Daniel Pink's Drive - Recommended - Harvard Business Review

Daniel Pink's Drive - Recommended - Harvard Business Review

Daniel Pink's Drive
1:27 PM Wednesday January 13, 2010 by Andrew O’Connell


Citing work by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, consultant Tammy Erickson, and many others, Pink, who is also the author of 2005's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, looks at motivation from the viewpoints of both the leader and the led. To managers, he says that coaxing great performance out of employees is no longer a matter of compensating them lavishly for putting the business first and suppressing their inner selves. It's about satisfying workers' desire for autonomy, which stimulates their "innate capacity for self-direction."

To employees, Pink offers advice on how "type X"es — his coinage for people who prefer external rewards — can enroll themselves in the burgeoning ranks of the "type I"s, driven mostly by inner rewards. The difference matters: Type I's have better long-term performance and well-being, he argues.

To help with the transition, the book's breezy tool kit section shows, for example, how to identify activities that generate the coveted "flow" state, in which a person's abilities and challenges are perfectly matched. Some of the suggested exercises sound like advice from Al Franken's SNL alter-ego, the self-help guru Stuart Smalley ("Doggone it, people like me!"), but there's certainly no harm in asking yourself, in the spirit of self-knowledge, what motto should be emblazoned on your own personal motivational poster and what's the one sentence that describes who you are. We could all benefit from figuring out what really gets us up in the morning.

Access Original Post: http://blogs.hbr.org/recommended/2010/01/drive-the-surprising-truth-abo.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.