Drive

The promise

The driver pulls up, hands you the bags, and before walking away asks a favor: if the app sends a rating, please give five stars. Not four. Four, he explains, counts against him. Nobody designed that little plea. It was designed, accidentally, by whoever decided service quality would be captured as a number from one to five and that the number would decide his pay. The company wanted better deliveries and bought, instead, a man who asks.

That's the territory of this book. Daniel H. Pink argues that most of what we do to motivate people — in offices, in schools, at home — rests on a reward-and-punishment model that experimental psychology had already taken apart decades before it reached the management handbooks. The trouble with nearly everything written about the book is that it leaves the reader holding a diagnosis and no lever. So we've organized it around a question the book never asks: who has to say yes? Five rungs, from the one you can climb on Monday without anyone's approval to the one that needs a signature in a boardroom.

The idea in one image

There's a field that grew well for twenty years while nobody paid it much attention. Nothing mystical was happening: underneath, a biology was working that nobody could see and nobody was paying. Then a new manager arrives with a perfectly reasonable idea — force the yield with soluble nitrogen, every season — and the field responds immediately. Harvests climb, spirits climb, and the credit goes to the bag.