Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: Difference between revisions

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The group without the pressure to kill or be killed, who had nothing at stake other than the satisfaction of ''knowing their work might be useful in some later project'' — heart-warming, right? — collaborated unselfishly and, on average, solved the problem much more quickly.
The group without the pressure to kill or be killed, who had nothing at stake other than the satisfaction of ''knowing their work might be useful in some later project'' — heart-warming, right? — collaborated unselfishly and, on average, solved the problem much more quickly.


Now, this really ought not to need a Ted Talk to point out. The incentives are all wrong: they discourage collaboration of the sort which obviously will help in solving the problem. The [[JC]] likes to keep his glass half-full as you know, readers, but he is a perma-bear about human nature when articulated through the prism of [[investment bank]]ing, all the same. It will take more than the [[Glucksberg candle problem]] and the total [[falsification]] of the commuter ethos to change things, but we can only hope, and Mr Pink’s book can be our narrative as we do.
Now, this really ought not to need a Ted Talk to point out. The incentives are all wrong: they discourage collaboration of the sort which obviously will help in solving the problem.  
 
But the puzzle isn’t understanding that “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” motivate people more than a bit of extra cash — who didn’t, instinctively, know that? — but why our corporate overlords who, in their reflective moments, surely know it as well, ignore this plain, a priori fact.
 
As ever, the [[JC]] has a theory: it is all about personal incentives. In the same way that the average wage-slave’s major motivator during her career is ''[[fear]]'' — and her primal instinct is the covering of her own behind, what propels the captains of our industry is ''personal enrichment''. Solving the organisation’s, and its clients’, problems and achieving general commercial goals of the collective in a way that empowers and energises the rank and file is, you know, ''good'', inasmuch as it generates a healthy pay packet, but it is still ''a second-order derivative of generating that healthy pay packet''. If, by some unfortunate turn of events, the two should conflict, it should not take a clairvoyant to work out which imperative will prevail: it won’t be “the collective betterment of the whole”.
 
The [[JC]] likes to keep his glass half-full as you know, readers, but he is a perma-bear about human nature when articulated through the prism of [[investment bank]]ing, all the same. It will take more than the [[Glucksberg candle problem]] and the total [[falsification]] of the commuter ethos to change things, but we can only hope, and Mr Pink’s book can be our narrative as we do.


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*[[Candle problem]]
*[[Candle problem]]
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