BOOK REVIEW: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates UsDaniel H Pink Canongate £12.99
'IF I KICK my dog (from the front or the back), he will move. And when I want him to move again what must I do? I must kick him again," wrote the American psychologist Frederick Herzberg in the Harvard Business Reviewin 1968. "Kick in the ass" management produces movement, not motivation, he said.
The fact that there is no mention of Herzberg in Daniel Pink’s new book or of his best-known statement about motivation rings an alarm bell. Not that there is any shortage of references to psychological and other academic research in the book, however.
The author, a former speechwriter for Al Gore who is rapidly acquiring international guru status, does what the best contemporary gurus do.
He breezily assembles a large selection of expert witnesses to support his thesis: that businesses have failed to understand where people’s motivation to act really comes from, and are thus stuck, deploying ineffective and sometimes even counter-productive measures in a doomed attempt to raise performance.
The book is short, punchy and energetic. It is not subtle.
After dividing human beings, and what motivates them, into two groups, the author is forced to concede: “To be sure, reducing human behaviour to two categories sacrifices a certain amount of nuance.” But since when were gurus interested in nuance?
Pink’s intention is quite different.
It is a counterblast against the idea that extrinsic motivation – often financial incentives – is more effective than intrinsic motivation, which is the desire that comes from within.
The dominant view, the author says, is that “in the end, human beings aren’t much different from horses: the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick”.
Pink draws attention to the wealth of research that suggests that, as far as human motivation is concerned, something far more interesting and potentially more powerful takes place.
Give human beings the possibility to achieve three things – autonomy, mastery and purpose – and you will have little need for crude incentives.
Under the heading of autonomy, for example, Google employees are free to spend up to 20 per cent of their time pursuing new projects.
He quotes one Google engineer who told the New York Times: "If your 20 per cent idea is a new product, it's usually pretty easy to just find a few like-minded people and start coding away."
At Google, the power of “a few like-minded people” choosing to collaborate should not be underestimated.
Mastery involves people “forgetting themselves in a function”, as the poet WH Auden put it.
It is required to achieve that elusive quality known as “flow”, a term popularised by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
But mastery requires hard work.
Again, he suggests, the motivation to commit to sustained effort is more likely to come from within than from without.
Last, purpose can play a big part in raising performance: “Purpose maximisation is taking its place alongside profit maximisation as an aspiration and a guiding principle.”
Predictably, Pink points the finger at misguided incentives as having played a big part in the financial crisis.
“A bad case of extrinsically motivated myopia,” he writes. “The very premise of extrinsic incentives is that we’ll always respond rationally to them. But even most economists don’t believe that any more.”
We felt it necessary to check that last claim with the economist, Tim Harford, who ought to know. The claim was met with a mild harrumph.
“Most economists still believe, rightly or wrongly, that we often respond rationally to extrinsic incentives,” he said. And as an afterthought: “There is a lot of very selective writing about the psychological evidence on extrinsic incentives.”
Pink is no economist. But he is an engaging writer who challenges and provokes.
Even if he overstates his case, he also succeeds in providing some answers as to why managers’ efforts to motivate staff can often prove so fruitless.
