Pink, Daniel H. Drive : the surprising truth about what motivates us / Daniel H. Pink. p. cm. Includes /addict_new6.pdf. 21 Brian Knutson, Charles M. Adams,
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Part One – A New Operating System CHAPTER 1 – The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0 CHAPTER 2 – Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often ) Don™t Work . . . CHAPTER 2A – . . . and the Special Circumstances Wh en They Do CHAPTER 3 – Type I and Type X Part Two – The Three Elements CHAPTER 4 – Autonomy CHAPTER 5 – Mastery CHAPTER 6 – Purpose Part Three – The Type I Toolkit Type I for Individuals: Nine Strategies for Awakeni ng Your Motivation Type I for Organizations: Nine Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I W ay Type I for Parents and Educators: Nine Ideas for He lping Our Kids The Type I Reading List: Fifteen Essential Books Listen to the Gurus: Six Business Thinkers Who Get It The Type I Fitness Plan: Four Tips for Getting (and Staying) Motivated to Exercise Drive: The Recap Drive: The Glossary The Drive Discussion Guide: Twenty Conversation Sta rters to Keep You Thinking FIND OUT MOREŠABOUT YOURSELF AND THIS TOPIC Acknowledgements NOTES INDEX ALSO BY DANIEL H . PINK Free Agent Nation A Whole New Mind The Adventures of Johnny Bunko 3 de 81
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RIVERHEAD BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New Yo rk, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Su ite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Cana da Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland , 25 St Stephen™s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Aus tralia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Lt d, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin G roup (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a d ivision of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, L ondon WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2009 by Daniel H. Pink All rights reserved. No part of this book may be re produced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violat ion of the author™s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada The author gratefully acknowledges permission to re print the following: Excerpt of fiSextfl from Horae Canonicae copyright © 1955 by W. H. Auden. Unless otherwise indicated, all illustrations in th is book are by Rob Ten Pas. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pink, Daniel H. Drive : the surprising truth about what motivates u s / Daniel H. Pink. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-101-15214-0 1. Motivation (Psychology). I. Title. BF503.P 153.1™534Šdc22 While the author has made every effort to provide a ccurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for chang es that occur after publication. Further, the publi sher does not have any control over and does not as sume any responsibility for author or third-party websites o r their content. http://us.penguingroup.com For Sophia, Eliza, and SaulŠthe surprising trio tha t motivates me INTRODUCTION The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci In the middle of the last century, two young scienti sts conducted experiments that should have changed the worldŠbut did not. Harry F. Harlow was a professor of psychology at th e University of Wisconsin who, in the 1940s, establ ished one of the world™s first laboratories for studying primate beh avior. One day in 1949, Harlow and two colleagues g athered eight rhesus monkeys for a two-week experiment on learning. The researchers devised a simple mechanical puzzle like the one pictured on the next page. Solving it required three steps: pul l out the vertical pin, undo the hook, and lift the hinged cover. Pretty easy for you and me, far more challenging for a thirteen-pou nd lab monkey. 5 de 81
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Harlow™s puzzle in the starting (left) and solved ( right) positions. The experimenters placed the puzzles in the monkeys ™ cages to observe how they reactedŠand to prepare t hem for tests of their problem-solving prowess at the end of the two weeks. But almost immediately, something strange h appened. Unbidden by any outside urging and unprompted by the experim enters, the monkeys began playing with the puzzles with focus, determination, and what looked like enjoyment. And in short order, they began figuring out how the con traptions worked. By the time Harlow tested the monkeys on days 13 and 1 4 of the experiment, the primates had become quite adept. They solved the puzzles frequently and quickly; two-thirds of t he time they cracked the code in less than sixty se conds. Now, this was a bit odd. Nobody had taught the monk eys how to remove the pin, slide the hook, and open the cover. Nobody had rewarded them with food, affection, or even qui et applause when they succeeded. And that ran count er to the accepted notions of how primatesŠincluding the bigger-brained , less hairy primates known as human beingsŠbehaved . Scientists then knew that two main drives powered b ehavior. The first was the biological drive. Humans and other animals ate to sate their hunger, drank to quench their thi rst, and copulated to satisfy their carnal urges. B ut that wasn™t happening here. fiSolution did not lead to food, water, or sex grati fication,fl Harlow reported. 