Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Multiple times throughout Drive, Pink points to a “mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” He even uses this phrase as part of his brief “Cocktail Summary” of Drive at the end of the book. For a long time, Pink says, science has known that the traditional “carrots and sticks” method of motivating people is not effective, and yet businesses and managers continue to structure their work environments around it rather than exploring the possibilities of intrinsic motivation.

This mismatch between science and business is evident even from the very first experiment described in the Introduction of Drive, in which Harlow discovered that monkeys would solve puzzles on their own without any external rewards, but would lose interest when external rewards were introduced. Harlow’s experiment, conducted in the late 1940s, radically challenged the prevailing theories of human motivation, suggesting that “our understanding of the gravitational pulls on our behavior was inadequate – that what we thought were fixed laws had plenty of loopholes” (4). However, Harlow’s theories never caught on, and Harlow himself eventually gave up on promoting them, choosing to pursue other subjects rather than “battle the establishment” (4). This is only one example of many in the book of researchers who discovered the power of intrinsic motivation and the ineffectiveness of extrinsic motivation, only for their discoveries to go completely ignored by businesses and managers.

Pink argues that old ideas about reward-and-punishment-driven behaviors, or “Motivation 2.0,” are obsolete and insufficient for modern day needs. He compares Motivation 2.0 to Newtonian physics: Like Newtonian physics, the “carrots-and-sticks” approach to motivation is simple, intuitive, and useful in many circumstances, but also completely useless when applied at the quantum level (the level of intrinsic motivation). In Chapter 3, he compares “Type X Behavior”—motivated by external rewards and punishment—to coal energy, and “Type I Behavior”—driven by intrinsic motivation—to green energy. While coal has historically been a useful, cheap, and efficient resource that has helped to create the modern world, it also leads to many unhealthy side effects, is non-renewable, and for these reasons is becoming obsolete. Likewise, management styles that focus on rewards-and-punishment have been and still are useful in many ways, but they too produce unhealthy effects, are unsustainable, and are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of the modern world. In contrast, both Type I Behavior and green energy are renewable resources that are much more conducive to human thriving. These analogies emphasize the need for the business world to let go of old outdated ideas and catch up with current scientific knowledge.

A recurring idea throughout Drive is that the world is changing, and people and businesses must adapt to the change. Adaptation requires recognizing that modern jobs will increasingly call for more creative thinking from workers than they have in the past. Creative thinking, in Pink’s view, relies on intrinsic motivation, and businesses must transition to a system that allows intrinsic motivation to flourish. The system Pink calls Motivation 3.0 is designed to harness the power of intrinsic motivation. The transition to this new system, he argues, is already becoming necessary to meet the demands of the modern world.

In Chapter 1, Pink makes a distinction between “algorithmic” work, which involves performing routine tasks or following a set of instructions, and “heuristic” work, which requires more outside-the-box puzzle solving and creative thinking. In the manufacturing economy of the past, algorithmic jobs were much more common, and the rewards-and-punishment structure worked well to motivate workers to do these dull tasks. But as demonstrated by the “candle problem” in Chapter 2, rewards and punishment can be detrimental to heuristic work because they narrow a person’s focus and therefore “blinker” more creative thinking. Today, Pink argues, more and more algorithmic jobs are being done either by outsourced workers in other countries or by actual machines, and this trend is only going to continue. The most sought-after jobs in the future, in his view, will mostly involve heuristic, “right-brain” tasks. In the glossary of Drive, when defining “nonroutine work,” Pink claims that “Today, if you’re not doing this sort of work, you won’t be doing what you’re doing much longer” (225). In Pink’s view, the shift to creative, right-brain, nonroutine work means that businesses must let go of old theories of management and offer their employees autonomy and purpose or face inevitable failure.