Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
NY: Penguin Group, 2009ISBN 978-1-59448-884-9
(page 8) "When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity," he [Edward Deci] wrote....
Human beings, Deci said, have an "inherent tendency to seek our novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn." But this third drive was more fragile than the other two; it needed the right environment to survive. "One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards," he wrote in a follow-up paper.
(23) Lakhani and Wolk uncovered a range of motives, but they found "that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver." A large majority of programmers, the researchers discovered, reported that they frequently reached the state of optimal challenge called "flow." Likewise, three German economists who studied open-source projects around the world found that what drives participants is "a set of predominantly intrinsic motives" - in particular, "the fun... of mastering the challenge of a given software problem" and the "desire to give a gift to the programmer community."
(24) For example, in April 2008, Vermont became the first U. S. state to allow a new type of business called the "low-profit limited liability corporation." Dubbed an L3C, this entity is a corporation - but not as we typically think of it. As one report explained, an L3C "operate[s] like a for-profit business generating at least modest profits, but its primary aim [is] to offer significant social benefits." Three other U. S. states have followed Vermont's lead. An L3C in North Carolina, for instance, is buying abandoned furniture factories in the state, updating them with green technology, and leasing them back to beleaguered furniture manufacturers at a low rate. The venture hopes to make money, but its real purpose is to help revitalize a struggling region....
The Fourth Sector Network in the United States and Denmark is promoting "the for-benefit organization" - a hybrid that it says represents a new category of organization that is both economically self-sustaining and animated by public purpose. One example: Mozilla, the entity that gave us Firefox, is organized as a "for-benefit" organization. And three U. S. entrepreneurs have invented the "B Corporation," a designation that requires companies to amend their bylaws so that the incentives favor long-term value and social impact instead of short-term economic gain.
NB: Gandhian economics, stewardship
http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/sarvodaya-swaraj-and-swadeshi.html
(28) Some scholars are already widening the reach of behavioral economics to encompass these ideas. The most prominent is Bruno Frey, an economist at the University of Zurich... As Frey writes, "Intrinsic motivation is of _great importance_ for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives."
(32) To recap, Motivation 2.0 suffers from three compatibility problems. It doesn't mesh with the way many new business models are organizing what we do - because we're intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers. It doesn't comport with the way that twenty-first-century economics thinks about what we do - because economists are finally realizing that we're full -fledged human beings, not single-minded economic robots. And perhaps most important, it's hard to reconcile with much of what we actually do at work - because for growing numbers of people, work is often creative, interesting, and self-directed rather than unrelentingly routine, boring, and other-directed.
(36-37) [Tom Sawyer fence painting incident] From this episode, Twain extracts a key motivational principle, namely "that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." He goes on to write:
In other words, rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work. And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes. Let's call this the Sawyer Effect.
(28) Some scholars are already widening the reach of behavioral economics to encompass these ideas. The most prominent is Bruno Frey, an economist at the University of Zurich... As Frey writes, "Intrinsic motivation is of _great importance_ for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives."
(32) To recap, Motivation 2.0 suffers from three compatibility problems. It doesn't mesh with the way many new business models are organizing what we do - because we're intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers. It doesn't comport with the way that twenty-first-century economics thinks about what we do - because economists are finally realizing that we're full -fledged human beings, not single-minded economic robots. And perhaps most important, it's hard to reconcile with much of what we actually do at work - because for growing numbers of people, work is often creative, interesting, and self-directed rather than unrelentingly routine, boring, and other-directed.
(36-37) [Tom Sawyer fence painting incident] From this episode, Twain extracts a key motivational principle, namely "that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." He goes on to write:
There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
In other words, rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work. And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes. Let's call this the Sawyer Effect.
NB: Tom Sawyer organizing
(39) Deci: "Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tends to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation," they determined. "When institutions - families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example - focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people's behavior," they do considerable long-term damage.
Alfie Kohn, whose prescient 1993 book, _Punished by Rewards_, lays out a devastating indictment of extrinsic incentive
(40-41) They [Ariely and others] recruited eighty-seven participants and asked them to play several games - for example, tossing tennis balls at a target, unscrambling anagrams, recalling a string of digits - that required motor skills, creativity, or concentration. To test the power of incentives, the experimenters offered three types of rewards for reaching certain performance levels.
One-third of the participants could earn a small reward - 4 rupees (at the time worth around 50 U. S. cents and equal to about a day's pay in Madurai [India] for reaching their performance targets. One-third could earn a medium reward - 10 rupees (about $5, or two weeks' pay). And one-third could earn a very large reward - 400 rupees (about $50, or nearly five months' pay)...
As it turned out, the people offered the medium-sized bonus didn't perform any better than those offered the small one. And those in the 400-rupee super-incentivized group? They fared worst of all. By nearly every measure, they lagged behind both the low-reward and medium-reward participants. Reporting the result for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the researchers wrote, "in eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to _worse_ performance."
...In 2009, scholars at the London School of Economics - alma mater of eleven Nobel laureates in economics - analyzed fifty-one studies of corporate pay-for-performance plans. These economists' conclusion: "We find that financial incentives... can result in a negative impact on overall performance."
(44) [Candle problem] He told the first group that he was timing their work merely to establish norms for how long it typically took someone to complete this sort of puzzle. To the second group he offered incentives. If a participant's time was among the fastest 25 percent of all the people being tested, that participant would receive $5. If the participant's time was the fastest of all, the reward would be $20. Adjusted for inflation, those are decent sums of money for a few minutes of effort - a nice motivator.