1But the only other known drive also failed to expla in the monkeys™ peculiar behavior. If biological mo tivations came from within, this second drive came from withoutŠthe rewa rds and punishments the environment delivered for b ehaving in certain ways. This was certainly true for humans, who respo nded exquisitely to such external forces. If you pr omised to raise our pay, we™d work harder. If you held out the prospect of g etting an A on the test, we™d study longer. If you threatened to dock us for showing up late or for incorrectly completing a for m, we™d arrive on time and tick every box. But that didn™t account for the monkeys™ actions either. As Harlow wrote, and you c an almost hear him scratching his head, fiThe behavi or obtained in this investigation poses some interesting questions for motivation theory, since significant learning was a ttained and efficient performance maintained without resort to special or extrinsic incentives.fl What else could it be? To answer the question, Harlow offered a novel theo ryŠwhat amounted to a third drive: fiThe performance of the task,fl he said, fiprovided intrinsic reward.fl The monkeys solv ed the puzzles simply because they found it gratify ing to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own re ward. If this notion was radical, what happened next only deepened the confusion and controversy. Perhaps th is newly discovered driveŠHarlow eventually called it fiintrinsic motivat ionflŠwas real. But surely it was subordinate to the other two drives. If the monkeys were rewardedŠwith raisins!Šfor solving the puzzles, they™d no doubt perform even better. Y et when Harlow tested that approach, the monkeys actually made more errors and solved the puzzles less frequently. fiIntroduction of food in the present experiment,fl Harlow wrote, fiserved to d isrupt performance, a phenomenon not reported in th e literature.fl Now, this was really odd. In scientific terms, it was akin to rolling a steel ball down an inclined plane to measure its velocityŠonly to watch the ball float into the air i nstead. It suggested that our understanding of the gravitational pulls on our behavior was inadequateŠthat what we thought were fi xed laws had plenty of loopholes. Harlow emphasized the fistrength and persistencefl of the monkeys™ drive to complete the puzzles. Then he noted: It would appear that this drive . . . may be as bas ic and strong as the [other] drives. Furthermore, t here is some reason to believe that [it] can be as efficient in facilit ating learning. 2At the time, however, the prevailing two drives hel d a tight grip on scientific thinking. So Harlow so unded the alarm. He urged scientists to ficlose down large sections of o ur theoretical junkyardfl and offer fresher, more ac curate accounts of human behavior. 3 He warned that our explanation of why we did what we did was incomplete. He said that to truly unders tand the human condition, we had to take account of this thi rd drive. Then he pretty much dropped the whole idea. 6 de 81
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three and a half and four minutes, suggesting they found it at least somewhat interes ting. On the second day, during which Group A participant s were paid for each successful configuration and G roup B participants were not, the unpaid group behaved mos tly as they had during the first free-choice period . But the paid group suddenly got really interested in Soma puzzles. On average, the people in Group A spent more than five minutes messing wi th the puzzle, perhaps getting a head start on that th ird challenge or gearing up for the chance to earn some beer money when Deci returned. This makes intuitive sense, right? It™s c onsistent with what we believe about motivation: Re ward me and I™ll work harder. Yet what happened on the third day confirmed Deci™s own suspicions about the peculiar workings of moti vationŠand gently called into question a guiding premise of mo dern life. This time, Deci told the participants in Group A that there was only enough money to pay them for one day and that this third session would therefore be unpaid. Then things unfolded just as beforeŠtwo puzzles, followed by Deci™s interruption . During the ensuing eight-minute free-choice period, the subjects in the never-been-paid Group B actual ly played with the puzzle for a little longer than they had in previou s sessions. Maybe they were becoming ever more enga ged; maybe it was just a statistical quirk. But the subjects in Group A, w ho previously had been paid, responded differently. They now spent significantly less time playing with the puzzleŠnot only about two min utes less than during their paid session, but about a full minute less than in the first session when they ini tially encountered, and obviously enjoyed, the puzz les. In an echo of what Harlow discovered two decades ea rlier, Deci revealed that human motivation seemed t o operate by laws that ran counter to what most scientists and c itizens believed. From the office to the playing fi eld, we knew what got people going. RewardsŠespecially cold, hard cashŠinte nsified interest and enhanced performance. What Dec i found, and then confirmed in two additional studies he conduct ed shortly thereafter, was almost the opposite. fiWh en money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects los e intrinsic interest for the activity,fl he wrote. 5 Rewards can deliver a short-term boostŠjust as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears offŠand, worse, can reduce a person™s longer-term motivation to con tinue the project. Human beings, Deci said, have an fiinherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn.fl But this thi rd drive was more fragile than the other two; it ne eded the right environment to survive. fiOne who is interested in developing an d enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, emplo yees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards,fl he wrote in a f ollow-up paper. 