Book of the Week: Drive
22 Jun 2013
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. - from the flap
To motivate people, you need to give them
- Autonomy
- Mastery
- Purpose
These are the same themes from So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. It has the perspective of an employer rather than that of a employee (Cal’s book). You will probably get as much from watching the video as reading the book. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc] Creativity The main issue is that the majority of routine jobs will be replaced with robots and algorithms. In the future all jobs will require some level of creativity as no one has developed a creative robot. The problem is that how companies used to motivate people to do routine work doesn’t work for motivating people to do creative work. Motivation The first part of the book is about motivation. After reading it, I came to the conclusion that is a good idea to pay graduate students a subsistence salary. Being paid money kills the fun. Once you get paid to do something, it becomes a job. We all know that jobs suck, that is why they are called jobs. A well paid graduate student will not be able to get as far as a poor graduate student. The pay has to be above a threshold, but anymore and you’ll be hurting productivity. Sad, but true. The main thing is that there are two types of ways to motivate people, extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic is when I offer a reward for you to do something. Intrinsic motivation is because you want to do something. Intrinsic is always better than extrinsic in the long run. Intrinsic people end up doing a better job. This goes back to people saying you should do things you are passionate about.
It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually receive them.
Fame and fortune come to those who do what they are passionate about instead of those who follow the money. Autonomy Officially Google employees are allowed to allocate 20% of their time to work on side projects. Many of Google’s products such as Gmail and Google News Reader (RIP) came out of the 20% time. This practice originated from 3M. Other startups take the approach of quarterly hack days or hack weeks to give employees autonomy to think of new ideas that can drive revenue. Another side to autonomy is letting employees decide how to do their jobs. Typically call centers are based in India with predefined scripts to follow. This can result in frustrating service as going through these scripts is like pressing buttons on the phone. These call centers are trying to optimize for reduced call times at the expense of service. In Delivering Happiness Tony Hsieh describes how he changed how call centers operated to provide excellent customer experience at Zappos. Instead of having predefined scripts, workers have freedom to handle the situation. This lead to decreased turnover, happy employees and happy customers. You need to hire employees that you can trust to be autonomous. Mastery
In addition, a study of 11,000 in industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge—that is, the urge to master something new and engaging—was the best predictor of productivity.
Being good at something takes time and facing challenges that are neither too easy that you’ll be bored or too hard that you’ll give up. Being in a state where you are working in the sweet spot is called flow. Mastery involves a lot of learning. If you want your kid to be good at learning, you need to praise them for working hard instead of getting good grades. There was a recent paper on this. If Khan Academy can optimize for keeping kids in the flow regime while providing praise for effort, then everybody wins. This can be accomplished with gamification through an achievement system and machine learning algorithms. Purpose Why am I doing this? If I want to get stuff done, I need to give people the freedom and time to get really good at solving important problems. Purchase Drive from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.