How much faster did the incentivized group come up with a solution? On average, it took them nearly three and a half minutes _longer_....
Why? Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That's helpful when there's a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But "if-then" motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people's focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.
(46) 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 the "if-then" motivators that are the staple of most businesses often stifle, rather than stir, creative thinking.
(50-51) As the cadre of business school professors [Harvard Business School, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School] write, "Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior."
The examples are legion, the researchers note. Sears imposes a sales quota on its auto repair staff - and workers respond by over-charging customers and completing unnecessary repairs. Enron sets lofty revenue goals - and the race to meet them by any means possible catalyzes the company's collapse. Ford is so intent on producing a certain car at a certain weight at a certain price by a certain date that it omits safety checks and unleashes the dangerous Ford Pinto.
The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even it it means taking the low road....
Executives game their quarterly earnings so they can snag a performance bonus. Secondary school counselors doctor student transcripts so that their seniors can get into college. Athletes inject themselves with steroids to post better numbers and trigger lucrative performance bonuses.
Contrast that approach with behavior sparked by intrinsic motivation. When the reward is the activity itself - deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one's best - there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road. In some sense, it's impossible to act unethically because the person who's disadvantaged isn't a competitor but yourself....
Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
(53) "After the introduction for the fine [for not arriving on time to pick up children from day-care] we observed a steady _increase_ in the number of parents coming late," the economists wrote. "The rate finally settled, at a level that was higher and _almost twice as large_ as the initial one." And in language reminiscent of Harry Harlow's head scratching, they write that the existing literature didn't account for such a result. Indeed, the "possibility of an increase in the behavior being punished was not even considered."
...One reason most parents showed up on time is that they had a relationship with the teachers - who, after all, were caring for their precious sons and daughters - and wanted to treat them fairly. Parents had an intrinsic desire to be scrupulous about punctuality. But the threat of a fine - like the promise of the kronor in the blood experiment - edged aside the third drive. The fine shifted the parents' decision from a partly moral obligation (be fair to my kids' teachers) to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn't room for both. The punishment didn't promote good behavior; it crowded it out.
(54) Pay your son to take out the trash - and you've pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What's more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you'll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance.
As Suvorov explains, "Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is face, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again." And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo - which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.
NB: Sounds like CEO pay and the banksters bonuses don't it
Addiction thinking
(55) In other words, if we watch how people's brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look disturbingly similar....
Rewards' addictive qualities can also distort decision-making. Knutson has found that activation in the nucleus accumbens seem to predict "both risky choices and risk-seeking mistakes." Get people fired up with the prospect of rewards, and instead of making better decisions, as Motivation 2.0 hopes, they can actually make worse ones.
(57) Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly _lower_ long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently. (One reason: The earnings-obsessed companies typically invest less in research and development.) They successfully achieved their short-term goals, but threaten the health of the company two or three years hence. As the scholars who warned about goals gone wild put it, "The very presence of goals may lead employees to focus myopically on short-term gains and to lose sight of the potential devastating long-term effects on the organization."
(58) This is the nature of economic bubbles: What seems to be irrational exuberance is ultimately a bad case of extrinsically motivated myopia.
By contrast, the elements of genuine motivation that we'll explore later, by their very nature, defy a short-term view. Take mastery. The objective itself is inherently long-term because complete mastery, in a sense, is unattainable. Even Roger Federer, for instance, will never fully "master" the game of tennis. But introducing an "if-then" reward to help develop mastery usually backfires. That's why school children who are paid to solve problems typically choose easier problems and therefore learn less. The short-term prize crowds out the long-term learning....
Likewise, several studies show that paying people to exercise, stop smoking, or take their medicines produces terrific results at first - but the healthy behavior disappears once the incentives are removed.
(59) Carrots and Sticks: The Seven Deadly Flaws
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.
(60) The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards - wages, salaries, benefits, and so on - are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.
(62) For routine tasks, which aren't very interesting and don't demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivation booster shot without the harmful side effects.... when the task called for "even rudimentary cognitive skill," a larger reward "led to poorer performance. But "as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance."
(64) Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. A job that's not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it's part of a larger purpose...
Acknowledge that the task is boring. This is an act of empathy, of course. And the acknowledgment will help people understand why this is the rare instance when "if-then" rewards are part of how your organization operates.
Allow people to complete the task their own way. Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome you need. But instead of specifying precisely the way to reach it... give them the freedom over how they do the job.
(66) The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete....
In other words, where "if-then" rewards are a mistake, shift to "now that" rewards - as in "Now that you've finished the poster and it turned out so well, I'd like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch."
Ad Deci and his colleagues explain, "If tangible rewards are given unexpectedly to people after they have finished a task, the rewards are less likely to be experienced as the reason for doing the task and are thus less likely to be detrimental to intrinsic motivation."
(67) First, _consider nontangible rewards_. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci's original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that "positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation."
...Second, _provide useful information_. Amabile has found that while controlling extrinsic motivators can clobber creativity, "informational or enabling motivators can be conducive" to it.
(72) SDT [Self Determination Theory], by contrast begins with a notion of universal human _needs_. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs - competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we're motivated, productive, and happy.
