• Drive

  • The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
  • By: Daniel H. Pink
  • Narrated by: Daniel H. Pink
  • Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (7,857 ratings)

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Drive  By  cover art

Drive

By: Daniel H. Pink
Narrated by: Daniel H. Pink
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Publisher's summary

The New York Times best seller that gives listeners a paradigm-shattering new way to think about motivation from the author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money - the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction - at work, at school, and at home - is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does - and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation - autonomy, mastery, and purpose - and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.

©2009 Daniel H. Pink (P)2009 Penguin

Critic reviews

"Pink makes a convincing case that organizations ignore intrinsic motivation at their peril." (Scientific American)

"Persuasive...Harnessing the power of intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic remuneration can be thoroughly satisfying and infinitely more rewarding." (Miami Herald)

"These lessons are worth repeating, and if more companies feel emboldened to follow Mr. Pink's advice, then so much the better." (Wall Street Journal)

Featured Article: 35+ Quotes About Hard Work to Keep You Motivated and Moving Forward


The things most worth doing require the most from us—it takes hard work to accomplish important tasks, achieve major goals, and realize your dreams. Commitment, sweat, exhaustion, frustration, and a willingness to fail are all necessary parts of taking on challenges. When you’re in the middle of a difficult project, there will be times when you’re tempted to simply give up. In such moments, look to these quotes about hard work to keep you going.

What listeners say about Drive

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Not as good as A Whole New Mind

I usually love Daniel Pink's work, but this was tired and repetitive. I find he is insightful and typically puts an original twist on common wisdom. He missed the mark on this one. He used the same formula of his past successes but this one felt like a 50-100 page concept stretched out into a 200 pager to keep publishers happy. I would put the concepts in A Whole New Mind on par with the best works of Malcom Gladwell, Steven Levitt and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is recycled, repetitive and doesn't come close to his best.

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100 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

OK, but could have been a lot better

Daniel Pink makes a reasonable case for a more humane business environment. The keystone of his approach is Autonomy: people need autonomy (the ability to choose what they do, when they do it, how they do it, and who they do it with); and the more they have, the more productive they can be. More importantly, the usual approach of giving bonuses and other rewards for meeting prescribed goals can actually undermine autonomy, and thus productivity, over the long term. Pink cites a number of ingenious experiments that have demonstrated the negative effect of rewards in many situations.

It's not all about autonomy, though. According to Pink, people also need Mastery and Purpose. In other words, they like to get better at doing something that matters. Much of Pink's book is an exploration of ways that people have re-engineered work environments to make those needs easier to meet.

He closes the book with a long chapter on recommendations for change; but as in most books of this type, they are more pep talk than blueprint. Pink describes management in general as being an outmoded technology, but the successes he describes only happened because management gave the new approach their full support.

One aspect of the book I found particularly puzzling. Much of his argument is based on the work of psychologists Edward Deci and Robert Ryan, who propose three basic human needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Mastery is a bit like competence; but what happened to relatedness? It seems to me that could have as big an impact on productivity as anything else.

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85 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Repetitive

Like many books with a good idea or message, they are relatively simple. This, like many other books, repeats the main points ad nauseum. If you are in charge of a creative group of people, this is required information. If not, it's interesting for the first hour or two.

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43 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Nothing New in this book

If you have never read a self development book then you will enjoy this one.

BUT if that is not you then this book is border line plagiarism.

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36 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

great book

This book started out fairly slowly, but then it was fantastic with the thoughts and ideas it presented and the research that backs them up. It confirmed what I saw as a Recognition Coordinator for a major corporation. The carrot approach can create a lot of problems if not done correctly. I saw cheating, people being demotivated when there wasn't a contest on, etc. What I like most about this book were the ideas on how to encourage "Drive". I am going to buy the physical book for this to keep as a reference.

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24 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Many valid ideas

Mr Pink's criticisms of traditional methods of motivation are entertaining and valid. Many of the ideas put forward are interesting and worthy of consideration.
However, while he advocates allowing employees more autonomy and freedom to decide things for themselves, he allows the reader less and less. He repeats fairly interesting ideas over and over, lecturing us about their value until one gets sick of them, particularly generalizing techniques that might work well for software developers, but few other businesses.
Instead of allowing the reader the decide for himself and ponder how he or she might incorporate some part of these ideas into his or her own business, he ends up hectoring us over and over about "FedEx days", "Flow" and "I-type" people.
It is ironic that, just as he insists we must abandon our rigid 9 to 5 mentality, he is shoe-horning everything into the constraining format of a book with a strong thesis he thinks he can sell.
It's a pity he doesn't have the courage to follow his own advice.

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23 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Thought provoking

The author divides motivation into 3 versions... 1.0 is physical (food & sex), 2.0 is extrinsic Pavlov and money stuff, and 3.0 is the top of Maslow's triangle and a heaping helping from the book Flow. I thought the book read well, and put a fresh coat of paint on some older info that we shouldn't ignore.

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16 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Can I get my money back for this strawman?

Any additional comments?

This book outright ignores certain psychological facts of human behavior in order to promote an idea that only works for those that already have basic needs in life met. While it would be wonderful to implement in a utopian world that is not reality.

While it may incorporate Maslow's Hierarchy it does its best to outright ignore the basic facts at the same time to bolster a point. Case studies are rarely people selected at random from society but are those willing to commit to testing for various reasons - motivating children (semi-random selections) who have their basic needs met in life is a far cry from a person (more than likely not the average test subject) trying to keep their family fed and secure. So using children and volunteer test subjects while comparing to adult test subjects that are NOT random is very misleading. I'll give you a hint: If pay (which he constantly decrees) is not a factor then why will people in the U.S. culture not work certain available jobs for low pay? But those in foreign countries are more than willing to do so for far less? This is just one of the obvious errors of his thinking.

I will admit I could not finish the book; I started reading other reviews which I would advise you to do as well (there are plenty on amazon-the critical ones are most helpful).

Don't waste your money.

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15 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Very interesting topic

This is an interesting topic and a well written synopsis of the science of motivation. If you are a leader in a working company who has had to motivate people in the past, this book will mostly confirm what you already know. Monetary and other extrensic incentives don't work and they can be very detrimental. That in itself makes it valuable as a work of literature. There are a lot of people in high levels of leadership who may actually need a book like this to tell them what they should already know by looking at the effects of the systems they have created.

I wouldn't call this book a must read or a game changer however. It is saying what a LOT of literature in the business world is currently saying. What it does do is organize what is very good science behind ideas that are being propogated in many other books. There are a few other books I would recommend ahead of this one but if you are well read in business and leadership texts, this is definitely not one you want to skip.

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11 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Pink does it again

After reading Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, (highly recommended), I was delighted to hear what he had to say about motivation. He did not dissapoint me. His explanations make sense, and are relevant, supported by science, and useful for anyone: in business, raising children, or for personal motivation. I will listen to this often.

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10 people found this helpful