6 Thus began what for Deci became a lifelong quest to rethink wh y we do what we doŠa pursuit that sometimes put him at odds with fellow psychologists, got him fired from a business school, and challenged the operating assumptions o f organizations everywhere. fiIt was controversial,fl Deci told me one spring mor ning forty years after the Soma experiments. fiNobod y was expecting rewards would have a negative effect.fl THIS IS A BOOK about motivation. I will show that m uch of what we believe about the subject just isn™t soŠand that the insights that Harlow and Deci began uncovering a fe w decades ago come much closer to the truth. The pr oblem is that most businesses haven™t caught up to this new understand ing of what motivates us. Too many organizationsŠnot just companies, but governments and nonprofits as wellŠstill operate fro m assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklo re than in science. They continue to pursue practic es such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures us ually don™t work and often do harm. Worse, these practices have infiltra ted our schools, where we ply our future workforce with iPods, cash, and pizza coupons to fiincentivizefl them to learn. Somet hing has gone wrong. The good news is that the solution stands before us Šin the work of a band of behavioral scientists who have carried on the pioneering efforts of Harlow and Deci and whose qui et work over the last half-century offers us a more dynamic view of human motivation. For too long, there™s been a mism atch between what science knows and what business d oes. The goal of this book is to repair that breach. Drive has three parts. Part One will look at the flaws i n our reward-and-punishment system and propose a ne w way to think about motivation. Chapter 1 will examine how the pr evailing view of motivation is becoming incompatibl e with many aspects of contemporary business and life. Chapter 2 will r eveal the seven reasons why carrot-and-stick extrin sic motivators often produce the opposite of what they set out to achiev e. (Following that is a short addendum, Chapter 2a, that shows the special circumstances when carrots and sticks actually can be effective.) Chapter 3 will introduce what I call fiType Ifl behavior, a way of thinking and an approach to business grounde d in the real science of human motivation and power ed by our third driveŠour innate need to direct our own lives, to le arn and create new things, and to do better by ours elves and our world. Part Two will examine the three elements of Type I behavior and show how individuals and organizations are using them to improve performance and deepen satisfaction. Chapte r 4 will explore autonomy, our desire to be self-di rected. Chapter 5 will look at mastery, our urge to get better and better at what we do. Chapter 6 will explore purpose, our yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves. Part Three, the Type I Toolkit, is a comprehensive set of resources to help you create settings in whi ch Type I behavior can flourish. Here you™ll find everything from dozens o f exercises to awaken motivation in yourself and ot hers, to discussion questions for your book club, to a supershort summa ry of Drive that will help you fake your way through a cocktai l party. And while this book is mostly about business, in this s ection I™ll offer some thoughts about how to apply these concepts to education and to our lives outside of work. But before we get down to all that, let™s begin wit h a thought experiment, one that requires going bac k in timeŠto the days when John Major was Britain™s prime minister, Barac k Obama was a skinny young law professor, Internet connections were dial-up, and a blackberry was still just a fruit. 8 de 81
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Part One A New Operating System CHAPTER 1 The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0 Imagine it™s 1995. You sit down with an economistŠan accomplished business school professor with a Ph.D. in economics. You say to her: fiI™ve got a crystal ball here that can peer fifteen years into the future. I™d like to test your forecasting powers.fl She™s skeptical, but she decides to humor you. fiI™m going to describe two new encyclopediasŠone jus t out, the other to be launched in a few years. You have to predict which will be more successful in 2010.fl fiBring it,fl she says. fiThe first encyclopedia comes from Microsoft. As yo u know, Microsoft is already a large and profitable company. And with this year™s introduction of Windows 95, it™s a bout to become an era-defining colossus. Microsoft will fund this encyclopedia. It will pay professional writers and editors to craft articles on thousands of topics. W ell-compensated managers will oversee the project to ensure it™s completed o n budget and on time. Then Microsoft will sell the encyclopedia on CD-ROMs and later online. fiThe second encyclopedia won™t come from a company. It will be created by tens of thousands of people who write and edit articles for fun. These hobbyists won™t need a ny special qualifications to participate. And nobod y will be paid a dollar or a euro or a yen to write or edit articles. Particip ants will have to contribute their laborŠsometimes twenty and thirty hours per weekŠfor free. The encyclopedia itself, which wi ll exist online, will also be freeŠno charge for an yone who wants to use it. fiNow,fl you say to the economist, fithink