"If there's anything [fundamental] about our nature, it's the capacity for interest. Some things facilitate it. Some things undermine it," [Richard] Ryan explained during one of our conversations.
NB: Interest is attention - appamada
"Of course, they're [rewards] necessary in workplaces and other settings," says Deci. "but the less salient they are made, the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating."
(76) If your starting point was Theory X, he [Douglas McGregor] said, your managerial techniques would inevitably produce limited results, or even go awry entirely. If you believed in the "mediocrity of the masses," as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve. But if your starting point was Theory Y, the possibilities were vast - not simply for the individual's potential, but for the company's bottom line as well.
NB: Theory X/Theory Y : Conservative/Liberal
(78-79) Type I [Intrinsic] behavior is made, not born. These behavioral patterns aren't fixed traits. They are proclivities that emerge from circumstance, experience, and context... The science demonstrates that once people learn the fundamental practices and attitudes - and can exercise them in supportive settings - their motivation, and their ultimate performance, soars. Any Type X [Extrinsic] can become a Type I.
Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts. Alas, that's not always true in the short term. An intense focus on extrinsic rewards can indeed deliver fast results. The trouble is, this approach is difficult to sustain. And it doesn't assist in mastery - which is the source of achievement over the long haul....
Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. Both Type X's and Type I's care about money. If an employee's compensation doesn't hit the baseline that I described in Chapter 2 - if her organization doesn't pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn't equitable compared to others doing similar work - that persons motivation will crater regardless of whether she leans towards X or toward I.
(80) Type I behavior is a renewable resource. This of Type X behavior as coal and Type I behavior as the sun....
Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being. According to a raft of studies from SDT researchers, people oriented toward autonomy and intrinsic motivation have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than those who are extrinsically motivated.
(80-81) Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.
(86) ROWEs [results-only work environments] are the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources executives at the American retailer Best Buy. ROWE's principles marry the commonsense pragmatism of Ben Franklin to the cage-rattling radicalism of Saul Alinsky. In a ROWE workplace, people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time - or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.
(87) People still had specific goals they had to reach - for example, completing a project by a certain time or ringing up a particular number of sales. And if they needed help, [Jeff] Gunther was there to assist. But he decided against tying those goals to compensation. "That creates a culture that says it's all about the money and not enough about the work." Money, he believes, is only "a threshold motivator." People must be paid well adn be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don't much affect performance and motivation. Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise - and employees' spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE's staunchest advocates.
(88) Gunther: "For me, it's a partnership between me and the employees. They're not resources. They're partners." And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.
(90) Deci and Ryan: "Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice," they write, "whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self."
Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It's not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice - which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human concept rather than a western one. Researchers have found a link between autonomy and overall well-being not only in North America and Western Europe, but also in Russia, Turkey, and South Korea. Even in high poverty non-Western locales like Bangladesh, social scientists have found that autonomy is something that people seek and that improves their lives.
(90-91) According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being. Those effect carry over to the workplace.
(91) For example, researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.
(93) Now, once a quarter, the company [Atlassian] sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want - only this time, "to get them out of the day to day," it _must_ be something that's not part of their regular job.
At two P. M. on a Thursday, the day begins. Engineers, including Cannon-Brookes himself, crash out new code or an elegant hack - any way they want, with anyone they want. Many work through the night. Then, at four P. M. on Friday, they show the results to the rest of the company in a wild-and-woolly all-hands meeting stocked with ample quantities of cold beer and chocolate cake. Atlassian calls these twenty-four-hour bursts of freedom and creativity "FedEx Days" - because people have to deliver something overnight. And deliver Atlassians have. Over the years, this odd little exercise has produced an array of software fixes that might otherwise never have merged. Says one engineer, "Some of the coolest stuff we have in our product today has come from FedEx Days."
NB: Pecha-Kucha and Maker Culture
"We've always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on," Cannon-Brookes told me. "If you don't pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features."
(93-94) And what a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of the essential features is autonomy - in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian's experience shows, Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T's: their _task_, their _time_, their _technique_, and their _team_.
(94) In the spring of 2008, they [owners of Atlasssian] announced that for the next six months, Atlassian developers could spend 20 percent of their time - rather than just one intense day - working on any project they wanted.
(95) William McKnight, CEO 3M in the 1930s and 1940s: ...this unlikely corporate heretic established a new policy: 3M's technical staff could spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects of their choosing... so seemingly illicit, that inside the company, it was known as the "bootlegging policy." And yet it worked. These walled gardens of autonomy soon became fertile fields for a harvest of innovations - including Pot-it notes.
(96) McKnight's innovation remains in place at 3M. But only a surprisingly small number of other companies have moved in this direction, despite its proven results. The best-known company to embrace it is Google, which has long encouraged engineers to spend one day a week workign on a side project. Some Googlers use their "20 percent time" to fix an existing product, but most use it to develop something entirely new. Of course, Google doesn't sign away the intellectual property rights to what's created during that 20 percent - which is wise. In a typical year, more than half of Google's new offerings are birthed during this period of pure autonomy....
NB: Art Kleiner's _Age of Heretics_
As Google engineer Alec Proudfoot, whose own 20 percent project aimed at boosting the efficiency of hybrid cars, put it in a television interview: "Just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time."
(100) If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption - that people want to do good work - then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it.
