Here is the transcription of my interview with Dan Pink for those of you who would rather read it than listen to the recording. I hope you enjoy. Bob Poole
Interview with Dan Pink, talking about Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Bob Poole: Well, I have the privilege today of being with Dan Pink, to discuss his latest book
Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Dan, welcome to the Water Cooler Hangout.
Dan Pink: Bob, it’s great to be at the water cooler, hanging out.
BP: Thanks. By the way, congratulations, I took a look today and I see that Drive is ranked
number three on New York Times business best sellers list this month.
DP: Hey, thanks. Thanks for noticing.
BP: Yeah, that’s fantastic.
DP: Yeah, we’re off to a pretty good start
BP: In the introduction, you said that "this is a book about motivation and I
will show you that much of what we believe about the subject just isn’t so." Many years ago I was
taught in Management 101, that what gets rewarded gets done. And you think about the carrot and
stick kind of thing. So, what really motivates people? What did you find when you wrote the book?
DP: Well, I think that you’re right, that what gets rewarded, that is people respond very well to
rewards and punishments in their environment. They don’t always respond the way we think they’re
going to respond. And one of the things that I found out in doing the research for this book, and if you
actually look at the science of human motivation, it calls into question a lot of practices in business.
As you suggest, Management 101 suggests, that the way that people perform better is by responding to
rewards or punishments, that in the absence of a carrot or a stick people wouldn’t do much. That’s just
not quite right. That’s just not true, at least according to 40 or 50 years of behavioral science.
What science shows, for relatively simple straightforward tasks, turning the same screw the same way
on an assembly line, or adding up columns of figures in a white collar job, those kind of motivators are
actually pretty good. However, once tasks call for even modest degrees of creativity, complex thinking,
conceptual ability, those kinds of contingent motivators, those if/then motivators, if you do this, then
you get that, they don’t work very well at all, and they often backfire.
BP: Right, the backfiring thing was very interesting as it relates to what happened in this past
year with the idea of short term goals and the whole real estate market. Can you tell us a little bit about
that?
DP: Sure! There are all kinds of ways that those kinds of contingent rewards can backfire. They
have a lot of potential collateral consequences. One of them is that, especially if you give a very high
stakes reward to short term performance, some people are going to take the low road there. Some
people are going to cheat. Not everybody, but a portion of people will cheat. You see this basically in
every kind of high stakes reward, where there’s a big payoff for hitting it.
That’s Bernie Maddoff. That is a source of part of our financial woes.
We see it now even in schools
where you have schools and teachers being rewarded based on scores on standardized tests, and
there’s some recent news out of Georgia that show that something like 25% of the exams that came in
had erasures that changed the answer from what the wrong answer to what was the right answer. And
so some people are going to cheat. That’s the big downside of it.
I think the bigger downside though—that’s a significant downside—but the more significant one for our
purposes, or for the purposes of your listeners, is that contingent motivators, those if/then motivators
can actually inhibit creative thinking. They’re very good for fostering simple, routine rule-based thinking,
because they get you to focus.
So, if you offer me 500 bucks to do something, you have my attention, Bob, I’m focused, man. I really
want to get that 500 dollars. But my frame of mind is this very intense focus, narrow vision. That’s a
great way to approach a problem if it’s short-term or if it’s simple, or if it’s rule based, where there’s a
certain set of steps to follow to get a right answer. That’s not the frame of mind you want to be in if
you’re trying to come up with something creative, if you’re trying to do something innovative, if you’re
trying to solve a conceptual problem
For that, for those kinds of problems, those kinds of challenges you don’t want a narrow view, you want
an expansive view, you want to be seeing the periphery.
And so many times these kinds of rewards
which we think of as somehow emanating from nature, as sort of a given in how people perform, these
if/then rewards, they don’t work very well for creative, conceptual tasks precisely because they work for
simple tasks. They narrow our vision, sometimes you want a narrow vision, other times you want an
expansive vision. But you don’t want to apply a motivator that gives you a narrow vision when you really
want is a wider ranging vision.
BP: So you call the new motivation—what?—Motivation 3.0?
DP: Right, Motivation 1.0 is motivation based on our survival instinct. This is the motivation of
when we were evolving and trying to outrace saber tooth tigers. And it’s built mostly on our biological
motivations, and human beings have a biological drive, obviously. We eat when we’re hungry, we drink
when we’re thirsty, we have sex to satisfy our carnal urges. But that’s not all we are.
So we also have a
second drive, where we do respond very well to rewards and punishments in our environment. Typically
if you reward something you get more of that behavior and if you punish something you get less of it.
