This is a book about motivation, specifically about how our assumptions that biological urges and extrinsic motivation are sufficient to model all human behaviours. It turns out that’s not true — intrinsic motivation plays an important part, and in fact badly applied extrinsic motivators can harm the much more powerful intrinsic motivating factors.
(It will be interesting to see what corporations currently cutting bonus payouts experience in terms of overall productivity now that they’ve removed an extrinsic motivator).
Intrinsic motivation is more important for heuristic work where the outcomes aren’t algorithmic or clear cut the book argues. It’s not as simple as just cranking and handle and creativity comes out the other end. However, that’s just what traditional management is — a series of carrots and sticks to crinkle that handle as fast as possible.
Its important to note here that the book repeatedly states that intrinsic motivation only works if the person’s baseline needs are already met. That is, you need to be earning enough to pay your bills and so forth before you start valuing how interesting work is.
Instead, the book encourages companies to consider things like 20% time, self organizing teams, flexible work hours, and so forth. The book is from the hopeful days of 2009, where companies like Zappos and Google were doing such things. Notably I think both have now backed away from these ideas. I wonder if this explains why seemingly everyone is leaving Google these days? They used to be intrinsically motivated to “change the world”, but now it’s clearly just about money and that doesn’t motivate in the same way.
The book also argues that intrinsically motivated employees seek mastery of whatever it is they do, and this rings true for me. The strongest engineers I’ve ever worked with are the ones who are always trying to understand better how the machine works, in order to better bend the machine to their will.
Overall this book really resonated with me, especially the concepts of intrinsic motivation being important to creative work, the reinforcement of the importance of flow, and the encouragement to seek mastery.
Business & Economics
Canongate Books
2011
257
The author of the bestseller "A Whole New Mind" is back with a paradigm-changing examination of how to harness motivation to find greater satisfaction in life. This book of big ideas discusses the surest pathway to high performance, creativity, and well-being.