by Daniel Pink
- It was long assumed that only biological drives and extrinsic motivators (rewards and punishments from the environment) powered behavior.
- Extrinsic rewards can deliver a short-term boost, but the effect can wear off and reduce a person's longer-term motivation in a project.
- Intrinsic rewards are more fragile than the other two, and need the right environment to survive.
- "Scientific management" treated workers as part in a complicated machine, which would respond to carrots and sticks as motivators.
- The absence of extrinsic rewards creates job dissatisfaction, but their presence does not create satisfaction. Intrinsic rewards do.
- The carrot and stick mentality is incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and how we do what we do.
- Open source, low-profit LLCs, and social businesses reflect a shift from profit maximizing to purpose maximizing.
- Scientific management assumed that we are purely rational, but we do things for self-seeking, self-actualizing reasons.
- We classify work as either algorithmic or heuristic; the latter requires experimenting with possibilities to devise a novel solution.
- Carrots and sticks work well for algorithmic tasks, but heuristic tasks require creativity, which requires intrinsic motivation.
- The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, or to satisfy "baseline rewards."
- The Sawyer Effect says that rewards can diminish intrinsic motivation, and thereby diminish performance, creativity, and upstanding behavior.
- Contingent and expected "if-then" rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy, leading to long-term damage.
- Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That is helpful for algorithmic work, but detrimental for heuristic work.
- Like a paradox, those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards create a better state of mind to eventually receive them.
- Intrinsic motivation, or the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, or absorbing, is essential for creativity.
- Rewards can taint altruistic or moral tasks, turning them into pure transactions with no intrinsic reward.
- Making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters means that some people will take the quickest way there, along the low road.
- Rewards are addictive in that once offered, they're expected for any similar task; and once the status quo, they must be increased.
- Extrinsic motivators can reduce not just breadth but depth, fostering short-term thinking and ignoring the long-term.
- Without healthy baseline rewards, such as wages, benefits, and so on, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.
- Rewards do not undermine people's intrinsic motivation for routine tasks, because there is no such motivation to undermine.
- For creative tasks where "if-then" rewards are a mistake, focus on "now that" rewards, or introduce rewards after the job is done.
- But repeated "now that" rewards can become expected "if then" entitlements, thereby reducing effective performance.
- Also consider intangible rewards like praise, and feedback that provides useful information.
- Self-Determination Theory says that our innate needs are competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and when satisfied, we're motivated, productive, and happy.
- When we use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating; the less salient they are, the better.
- Theory X believes in the mediocrity of the masses, and so mediocrity becomes the ceiling of what you can achieve.
- Theory Y says that an interest in work is natural, creativity and ingenuity abound, and people will accept and even seek responsibility.
- Type X people are driven by external rewards and deeper satisfaction is welcome but secondary.
- Type I people are motivated by the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are simply a welcome bonus.
- Type I's almost always perform Type X's in the long run, but an intense focus on extrinsic rewards can deliver fast results in the short term.
- Type I's like recognition because it is a form of feedback, but for Type X's, recognition is a goal in itself.
- Type I's have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than Type X's.
- A ROWE, or results-only work environment, requires that work gets done, but doesn't focus on how, where, or when it's done.
- Autonomy is different from independence; it means acting with choice, which means it can happen while interdependent with others.
- Autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.
- As a boss, see issues from the employee's perspective, give meaningful feedback, provide choice over what to do and how to do it, and encourage taking on new projects.
- Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T's: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
- William McKnight, the founder of 3M, had a simple credo: "Hire good people, and leave them alone."
- For nonroutine tasks, the link between how much time someone spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable.
- Autonomy over your team is a tall order, which is one reason why people are drawn to entrepreneurship.
- People working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams.
- Encouraging autonomy doesn't mean discouraging accountability; people must always be accountable for their work.
- Assume that people want to be accountable, and that making sure they have control over their task, time, technique, and team begets this.
- Only engagement can produce mastery, which is important also in our personal lives, where personal fulfillment is paramount.
- In flow, the goals are clear, the feedback is immediate, and the task difficulty is barely beyond your ability, so that the effort is its own reward.
- One study has shown that the urge to master something new and engaging is the best predictor for productivity.
- When what must do exceeds one's capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what must do is below one's capabilities, the result is boredom.
- Shrewd enterprises give employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that bring some flow to otherwise mundane duties.