(101) Reporting on the company's [Best Buy] ROWE results in the _Harvard Business Review_, Tamara Erickson writes:
(102) Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer Zappos.com (now part of Amazon.com), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees. So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn't for them and want to leave, he'll pay them $2,000 - no hard feelings. Hsieh is hacking the Motivation 2.0 operating system like a brilliant and benevolent teenage computer whiz. He's using an "if-then" reward not to motivate people to perform better, but to weed out those who aren't fit for a Motivation 3.0-style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique. Zappos doesn't monitor its customer service employees' call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them.
(103) ... Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the United States - ahead of better-known names like Cadillac, BMW, and Apple and roughly equal to ritzy brands like Jaguar and the Ritz-Carlton....
homeshoring. Instead of requiring customer service reps to report to a single large call center they're routing the calls to the employees' homes. This cuts commuting time for staff, removes them from physical monitoring, and provides far greater autonomy over how they do their jobs.
(105) For example, at the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, the people who are nominally in charge of each department don't do the hiring. That task falls to a department's employees. After a job candidate has worked a thirty-day trial period on a team, the prospective teammates vote on whether to hire that person full-time. At W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 in action, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.
(106) And once again, the science affirms the value of something traditional businesses have been slow to embrace. Ample research has shown that people workign in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams. Likewise, studies by Deci and others have shown that people high in intrinsic motivation are better coworkers. And that makes the possibilities on this front enormous. If you want to work with more Type I's, the best strategy is to become one yourself. Autonomy, it turns out, can be contagious.
(107) If we pluck people out of controlling environments, when they've known nothing else, and plop them in a ROWE or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they'll struggle. Organizations must provide, as Richard Ryan puts it, "scaffolding" to help every employee find his footing to make the transition...
As Zappos CEO Hsieh told me by e-mail, "Studies have shown that perceived control is an important component of one's happiness. However, what people feel like they want control over really varies, so I don't think there's one aspect of autonomy that's universally the most important. Different individuals have different desires, so the best strategy for an employer would be to figure our what's important to each individual employee."
(111) Gallup's extensive research on the subject shows that in the United States, more than 50 percent of employees are not engaged at work - and nearly 20 percent are actively disengaged. The cost of all this disengagement: about $300 billion a year in lost productivity - a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal, Singapore, or Israel Yet in comparative terms, the United States looks like a veritable haven of Type I behavior at work. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to 3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their work.
(114) Csikszentmihalyi would page people eight times a day at random intervals and ask them to write in a booklet their answers to several short questions about what they were doing, who they were with, and how they'd describe their state of mind. Put the findings together for seven days and you had a flip book, a mini-movie, of someone's week.
NB: App for finding flow? Probably already exists.
(117) He [Stefan Falk of Ericsson] persuaded managers to configure work assignments so that employees had clear objectives and a way to get quick feedback. And instead of meeting with their charges for once-a-tear performance reviews, managers sat down with employees one-on-one six times a year, often for as long as ninety minutes, to discuss their level of engagement and path toward mastery. The flow-centered strategy worked well enough that Ericsson began using it in offices around the world....
The he required them [managers] to meet with staff once a month to get a sense of whether people were overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their work - and to adjust assignments to help they find flow. After two years of managerial revamping, state-owned Green Cargo became profitable for the first time in 125 years - and executives cite its newfound flowcentricity as a key reason.
In addition, a study of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge - that is, the urge to master something new and engaging - was the best predictor of productivity.
(118) Why not, he [Jenova Chen] thought, design to bring the flow sensation to more casual gamers?
...Chen calls his game flOw (http://jenovachen.info/flow)
(39) Deci: "Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tends to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation," they determined. "When institutions - families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example - focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people's behavior," they do considerable long-term damage.
Alfie Kohn, whose prescient 1993 book, _Punished by Rewards_, lays out a devastating indictment of extrinsic incentive
(40-41) They [Ariely and others] recruited eighty-seven participants and asked them to play several games - for example, tossing tennis balls at a target, unscrambling anagrams, recalling a string of digits - that required motor skills, creativity, or concentration. To test the power of incentives, the experimenters offered three types of rewards for reaching certain performance levels.
One-third of the participants could earn a small reward - 4 rupees (at the time worth around 50 U. S. cents and equal to about a day's pay in Madurai [India] for reaching their performance targets. One-third could earn a medium reward - 10 rupees (about $5, or two weeks' pay). And one-third could earn a very large reward - 400 rupees (about $50, or nearly five months' pay)...
As it turned out, the people offered the medium-sized bonus didn't perform any better than those offered the small one. And those in the 400-rupee super-incentivized group? They fared worst of all. By nearly every measure, they lagged behind both the low-reward and medium-reward participants. Reporting the result for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the researchers wrote, "in eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to _worse_ performance."
...In 2009, scholars at the London School of Economics - alma mater of eleven Nobel laureates in economics - analyzed fifty-one studies of corporate pay-for-performance plans. These economists' conclusion: "We find that financial incentives... can result in a negative impact on overall performance."
(44) [Candle problem] He told the first group that he was timing their work merely to establish norms for how long it typically took someone to complete this sort of puzzle. To the second group he offered incentives. If a participant's time was among the fastest 25 percent of all the people being tested, that participant would receive $5. If the participant's time was the fastest of all, the reward would be $20. Adjusted for inflation, those are decent sums of money for a few minutes of effort - a nice motivator.
