Drive by Daniel Pink
Publication date/ Length: 2009 / 215 pages
Synopsis (from the jacket cover): 
Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like a money — the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel Pink says… in his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction — at work, at school, and at home — is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
First line: “Imagine it’s 1995.”
Review: Open-source software. Results Only Work Environment. 20 Percent Time. Flow. Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose. All are topics that fascinate me, so I was excited to read Pink’s latest musings and was not disappointed. I read his first work A Whole New Mind on the recommendation of my sister, an elementary school social worker whose district “assigned” Pink’s work to its entire staff – Edina Public Schools is consistently not only one of the highest performing and most respected public school districts in the state of Minnesota, but I know from conversations with my sister that her employers greatly revere creativity, intuition, and “thinking outside the box;” therefore I was not surprised when Mind celebrated the same attributes.
Drive tackles the subject of what motivates us — as employees, as managers, as students, and most significantly as human beings. Since I taught high school English for fifteen years and currently teach adults, I have studied motivation for years and was not surprised to read that external rewards do not result in better, more creative work. I read Kohn’s Punished by Rewards years ago and found that my students’ performance improved once my feedback became specific to their effort (replacing “Good Job!” with “Your chronological organization of your ideas effectively supported the most salient aspect of your thesis” for example), stopped awarding points for “good behavior,” and allowed them more autonomy with regard to research topics, etc. I know why paying children to get good grades destroys intrinsic motivation and intellectual curiosity: “In environments were extrinsic rewards are most salient, many people work only to the point that triggers the reward — and no further.” I understand why allowances and chores should not be joined (chores should be an accepted training ground for “real life” — and no one paid me to do my laundry this morning! 
).
However, I loved how Drive made me rethink my own life — outside the classroom. I know that my stress levels plummeted and my overall satisfaction sky-rocketed once autonomy became a focus in my own work-life a few years ago, but I was ready for a new angle on how I envision my purpose in life. In addition, I have been so dismayed by the disturbing and toxic reaction to the recent health care bill and when I finished reading Drive, a sense of understanding and almost peace descended.
Drive focuses on motivation — specifically on why our old “stick-and-carrot” system of punishments and rewards has become outdated and ineffective: “Too many organizations — not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well — still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.”
Pink’s theory is that our society needs a new “operating system” — the old paradigm of external rewards (money) and goal-setting (winning at all costs) has left our country in, quite honestly, an embarrassing state of greed-driven debt: “The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts. Executives game their quarterly earnings so they can snag a performance bonus. Secondary school counselors doctor student transcripts so their seniors can get into college. Athletes inject themselves with steroids to post better numbers and trigger lucrative performance numbers… Our current operating system has become far less compatible with, and at times downright antagonist to: how we organize what we do; how we think about what we do; and how we do what we do.” One researcher, Richard Ryan, explained this well: “People who are very high in extrinsic goals for wealth are more likely to attain that wealth, but they’re still unhappy.”
Coincidentally, one of the organizations in my life — Tutor.com — has recently implemented “merit pay” and I love it. Each month I must receive at least 30 rated sessions and my pay bump is determined by my average rating on a scale from 1 to 5. The students have no motivation to rate their tutors — beyond an altruistic desire to praise a good teacher or to vent frustration after a bad session — and I find that about 50% of my sessions are rated by the end of the month. In addition, younger students often believe that being “#1″ is best, even though 1 is the lowest possible rating a tutor can receive. On top of that, many students use the program in the hopes of finding a tutor who will do the work for them — we obviously do not — and are quite dismayed to learn that the program is focused on teaching the students how to do the work themselves. So many variables… I am somewhat competitive in nature and love having a concrete goal against which to measure myself. However, once I reach that magic number of “30″ I have no desire to accept any more sessions since they could feasibly lower my rating… And to think I used to tutor simply because I enjoyed helping students!
So, rather than focusing on how I could incorporate Pink’s ideas into my classroom, I loved learning how to find “flow” and increase my overall satisfaction in my daily life. The toolkit at the end of the book made me wish I had bought a copy (and plan to) rather than borrowed my copy from the library — I think this book would be very useful for business owners and managers, parents, teachers, and, well, everyone who wants to lead a more satisfying and fulfilling life!
What intriguing thoughts! This sounds like an important theory that could improve an individual’s life. It’s probably too much to hope that government officials will make such changes…but as individuals, perhaps…
My salon is here:
http://laurel-rainsnowsaccidentallife.blogspot.com/2010/05/sunday-salon.html