Skip to main content

Drive



Daniel H. Pink's bestseller on motivation and its sources is energetically written: a cross between an evangelical tract and a popular science book!

I am converted!

It recognizes that external incentives to motivation (rewards or punishments) only work when the task is routine, susceptible to regularization with distinct, structured outcomes. After or beyond which it fails!

Yet much of our practice at home, at work or in the community is designed on the basis of it.

But we are curious beings, motivated by intrinsic rewards that enable us to practice autonomy and mastery, framed by purpose.

Given this our educational, working and societal structures need an overhaul. A redesign so that our organizational and cultural arrangements nurture rather than frustrate.

There are wonderful examples from the fact that blood donations fall in Sweden when monetary rewards are offered (people are more deeply rewarded by the felt altruism of giving) to companies that have dispersed their 'call centres' to home working giving staff the remit to answer as they feel best boosting productivity and workers' felt engagement.

My favourite piece of research is about different understandings of intelligence  - as a fixed entity and as an incremental good - that lead to deeply different approaches to how we approach reality and the mastery of new opportunities. The first sees every accomplishment as a matching a fixed good so you naturally limit your challenge to the immediately achievable. The second sees every challenge as an opportunity to grow into a new set of mastered skills such that the world is malleable to achievement.

Beautifully thought provoking from how you organize teams to how you conduct performance reviews (timely in the latter instance, as I have one to offer next week)!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/184767769X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300476889&sr=1-1

Comments

  1. ndaisleyMarch 18, 2011 at 7:54 PM

    You will have seen the synthesis of the book on YouTube?
    http://bit.ly/eU7i0B

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nicholas ColloffMarch 18, 2011 at 8:00 PM

    No, I had not. It is great!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Steve P-TMarch 23, 2011 at 7:33 AM

    Thanks for introducing me to this. I am converted too!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more