How much faster did the incentivized group come up with a solution? On average, it took them nearly three and a half minutes _longer_....
Why? Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That's helpful when there's a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But "if-then" motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people's focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.
(46) 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 the "if-then" motivators that are the staple of most businesses often stifle, rather than stir, creative thinking.
(50-51) As the cadre of business school professors [Harvard Business School, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School] write, "Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior."
The examples are legion, the researchers note. Sears imposes a sales quota on its auto repair staff - and workers respond by over-charging customers and completing unnecessary repairs. Enron sets lofty revenue goals - and the race to meet them by any means possible catalyzes the company's collapse. Ford is so intent on producing a certain car at a certain weight at a certain price by a certain date that it omits safety checks and unleashes the dangerous Ford Pinto.
The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even it it means taking the low road....
Executives game their quarterly earnings so they can snag a performance bonus. Secondary school counselors doctor student transcripts so that their seniors can get into college. Athletes inject themselves with steroids to post better numbers and trigger lucrative performance bonuses.
Contrast that approach with behavior sparked by intrinsic motivation. When the reward is the activity itself - deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one's best - there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road. In some sense, it's impossible to act unethically because the person who's disadvantaged isn't a competitor but yourself....
Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
(53) "After the introduction for the fine [for not arriving on time to pick up children from day-care] we observed a steady _increase_ in the number of parents coming late," the economists wrote. "The rate finally settled, at a level that was higher and _almost twice as large_ as the initial one." And in language reminiscent of Harry Harlow's head scratching, they write that the existing literature didn't account for such a result. Indeed, the "possibility of an increase in the behavior being punished was not even considered."
...One reason most parents showed up on time is that they had a relationship with the teachers - who, after all, were caring for their precious sons and daughters - and wanted to treat them fairly. Parents had an intrinsic desire to be scrupulous about punctuality. But the threat of a fine - like the promise of the kronor in the blood experiment - edged aside the third drive. The fine shifted the parents' decision from a partly moral obligation (be fair to my kids' teachers) to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn't room for both. The punishment didn't promote good behavior; it crowded it out.
(54) Pay your son to take out the trash - and you've pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What's more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you'll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance.
As Suvorov explains, "Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is face, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again." And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo - which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.
NB: Sounds like CEO pay and the banksters bonuses don't it
Addiction thinking
(55) In other words, if we watch how people's brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look disturbingly similar....
Rewards' addictive qualities can also distort decision-making. Knutson has found that activation in the nucleus accumbens seem to predict "both risky choices and risk-seeking mistakes." Get people fired up with the prospect of rewards, and instead of making better decisions, as Motivation 2.0 hopes, they can actually make worse ones.
(57) Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly _lower_ long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently. (One reason: The earnings-obsessed companies typically invest less in research and development.) They successfully achieved their short-term goals, but threaten the health of the company two or three years hence. As the scholars who warned about goals gone wild put it, "The very presence of goals may lead employees to focus myopically on short-term gains and to lose sight of the potential devastating long-term effects on the organization."
(58) This is the nature of economic bubbles: What seems to be irrational exuberance is ultimately a bad case of extrinsically motivated myopia.
By contrast, the elements of genuine motivation that we'll explore later, by their very nature, defy a short-term view. Take mastery. The objective itself is inherently long-term because complete mastery, in a sense, is unattainable. Even Roger Federer, for instance, will never fully "master" the game of tennis. But introducing an "if-then" reward to help develop mastery usually backfires. That's why school children who are paid to solve problems typically choose easier problems and therefore learn less. The short-term prize crowds out the long-term learning....
Likewise, several studies show that paying people to exercise, stop smoking, or take their medicines produces terrific results at first - but the healthy behavior disappears once the incentives are removed.
(59) Carrots and Sticks: The Seven Deadly Flaws
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.
(60) The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards - wages, salaries, benefits, and so on - are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.
(62) For routine tasks, which aren't very interesting and don't demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivation booster shot without the harmful side effects.... when the task called for "even rudimentary cognitive skill," a larger reward "led to poorer performance. But "as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance."
(64) Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. A job that's not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it's part of a larger purpose...
Acknowledge that the task is boring. This is an act of empathy, of course. And the acknowledgment will help people understand why this is the rare instance when "if-then" rewards are part of how your organization operates.
Allow people to complete the task their own way. Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome you need. But instead of specifying precisely the way to reach it... give them the freedom over how they do the job.
(66) The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete....
In other words, where "if-then" rewards are a mistake, shift to "now that" rewards - as in "Now that you've finished the poster and it turned out so well, I'd like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch."
Ad Deci and his colleagues explain, "If tangible rewards are given unexpectedly to people after they have finished a task, the rewards are less likely to be experienced as the reason for doing the task and are thus less likely to be detrimental to intrinsic motivation."
(67) First, _consider nontangible rewards_. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci's original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that "positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation."
...Second, _provide useful information_. Amabile has found that while controlling extrinsic motivators can clobber creativity, "informational or enabling motivators can be conducive" to it.
(72) SDT [Self Determination Theory], by contrast begins with a notion of universal human _needs_. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs - competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we're motivated, productive, and happy.
"If there's anything [fundamental] about our nature, it's the capacity for interest. Some things facilitate it. Some things undermine it," [Richard] Ryan explained during one of our conversations.