forward fif teen years. According to my crystal ball, in 2010, one of these encyclopedias will be the largest and most popular in the world and the other will be defunct. Which i s which?fl In 1995, I doubt you could have a found a single so ber economist anywhere on planet Earth who would no t have picked that first model as the success. Any other conclusion wo uld have been laughableŠcontrary to nearly every bus iness principle she taught her students. It would have been like asking a zoologist who would win a 200-meter footrace bet ween a cheetah and your brother-in-law. Not even close. Sure, that ragtag band of volunteers might produce something. But there was no way its product could c ompete with an offering from a powerful profit-driven company. The incentives were all wrong. Microsoft stood to gain from the success of its product; everyone involved in the other project knew from the outset that success would earn them nothing. Most important, Microsoft™s writers, editors, and managers were pai d. The other project™s contributors were not. In fa ct, it probably cost them money each time they performed free work instead of remunerative labor. The question was such a no-bra iner that our economist wouldn™t even have considered putting it on an exam for her MBA class. It was too easy. But you know how things turned out. On October 31, 2009, Microsoft pulled the plug on MSN Encarta , its disc and online encyclopedia, which had been on the market for sixteen years. Meanwhile, WikipediaŠthat second modelŠended up becoming the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world. Just eight years after i ts inception, Wikipedia had more than 13 million ar ticles in some 260 languages, including 3 million in English alone. 1What happened? The conventional view of human motiv ation has a very hard time explaining this result. THE TRIUMPH OF CARROTS AND STICKS ComputersŠwhether the giant mainframes in Deci™s exp eriments, the iMac on which I™m writing this senten ce, or the mobile phone chirping in your pocketŠall have operating sys tems. Beneath the surface of the hardware you touch and the programs you manipulate is a complex layer of software that contains the instructions, protocols, and suppositi ons that enable everything to function smoothly. Most of us don™t think much a bout operating systems. We notice them only when th ey start failingŠwhen the hardware and software they™re supposed to manag e grow too large and complicated for the current op erating system to handle. Then our computer starts crashing. We compl ain. And smart software developers, who™ve always b een tinkering with pieces of the program, sit down to write a fundamen tally better oneŠan upgrade. Societies also have operating systems. The laws, so cial customs, and economic arrangements that we enc ounter each day sit atop a layer of instructions, protocols, and suppos itions about how the world works. And much of our s ocietal operating system consists of a set of assumptions about human behavior. 9 de 81
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In our very early daysŠI mean very early days, say, fifty thousand years agoŠthe unde rlying assumption about human behavior was simple and true. We were trying to sur vive. From roaming the savannah to gather food to s crambling for the bushes when a saber-toothed tiger approached, that drive guided most of our behavior. Call this early operating system Motivation 1.0. It wasn™t especially elegant, nor w as it much different from those of rhesus monkeys, giant apes, or many other animals. But it served us nicely. It worked well. U ntil it didn™t. As humans formed more complex societies, bumping up against strangers and needing to cooperate in orde r to get things done, an operating system based purely on the biolo gical drive was inadequate. In fact, sometimes we n eeded ways to restrain this driveŠto prevent me from swiping your dinner a nd you from stealing my spouse. And so in a feat of remarkable cultural engineering, we slowly replaced what we ha d with a version more compatible with how we™d begu n working and living. At the core of this new and improved operating syst em was a revised and more accurate assumption: Huma ns are more than the sum of our biological urges. That first drive s till matteredŠno doubt about thatŠbut it didn™t full y account for who we are. We also had a second driveŠto seek reward and a void punishment more broadly. And it was from this insight that a new operating systemŠcall it Motivation 2.0Šarose. (Of co urse, other animals also respond to rewards and pun ishments, but only humans have proved able to channel this drive to de velop everything from contract law to convenience s tores.) Harnessing this second drive has been essential to economic progress around the world, especially duri ng the last two centuries. Consider the Industrial Revolution. Tech nological developmentsŠsteam engines, railroads, wid espread electricity Šplayed a crucial role in fostering the growth of in dustry. But so did less tangible innovationsŠin part icular, the work of an American engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor. I n the early 1900s, Taylor, who believed businesses were being run in an inefficient, haphazard way, invented what he cal led fiscientific management.fl His invention was a fo rm of fisoftwarefl expertly crafted to run atop the Motivation 2.0 pla tform. And it was widely and quickly adopted. Workers, this approach held, were like parts in a c omplicated machine. If they did the right work in t he right way at the right time, the machine would function