Tag Archives: intrinsic motivation
Daniel Pink May Not Like This – But Let’s Hope it Works (Government Prizes for Innovation)
In Daniel Pink’s excellent book, DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, he argues – well, here’s his own Twitter summary of the book:
Twitter summary (in Pink’s own words, from the end of the book): “Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery, & purpose.”
Pink argues passionately for the supremacy of intrinsic motivation over extrinsic motivation. He wrote: For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation – the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing – is essential for high levels of creativity.
But… our country is in the midst of a dry spell in the innovation department. And, one piece of recent legislation provides for government prizes for innovation. Here’s an excerpt from the Slate.com article by Annie Lowrey, Prizewinning Policy: Can Washington get America’s economy moving again with cash rewards?:
There’s good reason for the government to get in on it: Prizes work, and they have a surprisingly long pedigree. Most famously, in 1714, the British government offered £20,000 to anyone who could devise a reliable way of measuring longitude at sea, a problem neither Newton nor Galileo could solve. (Clockmaker John Harrison won in 1773.) Napoleon offered a prize for innovations in food preservation for his army, leading to the development of modern canning. And the $25,000 Orteig Prize spurred Charles Lindbergh to make his trans-Atlantic flight.
The evidence backing the prize boom is not entirely anecdotal, either. There is not a huge body of academic research into prizes, but what there is supports them. One oft-cited study examines the prizes offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England between 1839 and 1939. “We find large effects of the prizes on contest entries,” the researchers wrote in 2008, confirming that prizes do indeed spur innovation, as opposed to just rewarding pre-existing advances. “[W]e also detect large effects of the prizes on the quality of contemporaneous inventions.”
Here is what I think. Intrinsic motivation is great – I’m a big fan of Daniel Pink’s argument. But, for any breakthroughs that actually make life better, and help us build a better economy, I think we ought to use all the arrows from any quiver available.
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You can purchase my synopsis of Drive, with audio + hadnout, at our companion website, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.
Avatar: Motivation 3.0 for an Evolved Community
After a day of food and fun with our granddaughter, the undisputed center of the household at the moment (when she is in town), we settled down to watch Avatar. (Yes, I had seen it at the theater).
There are a lot of ways to look at this film. Here is one: it is the battle between Motivation 2.0 and Motivation 3.0 (Daniel Pink’s terms). The context: the corporate profit seekers need the Navi to move away from their beautiful home, in order to turn a greater profit.
Selfridge: "Find me a carrot to get them to move, or it's going to have to be all stick."
Here’s the relevant dialogue (from the script, found here):
JAKE
So — who talks them into moving?QUARITCH
Guess.
JAKE
What if they won’t go?
QUARITCH
I’m betting they will.
SELFRIDGE
Killing the indigenous looks bad, but there’s one thing shareholders hate more
than bad press — and that’s a bad quarterly statement. Find me a carrot to
get them to move, or it’s going to have to be all stick. (emphasis added).
Jake is shaken by the enormity of this new responsibility.
QUARITCH
You got three months. That’s when the dozers get there.
JAKE
I’m on it.
Selfridge, the “company man,” is the one who uses the imagery of carrots and sticks. Here is his character bio from imdb:
Parker Selfridge is the “company man” on Pandora, the Chief Administrator for RDA. He’s in charge of all the mining operations on the planet and determined not the let the ‘natives’ stand in his way. He’d like to use diplomacy- largely because it looks better from a PR standpoint- but is prepared to use force if necessary.
Well, if you have seen Avatar, you know that carrots and sticks did not win the day. The Navi are fully devoted Motivation 3.0 followers, finding their motivation from within, true intrinsic motivation – motivation that leads them to the greatest of sacrifice.
So, yes, as I watched the movie I thought of the motivation insight from Daniel Pink’s DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Here is his own twitter summary of his book (in Pink’s own words, from the end of the book):
“Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery, & purpose.”
I think it is interesting that in the midst of the story of Avatar, James Cameron reveals just how outmoded carrots and sticks are in an evolved community.
John Wooden – Exemplar of Intrinsic Motivation
I have always deeply admired John Wooden. I wrote this post about him last October, and this brief tribute after his death. But now, after a couple of days of reading/hearing a lot more about him, I want to add, or at least reinforce, a couple of observations.
#1 John Wooden was an exemplar of intrinsic motivation.
In Drive by Daniel Pink, Pink writes this:
If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate, or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all. But once we’re past that threshold, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite of their intended aims.
What he says is simple, and makes sense. If there is enough money to take care of the “baseline,” then money is “off the table,” and one can concentrate on what is important to that individual.
John Wooden was motivated by this: he wanted to teach.
From Wikipedia: “He never made more than $35,000 a year salary (not including camps and speaking engagements), including 1975, the year he won his 10th national championship, and never asked for a raise,” wrote Rick Reilly of ESPN.
So, yes, Coach Wooden was paid adequately, but he clearly was not motivated by money. He was motivated by his hunger and drive to teach. In his own words:
What am I? Just a teacher – a member of one of the great professions in the world.
In the Los Angeles Times article by Mike Penner, written on the 99th birthday of Coach Wooden (which I quoted in my blog post), he reported that Wooden turned down an offer to coach the Lakers from owner Jack Kent Cooke that may have been 10 times what UCLA was paying him.