NB: Interest is attention - appamada
"Of course, they're [rewards] necessary in workplaces and other settings," says Deci. "but the less salient they are made, the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating."
(76) If your starting point was Theory X, he [Douglas McGregor] said, your managerial techniques would inevitably produce limited results, or even go awry entirely. If you believed in the "mediocrity of the masses," as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve. But if your starting point was Theory Y, the possibilities were vast - not simply for the individual's potential, but for the company's bottom line as well.
NB: Theory X/Theory Y : Conservative/Liberal
(78-79) Type I [Intrinsic] behavior is made, not born. These behavioral patterns aren't fixed traits. They are proclivities that emerge from circumstance, experience, and context... The science demonstrates that once people learn the fundamental practices and attitudes - and can exercise them in supportive settings - their motivation, and their ultimate performance, soars. Any Type X [Extrinsic] can become a Type I.
Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts. Alas, that's not always true in the short term. An intense focus on extrinsic rewards can indeed deliver fast results. The trouble is, this approach is difficult to sustain. And it doesn't assist in mastery - which is the source of achievement over the long haul....
Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. Both Type X's and Type I's care about money. If an employee's compensation doesn't hit the baseline that I described in Chapter 2 - if her organization doesn't pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn't equitable compared to others doing similar work - that persons motivation will crater regardless of whether she leans towards X or toward I.
(80) Type I behavior is a renewable resource. This of Type X behavior as coal and Type I behavior as the sun....
Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being. According to a raft of studies from SDT researchers, people oriented toward autonomy and intrinsic motivation have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than those who are extrinsically motivated.
(80-81) Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.
(86) ROWEs [results-only work environments] are the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources executives at the American retailer Best Buy. ROWE's principles marry the commonsense pragmatism of Ben Franklin to the cage-rattling radicalism of Saul Alinsky. In a ROWE workplace, people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time - or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.
(87) People still had specific goals they had to reach - for example, completing a project by a certain time or ringing up a particular number of sales. And if they needed help, [Jeff] Gunther was there to assist. But he decided against tying those goals to compensation. "That creates a culture that says it's all about the money and not enough about the work." Money, he believes, is only "a threshold motivator." People must be paid well adn be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don't much affect performance and motivation. Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise - and employees' spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE's staunchest advocates.
(88) Gunther: "For me, it's a partnership between me and the employees. They're not resources. They're partners." And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.
(90) Deci and Ryan: "Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice," they write, "whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self."
Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It's not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice - which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human concept rather than a western one. Researchers have found a link between autonomy and overall well-being not only in North America and Western Europe, but also in Russia, Turkey, and South Korea. Even in high poverty non-Western locales like Bangladesh, social scientists have found that autonomy is something that people seek and that improves their lives.
(90-91) According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being. Those effect carry over to the workplace.
(91) For example, researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.
(93) Now, once a quarter, the company [Atlassian] sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want - only this time, "to get them out of the day to day," it _must_ be something that's not part of their regular job.
At two P. M. on a Thursday, the day begins. Engineers, including Cannon-Brookes himself, crash out new code or an elegant hack - any way they want, with anyone they want. Many work through the night. Then, at four P. M. on Friday, they show the results to the rest of the company in a wild-and-woolly all-hands meeting stocked with ample quantities of cold beer and chocolate cake. Atlassian calls these twenty-four-hour bursts of freedom and creativity "FedEx Days" - because people have to deliver something overnight. And deliver Atlassians have. Over the years, this odd little exercise has produced an array of software fixes that might otherwise never have merged. Says one engineer, "Some of the coolest stuff we have in our product today has come from FedEx Days."
NB: Pecha-Kucha and Maker Culture
"We've always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on," Cannon-Brookes told me. "If you don't pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features."
(93-94) And what a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of the essential features is autonomy - in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian's experience shows, Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T's: their _task_, their _time_, their _technique_, and their _team_.
(94) In the spring of 2008, they [owners of Atlasssian] announced that for the next six months, Atlassian developers could spend 20 percent of their time - rather than just one intense day - working on any project they wanted.
(95) William McKnight, CEO 3M in the 1930s and 1940s: ...this unlikely corporate heretic established a new policy: 3M's technical staff could spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects of their choosing... so seemingly illicit, that inside the company, it was known as the "bootlegging policy." And yet it worked. These walled gardens of autonomy soon became fertile fields for a harvest of innovations - including Pot-it notes.
(96) McKnight's innovation remains in place at 3M. But only a surprisingly small number of other companies have moved in this direction, despite its proven results. The best-known company to embrace it is Google, which has long encouraged engineers to spend one day a week workign on a side project. Some Googlers use their "20 percent time" to fix an existing product, but most use it to develop something entirely new. Of course, Google doesn't sign away the intellectual property rights to what's created during that 20 percent - which is wise. In a typical year, more than half of Google's new offerings are birthed during this period of pure autonomy....
NB: Art Kleiner's _Age of Heretics_
As Google engineer Alec Proudfoot, whose own 20 percent project aimed at boosting the efficiency of hybrid cars, put it in a television interview: "Just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time."
(100) If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption - that people want to do good work - then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it.
(101) Reporting on the company's [Best Buy] ROWE results in the _Harvard Business Review_, Tamara Erickson writes:
Salaried people put in as much time as it takes to do their work. Hourly employees in the program work a set number of hours to comply with federal labor regulations, but they get to choose when. Those employees report better relationships with family and friends, more company loyalty, and more focus and energy. Productivity has increased by 35%, and voluntary turnover is 320 basis points lower than in teams that have not made the change. Employees say they don't know whether they work fewer hours - they've stopped counting.
