I read this book and it now seems very clear to me why there are people who dread Mondays and people who kind of look forward to it (or at the very least, do not need to drag themselves out of bed on a Monday morning.) The main concept of the book is simple – Business. How we have run, conducted and applied it has never really changed since the word’s been in existence. We have rewarded the best employees and hired them by throwing money at them. We still believe that the best way to motivate people is by giving them more money . . . unfortunately, this has been proven to be so ineffective – it actually demotivates people.

Through various studies conducted by scientists and psychologists around the world, they have proven that by giving a reward to somebody actually enjoying a task – will actually diminish its enjoyment. Because the act of monetary reward will transform the said task into “work”. These “if then” rewards have worked for a while during the industrial age when the usual occupation is routinary and without any monetary benefit, nobody would actually be doing any of those tasks . . . however, the landscape has significantly changed and we are now more immersed in our jobs. And to stay motivated, we subconsciously crave for something “intrinsic”. One example of this is open source development – the people involved don’t get paid, yet they spend countless hours working because they work for a purpose – to be a part of something bigger than themselves. And because of them, we have benefited with some amazing products – like Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, the Linux OS to name a few.

The carrot (monetary reward) and stick (punishment through suspensions, demotions) method is no longer a good way of controlling employees . . . they will do the work, but when they aren’t motivated – their work lacks quality, efficiency and their productivity suffers. It’s so astounding how so many managers still believe that this is the best way to control their staff. Wake up!!

Here is an excerpt from the book: DRIVE PDF.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.