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Twitter Summary: Many people struggle to do anything exceptionally well if they don’t know the reasons why they’re doing it in the first place.

Principle

So far we’ve visited three main principles from Dan Pink’s book Drive.  First, I shared about a primary assumption most of us have, that if you reward good behavior and punish the bad you’ll get more of the good behavior.  That doesn’t work anymore according to Dan Pink and that was touched on in a post called How Money Can Do More Harm than Good.  Pink says what instead is needed for a creative work environment to thrive is to give people more autonomy, a chance to master a skill, and his final point, that I want to share today, is how providing people a sense of purpose leads to greater success.

Knowing your purpose strengthens you ...

Twitter Summary: People involved in creative work perform best when they are allowed to pursue the mastery of a creative skill.

Principle

At this point I have taken you through a few principles from Dan Pink’s book Drive.  I’ve explained how money can do more harm than good in a creative work environment and followed that up with an explanation of how creative employees flourish when given autonomy, a chance to master a skill, and a clear purpose. 

Today I want to highlight this idea of providing people a chance to master a skill.  To creative people, there’s something innately satisfying about constantly striving to master something amazing, even though they never quite achieve it.

Pink explains first that creative talent is often simply confused for intense practice and dedication...

Twitter Summary:  Money ruins the intrinsic value of creative work.  It shifts your focus from the reward creative work offers and attaches it to money.

Principle

In Dan Pink’s book Drive he starts by presenting a bedrock assumption that most of the world follows:  “The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad.”  Pink explains that for as long as we can remember, we’ve configured our organizations and constructed our lives around this assumption.

This explains why most organizations offer financial incentives to high performers or higher salaries for positions with significant responsibility.  If you want performance, you have to pay for it.  But Pink says this is a problem...

Twitter Summary: What most managers think drive people in the work place is wrong. Upcoming posts about Drive by Dan Pink.

Background

Last December I had the chance to work on Dan Pink’s social marketing team for his book To Sell Is Human.  I really enjoyed that experience and much of it has shaped how this blog came about.  A number of my early posts were written about his book and I enjoyed his book so much I decided to dig into more of his work.  That’s how I came across his book Drive.

In the book, Dan writes that what most managers think drive people in the work place is wrong.  Most think that money or fear are the primary motivators, but that just isn’t true according to Dan Pink and the research he cites...