Review by Jon Pietz

http://www.brandxco.com

Sticky Rating: 4.5

Application Rating: 4-sticky
Ideas Rating: 5-sticky
Style Rating: 4.5 sticky

Would I recommend Drive?

I’d highly recommend this book. For a compact volume, it yields quite a lot to consider. As an employer, parent or person that simply needs to motivate oneself, you will never think about motivation the same way again after reading this book. It gives you the theory, the cases and the exercises to take motivation from the old carrot-and-stick 2.0 model to a new 3.0 model, based on what drives people now, and get better results wherever motivation is a factor. (Which is pretty-much everywhere.)

Overall stickiness:

On a scale of 1-5, I’d rate this book 4.5 on stickiness.

Application:

It’s a 4-sticky on application. We can use the principles and included examples as parents, teachers, and employers in large or small companies. There are a number of exercises included within the book to help you understand how to apply the principles on your own. The author has also pledged to follow up using examples collected from his community of readers to update the book in the future. So this application rating will likely go up over time.
Wherever creativity and right-brain type of activities are part of the mission, these techniques and ideas can be successfully applied. However, motivation 3.0 techniques tend not to work well with repetitive, analytical or left-brained types of tasks which are subject to little interpretation. These types of jobs—and activities require a rigid adherence to prescribed processes, and as the author points out, the principles here are less valid.

Ideas:

The ideas in this book are current, relevant, and will have a huge impact on the business world in the years to come. 5 stickies for this category

Style:

Dan Pink’s style is terse and to the point while still being user-friendly. I rate his style in this book 4.5 stickies.

My Biggest Insight:

The ideas in this book defy our current notion of work. Imagine having employees or partners who never need to be “managed” or motivated because they are so passionate and in-tune with what they are doing that they are pushing the company. The competitive advantage that could be derived from this book has the potential to change your business, your classroom and your life if you spend some time thinking deeply about how to apply it.

Some of the powerful concepts in this book (and how you start applying them today):

In many cases “Intrinsic” motivation is more powerful than “extrinsic” motivation in achieving organizational goals. When people are motivated by their internal desires of creativity and innovation, they often outperform those who have been trained to focus external motivators, such as money, or punishment. If you follow the three main components of motivation 3.0 as suggested by the author—autonomy, mastery and purpose—and build them into your processes, you have a roadmap for motivating effectively in today’s world, and outperforming your competitors.

Introductory concepts:

1) R.O.W.E. – Results Only Work Environment —used by Best Buy Corporate and other organizations to free up their workers and produce better results. The only thing that matters with your work is the results: the company does not track where, how, or how often you work—only the results. For Best Buy it meant a 15-20% increase in results, with a large increase in employee retention.

2) If-then rewards—if you do this, then you get that. The carrot and stick approach is losing its effectiveness as a tool. Offering more pay as an incentive—beyond what is the industry norm or what is considered a fair salary has little effect on happiness or productivity. But when bonuses and rewards are given after the fact (they must not be expected for this to be effective) they have a much more positive effect on productivity and happiness than if-then rewards.

3) Fedex days—giving employees one day to do nothing else but deliver one great big idea to improve your business. Also related to: 20% time —Successful organizations such as Google recently, and 3M historically, allow their employees to spend a percentage of their time working on projects of their own choosing which may ultimately become company products. Somewhere in the range of 80% these companies’ new innovations come from that free time.

4) Motivation 3.0.—Beyond survival (1.0), rewards and punishments (2.0), humans also have a third drive: to learn, create, and better the world (3.0).

5) Goldilocks tasks—work tasks which are neither too rote or to easy, nor too far above one’s head or too esoteric. When you hit the sweet spot where a job is challenging, yet attainable with hard effort, you are getting maximum motivation from your employees or students.

Where To Get This Book (Nope, this ain’t an affiliate link)?

Author: Daniel Pink
Hardcover: 256 Pages
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; 1 edition (December 29, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594488843
ISBN-13: 978-1594488849

Thanks to Jon Pietz

Brand X Communications http://www.brandxco.com