Book Club: 'Drive'
Should you be motivated to read Daniel Pink's book on motivation?What is it?
Drive – the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink.
Who wrote it?
Daniel Pink is a best selling author, Ted speaker, career analyst and thinker about stuff that impacts work and HR. One of his talks at the RSA got loads of people excited on Twitter and in the real world. He challenges a lot of conventional business thought, especially around motivation.
What it’s about?
Motivating others at work or outside is simple, right? You just need good incentives. And in the corporate world, when we think about incentives, most of us are thinking about $$$s.
Certainly, that was the conventional wisdom when I started working in HR. It persists in many leaders today – the belief that getting someone to do what you want really comes down to how much you are willing to pay them.
But if that’s something you never really thought rang true, you are gonna love this book.
Pink takes an engaging tour through the science and history of motivation, and puts forward a convincing case that our whole system of motivation needs to change – whether it’s motivating our colleagues, our kids, or ourselves.
He argues that we need to upgrade our whole motivational approach, especially for the type of work most of us do in an office these days. We need to adopt a motivational model more in tune with the world we live in.
My favourite quote
Too many organisations… still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are… rooted more in folklore than in science.
What will I learn?
Most businesses use carrot and stick motivational models through compensation and/or goal setting. Do more of one thing, I’ll pay you more. Not do enough and bad stuff happens.
Do they work? Here’s what Daniel says:
What business does hasn’t caught up with what science knows. And what science is revealing is that carrots and sticks can promote bad behaviour, create addiction, and encourage short-term thinking at the expense of the long view.
Still think you don’t need to read this book?
Why HR folks should read this
If you work as a leader in any line of business, but specifically in HR, you should care deeply about motivation.
What drives the people you work with to do great work, and do more of it, is one of the biggest questions HR people should be thinking about solving.
Forget big data, compa ratios, and HR organisational models – creating a motivated and engaged workforce is what HR is all about, right? You sure didn’t get into HR because you liked firing people and managing spreadsheets. (I hope.)
And with all the recent studies on engagement levels, there’s some compelling evidence that it’s time we did all look to change how we work.
As well as being a timely and sometimes provocative read, it’s really well written. If you like the mix of facts, experiments, and out-there thinking that has hit the bestseller list in books like Freakonomics, you’ll feel right at home.
I took this book on holiday, and just couldn’t put it down. And I’m someone who usually reads about one ‘work’ book a year, and then only if I have to.
In short
Read it – for fun, for work, for whatever you may learn. If you’re the practical type, the book finishes with a toolkit outlining how you can go about implementing some of the ideas.
And if you like what you read here, Pink has also written a great book about sales.
About the author