(102) Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer Zappos.com (now part of Amazon.com), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees. So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn't for them and want to leave, he'll pay them $2,000 - no hard feelings. Hsieh is hacking the Motivation 2.0 operating system like a brilliant and benevolent teenage computer whiz. He's using an "if-then" reward not to motivate people to perform better, but to weed out those who aren't fit for a Motivation 3.0-style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique. Zappos doesn't monitor its customer service employees' call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them.
(103) ... Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the United States - ahead of better-known names like Cadillac, BMW, and Apple and roughly equal to ritzy brands like Jaguar and the Ritz-Carlton....
homeshoring. Instead of requiring customer service reps to report to a single large call center they're routing the calls to the employees' homes. This cuts commuting time for staff, removes them from physical monitoring, and provides far greater autonomy over how they do their jobs.
(105) For example, at the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, the people who are nominally in charge of each department don't do the hiring. That task falls to a department's employees. After a job candidate has worked a thirty-day trial period on a team, the prospective teammates vote on whether to hire that person full-time. At W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 in action, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.
(106) And once again, the science affirms the value of something traditional businesses have been slow to embrace. Ample research has shown that people workign in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams. Likewise, studies by Deci and others have shown that people high in intrinsic motivation are better coworkers. And that makes the possibilities on this front enormous. If you want to work with more Type I's, the best strategy is to become one yourself. Autonomy, it turns out, can be contagious.
(107) If we pluck people out of controlling environments, when they've known nothing else, and plop them in a ROWE or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they'll struggle. Organizations must provide, as Richard Ryan puts it, "scaffolding" to help every employee find his footing to make the transition...
As Zappos CEO Hsieh told me by e-mail, "Studies have shown that perceived control is an important component of one's happiness. However, what people feel like they want control over really varies, so I don't think there's one aspect of autonomy that's universally the most important. Different individuals have different desires, so the best strategy for an employer would be to figure our what's important to each individual employee."
(111) Gallup's extensive research on the subject shows that in the United States, more than 50 percent of employees are not engaged at work - and nearly 20 percent are actively disengaged. The cost of all this disengagement: about $300 billion a year in lost productivity - a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal, Singapore, or Israel Yet in comparative terms, the United States looks like a veritable haven of Type I behavior at work. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to 3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their work.
(114) Csikszentmihalyi would page people eight times a day at random intervals and ask them to write in a booklet their answers to several short questions about what they were doing, who they were with, and how they'd describe their state of mind. Put the findings together for seven days and you had a flip book, a mini-movie, of someone's week.
NB: App for finding flow? Probably already exists.
(117) He [Stefan Falk of Ericsson] persuaded managers to configure work assignments so that employees had clear objectives and a way to get quick feedback. And instead of meeting with their charges for once-a-tear performance reviews, managers sat down with employees one-on-one six times a year, often for as long as ninety minutes, to discuss their level of engagement and path toward mastery. The flow-centered strategy worked well enough that Ericsson began using it in offices around the world....
The he required them [managers] to meet with staff once a month to get a sense of whether people were overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their work - and to adjust assignments to help they find flow. After two years of managerial revamping, state-owned Green Cargo became profitable for the first time in 125 years - and executives cite its newfound flowcentricity as a key reason.
In addition, a study of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge - that is, the urge to master something new and engaging - was the best predictor of productivity.
(118) Why not, he [Jenova Chen] thought, design to bring the flow sensation to more casual gamers?
...Chen calls his game flOw (http://jenovachen.info/flow)
. And it's been a huge hit. People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times.
(119) Some tasks at work don't automatically provide surges of flow, yet still need to get done. So the shrewdest enterprises afford employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that bring a little bit of flow to otherwise mundane duties.
(121) ...the first law of mastery: Mastery is a mindset.
(121-122) If you believe intelligence is a fixed quantity, then every educational and professional encounter becomes a measure of how much you have. If you believe intelligence is something you can increase, then the same encounters become opportunities for growth. In one view, intelligence is something you demonstrate; in the other, it's something you develop.
The two self-theories lead down two very different paths - one that heads toward mastery and one that doesn't. For instance, consider goals, [Carol] Dweck says they come in two varieties - performance goals and learning goals. Getting an A in French class is a performance goal. Being able to speak French is a learning goal. "Both goals are entirely normal and pretty much universal," Dweck says, "and both can fuel achievement." But only one leads to mastery.
(122) As Dweck writes, "With a learning goal, students don't have to feel that they're already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. aFter all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they're smart."
(123) Type X behavior often holds an entity theory of intelligence, prefers performance goals to learning goals, and disdains effort as a sign of weakness. Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters. bEgin with one mindset, and mastery is impossible begin with the other, and it can be inevitable.
(124) The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective [West Point] cadets' ratings on a noncognitive, non-physical trait known as "grit" - defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain....
As he [psychologist Anders Ericsson] puts it, "Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the results of intense practice for a minimum of 10 years."
(125) As they explained, "Whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible... in every field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment."
(127) This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote.
You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cézanne, you can _never_ touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully...
The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.
