INTRODUCTION
The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci
8 EDWARD DECI “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity”
8 EDWARD DECI “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”
10 “our third drive—our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”
Part One
A New Operating System
Chapter 1
The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0
22 “walk into the IT department of a large company anywhere in the world and ask for a tour. That company’s corporate computer servers could well run on Linux, software devised by an army of unpaid programmers and available for free. Linux now powers one in four corporate servers. Then ask an employee to explain how the company’s website works. Humming beneath the site is probably Apache, free open-source Web server software created and maintained by a far-flung global group of volunteers. Apache’s share of the corporate Web server market: 52 percent. In other words, companies that typically rely on external rewards to manage their employees run some of their most important systems with products created by nonemployees who don’t seem to need such rewards.”
23 KARIM LAKHANI and BOB WOLF “enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.”
29-30 “During the twentieth century, most work was algorithmic—and not just jobs where you turned the same screw the same way all day long. Even when we traded blue collars for white, the tasks we carried out were often routine. That is, we could reduce much of what we did—in accounting, law, computer programming, and other fields—to a script, a spec sheet, a formula, or a series of steps that produced a right answer. But today, in much of North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, routine white-collar work is disappearing. It’s racing offshore to wherever it can be done the cheapest. In India, Bulgaria, the Philippines, and other countries, lower-paid workers essentially run the algorithm, figure out the correct answer, and deliver it instantaneously from their computer to someone six thousand miles away.
But offshoring is just one pressure on rule-based, left-brain work. Just as oxen and then forklifts replaced simple physical labor, computers are replacing simple intellectual labor. So while outsourcing is just beginning to pick up speed, software can already perform many rule-based, professional functions better, more quickly, and more cheaply than we can. That means that your cousin the CPA, if he’s doing mostly routine work, faces competition not just from five-hundred-dollar-a-month accountants in Manila, but from tax preparation programs anyone can download for thirty dollars. The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work. A key reason: Routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine work generally cannot.”
30 TERESA AMABILE “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.”
Chapter 2
Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don’t Work…
35 “If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all.
But once we’re past that threshold, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite of their intended aims. Mechanisms designed to increase motivation can dampen it. Tactics aimed at boosting creativity can reduce it. Programs to promote good deeds can make them disappear. Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose—and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking.”
37 “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.” !!!
38 “When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect. Why? “If-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy. Like the gentlemen driving carriages for money instead of fun, they’re no longer fully controlling their lives. And that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivational bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment.” !!
39 DECI, et al, quoted by PINK “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.”
44 “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.”
46 CARNEY “Those artists who pursued their painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognized as superior. […] It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually receive them.”
49 “what science is revealing is that carrots and sticks can promote bad behavior, create addiction, and encourage short-term thinking at the expense of the long view.” !!!
50 “a group of scholars from the 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 questioned […] “Rather than being offered as an ‘over-the-counter’ salve for boosting performance, goal setting should be prescribed selectively, presented with a warning label, and closely monitored” […] Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.” […]
For complex or conceptual tasks, offering a reward can blinker the wide-ranging thinking necessary to come up with an innovative solution. Likewise, when an extrinsic goal is paramount—particularly a short-term, measurable one whose achievement delivers a big payoff—its presence can restrict our view of the broader dimensions of our behavior. As the cadre of business school professors write, “Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior.”
51 “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.”
55 “this particular brain chemical surging to this particular part of the brain—is what happens in addiction. The mechanism of most addictive drugs is to send a fusillade of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens. The feeling delights, then dissipates, then demands another dose. 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.”
56 “fixating on an immediate reward can damage performance over time.”
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.)”
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.”
Chapter 2A
…and the Special Circumstances When They Do
64 “[The approach for routine tasks:]
- 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. Explain why this poster is so important and why sending it out now is critical to your organization’s mission.
- Acknowledge that the task is boring. This is an act of empathy, of course. And the acknowledgement 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—how each poster must be rolled and how each mailing label must be affixed—give them freedom over how they do the job.
