.
- The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
- Mavericks: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
- The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organizations by Peter M. Senge