smoothly. And to e nsure that happened, you simply rewarded the behavi or you sought and punished the behavior you discouraged. People would respond rationally to these external forcesŠthese extrinsic motivatorsŠand both they and the system itself would flourish. We tend to think that coal and oil have powered economic development. But in some sense, the engine of comme rce has been fueled equally by carrots and sticks. The Motivation 2.0 operating system has endured for a very long time. Indeed, it is so deeply embedded in our lives that most of us scarcely recognize that it exists. For a s long as any of us can remember, we™ve configured our organizations and constructed our lives around its bedrock assumption : The way to improve performance, increase producti vity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad . Despite its greater sophistication and higher aspir ations, Motivation 2.0 still wasn™t exactly ennobli ng. It suggested that, in the end, human beings aren™t much different from ho rsesŠthat the way to get us moving in the right dire ction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick. But w hat this operating system lacked in enlightenment, it made up for in effectiveness. It worked wellŠextremely well. Until it didn™t. As the twentieth century progressed, as economies g rew still more complex, and as the people in them h ad to deploy new, more sophisticated skills, the Motivation 2.0 appro ach encountered some resistance. In the 1950s, Abra ham Maslow, a former student of Harry Harlow™s at the University of Wisc onsin, developed the field of humanistic psychology , which questioned the idea that human behavior was purely the ratlike see king of positive stimuli and avoidance of negative stimuli. In 1960, MIT management professor Douglas McGregor imported some of Maslow™s ideas to the business world. McGregor challenged the presumption that humans are fundamentally inertŠthat absent external rewards and punishments, we wouldn ™t do much. People have other, higher drives, he said. And thes e drives could benefit businesses if managers and b usiness leaders respected them. Thanks in part to McGregor™s writin g, companies evolved a bit. Dress codes relaxed, sc hedules became more flexible. Many organizations looked for ways to gra nt employees greater autonomy and to help them grow . These refinements repaired some weaknesses, but they amounted to a mo dest improvement rather than a thorough upgradeŠMoti vation 2.1. And so this general approach remained intactŠbecause it was, after all, easy to understand, simple to m onitor, and straightforward to enforce. But in the first ten ye ars of this centuryŠa period of truly staggering und erachievement in business, technology, and social progressŠwe™ve discovered tha t this sturdy, old operating system doesn™t work ne arly as well. It crashesŠoften and unpredictably. It forces people to devise workarounds to bypass its flaws. Most of al l, it is proving incompatible with many aspects of contemporary busi ness. And if we examine those incompatibility probl ems closely, we™ll realize that modest updatesŠa patch here or thereŠwi ll not solve the problem. What we need is a full-sc ale upgrade. THREE INCOMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS Motivation 2.0 still serves some purposes well. It™s just deeply unreliable. Sometimes it works; many t imes it doesn™t. And understanding its defects will help determine which parts to keep and which to discard as we fashion a n upgrade. The glitches fall into three broad categories. Our current opera ting system has become far less compatible with, an d at times downright antagonistic to: how we organize what we do; how we think about what we do; and how we do what we do. How We Organize What We Do Go back to that encyclopedic showdown between Micro soft and Wikipedia. The assumptions at the heart of Motivation 2.0 suggest that such a result shouldn™t even be possib le. Wikipedia™s triumph seems to defy the laws of b ehavioral physics. Now, if this all-volunteer, all-amateur encyclopedi a were the only instance of its kind, we might dism iss it as an aberration, an exception that proves the rule. But it™s not. In stead, Wikipedia represents the most powerful new b usiness model of the 10 de 81
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twenty-first century: open source. Fire up your home computer, for example. When you v isit the Web to check the weather forecast or order some sneakers, you might be using Firefox, a free open-source Web browser created almost exclusively by volunteers ar ound the world. Unpaid laborers who give away their product? That c ouldn™t be sustainable. The incentives are all wron g. Yet Firefox now has more than 150 million users. Or walk into the IT department of a large company a nywhere in the world and ask for a tour. That compa ny™s corporate computer servers could well run on Linux, software devised by an army of unpaid programmers and availa ble for free. Linux now powers one in four corporate servers. Then ask an employee to explain how the company™s website wo rks. Humming beneath the site is probably Apache, free open-sour ce Web server software created and maintained by a far-flung global group of volunteers. Apache™s share of the corporate Web server market: 52 percent. In other words, companie s that typically rely on external rewards to manage their employees run some of their most important systems with products crea ted by nonemployees who don™t seem to need such rewards. And it™s not just the tens of thousands of software projects across the globe. Today you