Author: Daniel H. Pink Rating: 4/5
What is it that drives us through our lives ? Author argues that we have three different types of motivation namely, Motivation 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 respectively. Motivation 1.0 is what comes out of our natural evolutionary process. Things that help in our survival. Motivation 2.0 is the carrot and stick motivation.
We do things in order to get rewards. Motivation 3.0 is the new trend where carrot and stick does not work any more, it is and intrinsic motivation to do well. This book mainly deals with the third category of motivation. His claim is, that money is not a motivational factor after a certain point. He agrees that "if-then" (carrot & stick) reward structure does work for certain cases and is a very important factor but not the only thing. "If-Then" rewards work for routine jobs but for creative jobs they do not. There is something above and beyond profit maximization which keeps us going. Book is done a good job in putting things together in a perspective. These are things that we might have encountered in our day to day lives but might not have really thought about it.
He talks about three main things in Motivation 3.0 namely Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose which motivates or should motivate and propel us forward.
Many companies have now started to realize that and have started to mold their company policies accordingly. Best examples are 3M, Google. These companies give the employees freedom to work on anything of their liking in the 20% of the work time. 3M post-its and Google News are products of that freedom. Jet blue allowed the customer service to work from their homes. This way the employees could spend more time with the family and Jet Blue could cut on office expense. Zappos.com, a shoe retailer, trains people for a week and at the end of the week they pay them $2,000 irrespective of if they join the company or not. They also let their customer service, handle the calls the way they want, they do not have a script to read from. Wikipedia and Linux are purely products of altruism. At W.L.Gore if you want to climb up the corporate ladder, you have to put together a team of people and demonstrate your leadership skills.
Author also argues that "if-then" rewards could sometimes get us undesirable results. If we must, then we should have "now-that" rewards and not "if-then" rewards. People try by hook or by crook to get the reward, this encourages people to take short cuts and do unethical things. Probably this is the reason why the Enron, Worldcom and other financial companies indulged in such behavior. Everyone was trying to make money for the share holders, which in turn would reward them, without watching what they were doing. People many times respond to social norms of being nice and friendly than to monetary rewards. Parents were told that if they came late to pick their kids from the day care they would be charged a fee, thinking that this would discourage people from coming late but rather it increased such occurrences. People started thinking of it as a business proposition. When the day care asked them to be considerate of the teacher's time the occurrences lessened. In another instance people have voluntarily donated blood but it was shown through an experiment that the donation did not increase or sometimes even decreased when people were told that they would be paid if they donated blood. Suddenly a good cause became a business deal and people were not interested in that kind of money.
There are certain businesses being run which are neither NGO nor are for profit completely. They are so innovative that some of those ideas have actually caught up with the corporate world. Micro-financing was started at Grameen Bank by Mohammad Yunus in Bangladesh where people pooled their money which was later loaned out at a very nominal interest rate. It was need based loan. The default rate for such loans was 10% or lower which is much less in comparison to the bigger banks. Many bank are now trying to adopt the principles of Grameen Bank. A company called L3C (low porfit limited liability company) buys abandoned furnitures, updates them with green technology and leases them out to furniture manufacturers at a lower rate.
We have to first get money out of the way. We have to pay people fairly and ethically only then would we be able to motivate them non-monetarily at work places. Author gives several example to show how to instill a creative non 'if-then' motivation. He say that we should never praise our kids in front of everyone rather we should talk to them one on one and tell them that they did a great job and might reward them later. Not as a precondition for doing a good thing but as a consequence of their good conduct.
There are more and more games being created which are based on your skills which lets you play and go to upper levels one step at a time. If you lose a games it pushes you down but not out, so you can keep playing until you get to the next level. This is very important in mastering any work. Practice is the only key to success. Companies could create "Goldilocks" goals and expand it as and when people are ready for the next level. Mastery should be seen as something to aspire for you could get very close to it but never quite achieve it. There should be more emphasis on learning goals than on performance goals. It is not important how much you scored in a certain subject, what is important is, whether you learnt anything from it or not. We could master things only when we are perseverant. Michael Phelps or Tiger Woods are not created in a single day. It is about working on the days when you do not feel like it.
Purpose maximization as opposed to profit maximization. Individuals and companies should work for a purpose in life. So that when we retire and do some introspection we feel good about. TOMS shoes sells canvas shoes but for every shoe you purchase one shoe is given free to a needy person in a poor country.
Author has listed a good collection of motivational books, fifteen in all. I have already saved them for my future reading. Also listed are some websites worth visiting.
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