- Mastery is a mindset, and our beliefs about ourselves and our abilities can set the abilities on what we accomplish.
- Incremental theorists see intelligence as malleable, like strength; entity theorists see it as fixed, like height.
- A learning goal, like speaking French, leads to mastery because one doesn't have to prove any proficiency in order to keep trying, unlike a performance goal.
- Type X embraces performance goals, prefers performance goals, and sees effort as weakness.
- Type I embraces learning goals, prizes learning gaols, and sees effort as a way to improve.
- Mastery requires grit, which is a perseverance and passion for long term goals, especially through the painful parts.
- Master is an asymptote in that you can never fully attain it, but in the end mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.
- People are more likely to reach flow at work, because it offers clear goals, immediate feedback, and challenges matched to our abilities.
- We are motivated most by making progress, and so organizations should create conditions for it, shine a light on it, and celebrate it.
- Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels, but achieve more in the purpose of some greater objective.
- As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies.
- Businesses like "for benefit" organizations, B corps, and low-profit LLCs pursue purpose, and use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.
- Humanize what people say, and you may well humanize what they do.
- It's often difficult to do something exceptionally well if we don't know the reasons we're doing it in the first place.
- Workers thirst for context, and a powerful way to provide it is to spend less time telling how and a little more time showing why.
- Naive policies can replace workers' intrinsic motivation to do the right thing with an extrinsic motivation to ensure the company isn't sued or fined.
- People with profit goals are not happier, and show increased anxiety, depression, and negative indicators, than those with purpose goals.
- Satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals.
- A healthy society and a healthy business begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product.
- To find what gives you flow, page yourself 40 random times in a week, and record what you're doing, how you're feeling, and whether you're in flow.
- "A great person is a sentence." As you contemplate your purpose, craft yours, and don't let it be a muddled paragraph.
- Ask yourself "Was I a little better today than I was yesterday?" Look for small measures of improvement to keep yourself motivated.
- Create a "to don't" list, or enumerate the behaviors and practices that sap your energy, divert your focus, and ought to be avoided.
- Deliberate practice seeks to maximize performance by repetition, seeking critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on where you need help.
- As a compass for meaning and direction, answer in one sentence "What gets you up in the morning?" and "What keeps you up at night?"
- Nearly everything that people do is commissioned, and so carve out a small island of non-commissioned work to flex your creativity.
- To ease into a culture of 20 percent time, start with 10 percent time, for a limited period, and with a small group of receptive people.
- Turn your next off-site into a "FedEx day" where something must be delivered, because real challenges invigorate more than controlled leisure.
- Conduct an autonomy audit of your team, where you ask everyone to rate their autonomy over their task, time, team, and technique.
- Leaders often know little about the experiences of the people working for them, but they will also do things differently if they see data.
- Give yourself a performance review each month with performance and learning goals, and later identify where you're falling short.
- For self-reviews, set some small goals so you will always accomplish some tasks, understand your work in the larger purpose, and be brutally honest.
- Giving employees a way to acknowledge a coworker puts the feedback control in the hands of those closest to the activity.
- To relinquish control, involve employees in goal-setting for buy-in, use non-controlling language like "think about" and "consider", and hold office hours.
- Ask each person to answer "What is our organization's purpose?" because people won't be motivated to work if they don't know this purpose.
- Employees using "they" suggests disengagement and even alienation, while "we" suggests they are part of something significant and meaningful.
- If you think people in your organization are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn't to build tighter rules, but to hire new people.
- To create flow in a team, have someone bored with his current assignment train someone else in skills he's already mastered, and then take on a harder assignment.
- Don't ask focus on changing the whole organization. Pile up small wins, and worry less about changing everything than about doing something.
- Take that first, subversive step. If things fail, don't say a word; but if things work out, tell others.
- Sell your boss not on mastery, autonomy, and purpose, but on results; and so play down the means and play up the ends.
- Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and focus on the work.
- The most important aspect of any communication package is fairness.
- Internal fairness is paying people commensurate with their colleagues; external fairness is paying people in line with similar work in similar companies.
- Paying more than average is an elegant way to bypass "if-then" rewards, and to eliminate concerns about unfairness.
- Use performance metrics that are wide-ranging, relevant, and hard to game.
- When the payoff for reaching targets is modest, rather than massive, it's less likely to narrow people's focus or encourage taking the low road.