Why did he do that? How could he do that? Was he crazy? Quick – name another person who would have turned down such a massive amount of money. Actually, there are others. Pat Tillman left his NFL salary to serve his country. But, admittedly, the list is short.
Wooden turned it down because he viewed himself as a teacher, and he simply was not in it for the money. His motivation came from within, from something that came close to a sense of calling. He was the exemplar of intrinsic motivation.
#2 – Coach Wooden was a great teacher.
As I read about his life after his death, here is a message that is being repeated often: he grew closer to his former players after his wife’s death. What kept them so close to him? For most of them, he was only around them for one chapter of their life – the college chapter. They had other coaches, other teachers. Why so close to him?
I think this. They remembered the impact he had made on them, and they wanted to recapture just a little more of it. Or, at least, to remember it a little better. He was a truly sincere, utterly memorable teacher. Listen to his players. They all seem to remember individual practice session, individual comments, and of course the lesson on how to put on your socks.
He loved to teach. And it has been oft reported that what he missed most after leaving coaching was the practice sessions. Not the games; not the championships; the practice sessions (the teaching sessions).
Those are just 2 observations. I could go on and on. There seems so much to learn from Coach Wooden. I hope you are reading a few of the articles out there.
The list of lessons is long – as it should be. We have lost a remarkable human being.
One Size Fits All; Right?! – Not Any More (Motivation 3.0 Has Arrived)
One Size Fits All; Right?! – Not Any More. This is true in so many ways. And one way is “motivation.” In the old days, the days that Daniel Pink calls Motivation 2.0, motivation was simple. Carrots and sticks. Going back to the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor:
You simply rewarded the behavior you sought and punished the behavior you discouraged. The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad. Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.
But we have now moved into the new era of Motivation 3.0. This is the premise of the book DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. For much of the working population, we still need to use the carrot & stick/rewards approach. In fact, Karl, my colleague at the First Friday Book Synopsis, presented a synopsis of the practical book, Make Their Day: Employee Recognition that Works by Cindy Ventrice. One key piece of advice is this: “recognize unique contributions with personalized recognition.” And the book has tangible ways to make this work to maximum effect. This is common, common-sense advice. (It is also a critical part of the plan recommended in the terrific book Encouraging the Heart by Kouzes and Posner).
But, for the newest “heuristic” workers (Pink’s term), there must be a new understanding of and approach to motivation. Here is my attempt to summarize the key findings in Pink’s book:
| The Three Elements
Of Motivation 3.0 |
What This Might Mean/
Might Look Like |
| Autonomy: a renaissance of self-direction | “ROWE” – Results Only Work Environment – everyone is/has to be/wants to be a self-starting, self-directing person |
| Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters (only engagement leads to mastery) (to learn, to create, to better the world) | Individuals always keep learning. With deliberate practice. (the 10,000 hour rule, with deliberate practice — deep, deepening abilities) |
| Purpose: very simply, doing something that matters because it should matter; something done in the service of something larger than ourselves | Either have a product/service that matters; or, provide “work time” to do something that matters… |
And here is Pink’s own “twitter length” summary of his book:
“Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery, & purpose.”
Who should read the Pink book? If you work alone, and you have to be your own self-starting, self-directed worker, you should read it. If the people you supervise are heuristic workers, you should read it.
And what is a heuristic job – any job that requires creativity, any job that creates something “new.” From the book:
Working as a grocery checkout clerk is mostly algorithmic. You do pretty much the same thing over and over in a certain way. Creating an ad campaign is mostly heuristic. You have to come up with something new…
Whatever your own job, you should read it. Because, more and more, you will have to rely on internal/intrinsic motivation. Because, in my opinion, “carrots and sticks” will slowly disappear from the scene. Because, to quote Pink again:
…in today’s environment, people have to be ever more self-directed. “If you need me to motivate you, I probably won’t hire you.”
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{To watch Dan Pink speaking on the key principles found in this book, from a recent Ted Conference, go here).
(I presented my synopsis of Drive this morning at the First Friday Book Synopsis. The two synopses from this morning will be available soon, with audio + handout, at our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com. And, Encouraging the Heart is available on the site now).
Was I better today than yesterday? – Drive and motivation insight from Daniel Pink
Daniel Pink
Last night, I heard Daniel Pink speak about motivation (at Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art. They put on really good programs).
His message was simple, and clear. It is found in his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. (I plan to present it soon at the First Friday Book Synopsis).
Here is the message: Intrinsic motivation is deeper, better, and is rapidly replacing extrinsic (rewards and punishments) motivation. And the question for which you need the best motivation is this question:
“Was I better today than yesterday?”
He said that if you learn to ask this question, very regularly, you will develop the practice of seldom going more than one day with an answer of “no.” If your answer is “no” for one day, you will work a little bit harder at getting better the second day.
And he offers his own Twitter summary of his own book (on page 203):
“Carrots and sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery, and purpose.”
So here is your question. What motivates you to do better/get better/be better? And if you are not motivated toward better, then it is definitely time to find some motivation.
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Here’s Dan Pink’s Ted Talk (just under 19 minutes) on motivation. I just watched it — it’s worth the time investment.