And so for a long time I think our businesses had an operating system—and Bob, this is Motivation 2.0—
for a long time our businesses had an operating system built almost entirely on rewards and
punishments. As you’re suggesting, that was Management 101. And here’s the thing, it worked pretty
darn well!
BP: Well, especially in the sales field! I grew up in the world of sales, and that was the
way of working with sales people… Is it still a good way, you think?
DP: On sales? It’s actually a very, very interesting question. I’m not sure whether it is. I’ll give
you an example of this. I think it’s a really interesting example. There’s a company that I encountered
just a couple weeks ago in Cambridge, United Kingdom, that has eliminated commissions for the sales
people.
Now that seems crazy, right? And what they did… here’s the reason behind it, and I’ll tell you the
outcome. The reason behind it was that they, the company, would set up a compensation scheme, and
sales people inevitably—which is what I would do, not because sales people are bad people, they’re
human beings, they would do what I would do—they figured out ways to game it.
So, if their big bonus is based on increase from month to month, people would often have this kind of
saw-tooth pattern, where they would do really well one month, not do well intentionally the next
month, so they could have a big kick the next month.
If the commissions topped out a certain amount in a given month, they would basically stop working,
stop selling. Understandably.
And so the company in response to people trying to game the
compensation system would make the compensation system more complex. As a result, sales people,
understandably, made their response it more complex, which made the company make the sale
compensation system more complex….
And so eventually the two founders of the company said, “Maybe we’re just going to down the entirely
wrong road.” And they said, “What if we just eliminated sales commissions.” And this is a very
interesting conversation that they had.
So they went in to two of their sales people individually. And
they went in to their first guy, Bob—or let’s not call him Bob, let’s call him Fred—so they go to Fred and
they say, “Fred, we’re thinking about changing our compensation system. What we’ll do is, instead of
having compensations, we’ll raise your base pay, and give you and everyone else a piece of the back
end, a piece of the profit, you know, profit sharing, and what do you think of that?” And Fred says,
“Well, wow, I think that’s actually kind of a cool idea. It would make me feel less pressured each time to
hit my numbers, I think I’d be more collaborative with the other sales people, and I think actually I’d
serve the customer better. The problem you’re going to have is that Maria, this other sales person,
Maria’s never gonna go for this. Maria only cares about money.”
And they say, “Thanks, thanks a lot.
Thanks for your feedback.”
So they go to talk to Maria, one of the other sales people, and they say, “Maria, we’re thinking about
eliminating commissions, here’s why… higher base salary, piece of the back end, what do you think?”
“Well, I actually think it’s not a bad idea. I think we’d serve customers better and collaborate more. The
problem is that Fred will never go for this, because Fred only cares about money.”
And so what you had
is people making false assumptions about others. That somehow sales people didn’t have any sense of
intrinsic motivation; didn’t have any desire to do a job for its own sake, they were only trying to get their
rewards, in contrast to every other person on the planet.
And so, what this company did in eliminating sales commissions, they actually saw sales go up. Why?
Well, a few things. Number one—and I thought this was interesting, ‘cause this surprised me—is that it
freed up an enormous amount of management time. Managers were spending less of their time figuring
out who brought in what piece of business and litigating those kinds of things and more time actually
coming up with good ideas and helping run the business better.
There was certainly much more
collaboration and customer satisfaction increased as well.
So this seems really sacrilegious in a way, but I think there are these alternative approaches. If you start
with a different assumption about people… If you start with the assumption about people that they’re
fundamentally passive, inert, and lazy, and that they’re not going to do a damn thing unless you dangle a
carrot or threaten them with a stick. If that’s your starting assumptions about human beings, or the
people in your organization, that’s going to take you down one road. If you’re starting assumption about
the people in your organization is different, that is, people actually given a chance want to do good
work, they want to be active and engaged, they actually care about quality, that’s going to take you
down a different road.
And what I find kind of curious is that in management, and certainly under Management 101, as you
describe it, Management 101 takes only that first view. And there are many—maybe even the majority
of managers out there today—who have that view of human nature. Who think that people in their
organization, that people in general, wouldn’t do a darn thing unless they were rewarded or punished.
What’s curious is that no one ever believes that about him or herself. Everybody always thinks that he or
she is the exception, that he or she cares about quality and cares about doing a good job and has some
intrinsic motivation. It’s sort of like that old phenomenon where if you go to a group of 100 people and
say, “Raise your hand if you think you’re an above average driver,” 99 of them raise their hand. And so,
maybe we’re not that unique, maybe people have the same sort of motivations and desires that you do,
and if you start from that assumption about human nature, I think it takes you down a very different
road.
