Daniel Pink's Motivation 3.0 Upgrade, Plus Toolkit (Book Review)

Daniel Pink visits Town Hall in Seattle on Monday, January 11. His talk begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $5.

Of the pack of gurus in the running to assume the mantle of Drucker and become the business world's go-to guy for advice on how to have it all, the author of Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, both is and isn't in the running.

It's hard to imagine anyone today having the chance to survey a monolithic business world the way Peter Drucker did. Today's analyses are either fiercely domain-specific or meta-analyses of a fractured, niche marketplace. Nonetheless, Daniel Pink books--for "intelligent, forward-thinking, optimistic folks," bursting with the hallmarks of the get-smart genre--sell like iPods (which I think supplanted hotcakes in sales rankings some years ago).

Drive naturally comes with an extended subhead ("The Surprising Truth ABout What Motivates Us") and includes seven reasons for things, invented dichotomies ("Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run"), recourse to experts and research, and glowing case studies of businesses that "get it."

In other words, Drive is to books what the Clif Bar is to food. If, like me, you find your soul's tastebuds shriveling from over-exposure to this high-energy presentation style, I want to deliver some surprising truth of my own: It's worth reading, and mulling over. It challenges you. (If hard-charging execs did book clubs, this would be a good pick.) And it's not "just" for business types--if you need to work for a living, there's something here for you.

Let me skip to the end, to explain why. According to Pink (the author, not the singer), motivation is what happens when autonomy, mastery, and purpose head off in the same direction. That's drive.

He's arguing for real autonomy here, not the faux kind where corporate sets goals and workers have the "freedom" to achieve them by working as long as they want so long as it's longer. The example he gives is of a ROWE (results-oriented work environment), where employees set their own hours--they come to work to work, not to show up at the office for 8.5 hours.

On the one hand, I resist the book jacket's "paradigm-shattering" emphasis, but on the other, just imagine what it would take to get your office to switch to ROWE. Many, if not most, of you are all too familiar with how suspicious command-and-control types are of giving employees meaningful choices. They may mean well, but they just can't get their heads around it. Their mantra is "Work harder, not smarter."

Fundamentally, they believe people don't like work, and would rather be someplace else: Only rum and the lash motivate the swabbies. But the thesis that underlies Pink's book is that in many cases, extrinsic motivators are only briefly effective, and are often counter-productive for the long-term. The thrill of a Salesperson of the Month plaque dwindles quickly. And if it's all about the extra money from a raise, why not take bids from competing firms for your services?

Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are intrinsic. They're how you feel about work. Mastery helps prevent burn-out because it feeds off a lifelong need we have to get better at things. So long as we feel like we're making progress, we'll keep at it. Purpose? Think greater good. People will do crazy things if they think it matters. They may, for instance, leave Amazon and start a micro-finance student loan company. Pink's example is TOMS Shoes.

The value of Pink's book is, for me, two-fold.

I liked how it explores the way this renegotiation is shaping business. Formerly clear boundaries are being blurred, and businesses are copying and experimenting with what works. Google's fabled 20-percent time has opened a Pandora's box of just how innovative employees can be if you let them (with attendant trade-offs). Purpose-driven companies are popping up and filling charitable or environmental roles without being nonprofits. Customers are coming home to roost in co-ops.

And as I say, this book speaks to anyone who is in management--of a company, club, community organization, or even "brand you" (pause to smile ironically). It's a doorway to an introspective look at what drives you, what gets you out of bed in the morning, and what you can do to align yourself with that. All your life, you may have had a voice in your head telling you to play it safe--that's fine, but don't forget to listen to the voice that tells you to play, too.

My primary caveat is the same as with Drucker's iconic "knowledge worker" or Florida's "cultural creative"--I can't escape the sense that a demographic worker population is being forced to stand in for the working population as a whole. It's not for nothing that results-oriented experimenters are software companies, rather than janitorial services. The talk of monetary compensation as simply a "threshold" reward skips over the large group for whom a paycheck is something close to life and death.

Finally, I think it would be too much to say that management is getting motivational religion all on its own; the nationwide job insecurity must be a factor, too. The rise of the autonomous, self-directed, self-fulfilled worker is tied to at-will employment and right-to-work legislation. It's ironic, but the instinct for corporate self-preservation that demanded the ability to shed millions of jobs in a quarter is creating workers who demand this "better" kind of partnership, as job security vanishes.