Since I’m spending a lot of time sitting these days, I picked up Daniel Pink’s book Drive and started to read. This is the second time, actually, that I’ve tried to read this book. Picked it up at the library the first time and got a few pages into the introduction before it got buried underneath some other books I was reading at the time.
However, I have gotten past the intro and the first chapter and am realizing what a provocative book this is. So far, I’m delighted and anxious to continue reading, having much the same emotional response to Pink’s book as I did to Sir Ken Robinson’s book, The Element.
Pink’s assertion up front is that “too many organizations still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.” Those assumptions being based on what he terms Motivation 2.0, the industrial revolution era theories still very much in vogue in corporate America that external rewards and punishments are the principal drivers of human behavior.
Pink posits, based on a number of research studies and experiments in behavioral science, that the nature of our economy is changing the way work is done. To probably oversimplify, outsourcing of algorithmic work tasks and similar automation of others enabled by computer technology is resulting in a rapid growth of more heuristic work (work that requires creative thinking and innovation). However, the old school system of rewards and punishments, the carrots and sticks that corporate managers love to talk about, actually lead to reduced performance and actually undermine the goals that they are supposedly in place to achieve.
Like Robinson (and Lisa Gansky in The Mesh), Pink is keyed into the revolution happening all around us as years of economic crisis are forcing real human questions about wealth, possessions, the debt it took to acquire them, meaning and purpose of work and social consciousness and how these trends are re-shaping work and business in the 2010 decade.
So far, so good. Where I’m finding this book most helpful, a few chapters into it now, is in articulating some of what I’ve experienced personally, but not quite been able to turn into words.