(129) As Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "After just two days of deprivation [of flow]... the general deterioration of mood was so advanced that prolonging the experiment woudl have been unadvisable."
...And one of Csikszentmihalyi's more surprising findings is that people are much more likely to reach that flow state at work than in leisure. Work can often have the structure of other autotelic experiences: clear goals, immediate feedback, challenges well matched to our abilities. And when it does, we don't just enjoy it more, we do it better.
(133) Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more. The most deeply motivated people - not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied - hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.
(136-137) Even cooperatives - an older business model with motives other than profit maximization - are moving from the shaggy edge to the clean-cut center. According to writer Marjorie Kelly, in the last three decades, worldwide membership in co-ops has doubled to 800 million people. In the United States alone, more people belong to a co-op than own shares in the stock market. And the idea is spreading, In Colombia, Kelly notes, "SaludCoop provides helath-care services to a quarter of the population. In Spain, the Mondragón Coporación Cooperativa is the nation's seventh largest industrial concern."
...The aims of these Motivation 3.0 companies are not to chase profit while trying to stay ethical and law-abiding. Their goal is to pursue purpose - and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.
(138) MBA Oath from HBS students in Spring 2009
And in just a few weeks, roughly one-quarter of the graduating class had taken the oath and signed the pledge. In launching the effort, Max Anderson, one of the founders, said: "My hope is that at our 25th reunion our class will not be known for how much money we made or how much money we gave back tot he school, but for how the world was a better place as a result of our leadership."
NB: http://mbaoath.org/
(139) Robert Reich's pronoun test: When he visits a workplace, he'll ask the people employed there some questions about the company. He listens to the substance of their response, of course. But most of all, he listens for the pronouns they use. Do the workers refer to the company as "they"? Or do they describe it in terms of "we"? "They" companies and "we" companies, he says, are very different places.
(141) In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than an MP3 player for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being...
But field research at the prestigious medical facility [Mayo Clinic] found that letting doctors spend one day a week on the aspect of their job that was most meaingful to them - whether patient care, research, or community service - could reduce the physical and emotional exhaustion that accompanies their work. Doctors who participated in this trial policy had half the burnout rate of those who did not. Think of it as "20 percent time" with a purpose.
(142-143) But the results for people with profit goals were more complicated. Those who said they were attaining their goals - accumulating wealth, winning acclaim - reported levels of satisfaction, self-esteem, and positive affect no higher than when they were students. In other words, they'd reached their goals, but it didn't make them any happier. What's more, graduates with profit goals showed _increases_ in anxiety, depression, and other negative indicators - again, even though they were attaining their goals.
"These findings are rather striking," the researchers write, "as they suggest that attainment of a particular set of goals [in this case, profit goals] has no impact on well-being and actually contributes to ill-being."
(144) A health society - and healthy business organizations - begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product of its attainment...
And since the planet very soon will contain more people over age sixty-five than under age five for the first time in its existence, the timing couldn't be better.
(163) Kimley-Horn and Associates, a civil engineering firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, has established a reward system that gets the Type I stamp of approval: At any point, without asking permission, anyone in the company can award a $50 bonus to any of her colleagues. "It works because it's real-time, and it's not handed down from any management," the firm's human resources director told _Fast Company_. "Any employee who does something exceptional receives recognition from their peers within minutes." Because these bonuses are noncontingent "now that" rewards, they avoid the seven deadly flaws of most corporate carrots. And because they come from a colleague, not a boss, they carry a different (and perhaps deeper) meaning.
NB: Are there rules?
(170) In Motivation 3.0, the best use of money is to take the issue of money off the table.
The more prominent salary, perks, and benefits are in someone's work life, the more they can inhibit creativity and unravel performance. As Edward Deci explained in Chapter 3, when organizations use rewards like money to motivate staff, "that's when they're most demotivating."
(172) Paying people a little more than the market demands, Akerlof and Yellen found, could attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale...
Indeed, other economists have shown that providing an employee a high level of base pay does more to boost performance and organizational commitment than an attractive bonus structure.
(174) We're bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement.
(178-179) Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence.
Make praise specific.
Praise in private. Praise is feedback - not an award ceremony.
Offer praise only when there's a good reason for it.
(181) Sudbury Valley School... gives its students total control over the task, time and technique of their learning.
http://www.sudval.org
The Tinkering School htttp://www.tinkeringschool.com
(185) Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of LIfe as Play and Possibility by James P Carse
(188)http://www.mindsetonline.com
Carol Dweck: Learn to listen for a fixed mindset "voice" that might be hurting your resiliency.
Interpret challenges not as roadblocks, but as opportunities to stretch yourself.
Use the language of growth - for example, "I'm not sure I can do it now, but I think I can learn with time and effort."
(185) Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon
http://www.goodwork.org
(187) Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward L Deci with Richard Flaste
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
(192) Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn
http://www.alfiekohn.org
(193) Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
(197) Peter Drucker's 2005 Harvard Business Review article, "Managing Oneself."
http://www.druckerinstitute.com
(198) [Jim] Collins [Built to Last] suggests four basic practices for creating a culture where self-motivation can flourish:
1. "Lead with questions, not answers."
2. "Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion."
3. "Conduct autopsies, without blame."
4. "Build 'red flag' mechanisms." In other words, make it easy for employees and customers to speak up when they identify a problem.
(217) www.danpink.com/drive.html, free quarterly newsletter
dhp@danpink.com