66-67 “[for other sorts of undertakings:]
The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete. […]
consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. […]
provide useful information. […] In the workplace, people are thirsting to learn about how they’re doing, but only if the information isn’t a tacit effort to manipulate their behavior.”
Chapter 3
Type I and Type X
72-73 “[Self-determination theory] argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet. […]
Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”
73-74 “Csikszentmihalyi’s first book about “flow” and Seligman’s first book on his theories (which argued that helplessness was learned, rather than innate, behavior) appeared in the same year as Deci’s book on intrinsic motivation. Clearly, something big was in the air in 1975. It’s just taken us a generation to reckon with it.
The broad assortment of new thinkers includes Carol Dweck of Stanford University and Harvard’s Amibile. It includes a few economists—most prominently, Roland Bénabou of Princeton University and Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich—who are applying some of these concepts to the dismal science. And it includes some scholars who don’t study motivation per se—in particular, Harvard University’s Howard Gardner and Tufts University’s Robert Sternberg—who have changed our view of intelligence and creativity and offered a brighter view of human potential.”
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.”
Part Two
The Three Elements
Chapter 4
Autonomy
94 “Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.”
95 WILLIAM MCKNIGHT “Hire good people, and leave them alone.”
96-97 “Back at Atlassian, the experiment in 20 percent time seemed to work. In what turned out to be a yearlong trial, developers launched forty-eight new projects. So in 2009, Cannon-Brookes decided to make this dose of task autonomy a permanent feature of Atlassian work life. The decision didn’t sit well with everyone. By Cannon-Brookes’s back-of-the-blog calculations, seventy engineers, spending 20 percent of their time over just a six-month period, amounted to an investment of $1 million. The company’s chief financial officer was aghast. Some project managers—despite Atlassian’s forward-thinking ways, the company still uses the m-word—weren’t happy, because it meant ceding some of their control over employees. When a few wanted to track employees’ time to make sure they didn’t abuse the privilege, Cannon-Brookes said no.” !!!
98 “Being pessimistic is almost always a recipe for low levels of what psychologists call “subjective well-being.” It’s also a detriment in most professions. But as Martin Seligman has written, “There is one glaring exception: pessimists do better at law.” In other words, an attitude that makes someone less happy as a human being actually makes her more effective as a lawyer. A second reason: Most other enterprises are positive-sum. If I sell you something you want and enjoy, we’re both better off. Law, by contrast, is often (though not always) a zero-sum game: Because somebody wins, somebody else must lose.
But the third reason might offer the best explanation of all—and help us understand why so few attorneys exemplify Type I behavior. Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little “decision latitude.” Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it’s another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don’t have much of it.”
106-107 “Whether you’re fixing sinks, ringing up groceries, selling cars, or writing a lesson plan, you and I need autonomy just as deeply as a great painter.
However, encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging accountability. Whatever operating system is in place, people must be accountable for their work. […] people want to be accountable—and [.] making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is a pathway to that destination.”
107 ”
Chapter 5
Mastery
110-111 “The opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. And this distinction leads to the second element of Type I behavior: mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters.” !!
118 “Jenova Chen, a young game designer who, in 2006, wrote his MFA thesis on Csikszentmihalyi’s theory. Chen believed that video games held the promise to deliver quintessential flow experiences, but that too many games required an almost obsessive level of commitment. Why not, he thought, design a game to bring the flow sensation to more casual gamers?” !!!!
Chapter 6
Purpose
139-140 MAX BAZERMAN “Say you take people who are motivated to behave nicely, then give them a fairly weak set of ethical standards to meet. Now, instead of asking them to “do it because it’s the right thing to do,” you’ve essentially given them an alternate set of standards—do this so you can check off all these boxes.” !!
144 “the planet very soon will contain more people over age sixty-five than under age five for the first time in its existence” !!
The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way
170 “get compensation right—and then get it out of sight. Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.” !!!!
The Type I Reading List: Fifteen Essential Books
193 STEVEN PRESSFIELD “The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.” !!