can find: ope n-source cookbooks; open-source textbooks; open-source car design; open -source medical research; open-source legal briefs; open-source stock photography; open-source prosthetics; open-source c redit unions; open-source cola; and for those for w hom soft drinks won™t suffice, open-source beer. This new way of organizing what we do doesn™t banis h extrinsic rewards. People in the open-source move ment haven™t taken vows of poverty. For many, participation in t hese projects can burnish their reputations and sha rpen their skills, which can enhance their earning power. Entrepreneurs have launched new, and sometimes lucrative, companies t o help organizations implement and maintain open-source software applica tions. But ultimately, open source depends on intrinsic mo tivation with the same ferocity that older business models rely on extrinsic motivation, as several scholars have show n. MIT management professor Karim Lakhani and Bosto n Consulting Group consultant Bob Wolf surveyed 684 open-source developers, mostly in North America and Europe, abo ut why they participated in these projects. Lakhani and Wolf un covered a range of motives, but they found fithat en joyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.fl 2 A large majority of programmers, the researchers disc overed, reported that they frequently reached the s tate of optimal challenge called fiflow.fl Likewise, three German economists wh o studied open-source projects around the world fou nd that what drives participants is fia set of predominantly intrinsic m otivesflŠin particular, fithe fun . . . of mastering t he challenge of a given software problemfl and the fidesire to give a gift to the programmer community.fl 3 Motivation 2.0 has little room for these sorts of impulses. What™s more, open source is only one way people are restructuring what they do along new organizationa l lines and atop different motivational ground. Let™s move from soft ware code to the legal code. The laws in most devel oped countries permit essentially two types of business organizationsŠprof it and nonprofit. One makes money, the other does g ood. And the most prominent member of that first category is the publ icly held corporationŠowned by shareholders and run by managers who are overseen by a board of directors. The managers and directors bear one overriding responsibility: t o maximize shareholder gain. Other types of business organizations steer b y the same rules of the road. In the United States, for instance, partnerships, S corporations, C corporations, limited liability c orporations, and other business configurations all aim toward a common end. The objective of those who run themŠpractically , legally, in some ways morallyŠis to maximize profi t. Let me give a rousing, heartfelt, and grateful chee r for these business forms and the farsighted count ries that enable their citizens to create them. Without them, our lives wo uld be infinitely less prosperous, less healthy, an d less happy. But in the last few years, several people around the world have bee n changing the recipe and cooking up new varieties of business organizations. For example, in April 2008, Vermont became the firs t U.S. state to allow a new type of business called the filow-profit limited liability corporation.fl Dubbed an L3C, this entity is a corporationŠbut not as we typically th ink of it. As one report explained, an L3C fioperate[s] like a for-profit bus iness generating at least modest profits, but its p rimary aim [is] to offer significant social benefits.fl Three other U.S. stat es have followed Vermont™s lead. 4 An L3C in North Carolina, for instance, is buying abandoned furniture factories in the state, updating them with green technology, and leasing th em back to beleaguered furniture manufacturers at a low rate. The venture hopes to make money, but its real purpose is to hel p revitalize a struggling region. Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has begun creating what he calls fisocial businesses .fl These are companies that raise capital, develop products, and sell them in an open market but do so in the servi ce of a larger social missionŠor as he puts it, fiwith the profit-maximizat ion principle replaced by the social-benefit princi ple.fl The Fourth Sector Network in the United States and Denmark is promoti ng fithe for-benefit organizationflŠa hybrid that it says represents a new category of organization that is both economically self-sustaining and animated by a public purpose. O ne example: Mozilla, the entity that gave us Firefox, is organized as a fifor-benefitfl organization. And three U.S. entrepre neurs have invented the fiB Corporation,fl a designation that requires companies to amend their bylaws so that the incentives favor long-term value and social impact instead of short-term economic gain. 5Neither open-source production nor previously unima gined finot only for profitfl businesses are yet the norm, of course. And they won™t consign the public corporation to the tr ash heap. But their emergence tells us something im portant about where we™re heading. fiThere™s a big movement out there th at is not yet recognized as a movement,fl a lawyer w ho specializes in for-benefit organizations told The New York Times. 6 One reason could be that traditional businesses ar e profit maximizers, which square perfectly with Motivation 2.0. These n ew entities are purpose maximizers Šwhich are unsuited to this older operating system because they flout its very princi ples. How We Think About What We Do 11 de 81
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