Daniel Pink

As a kid, did you ever slip behind a store counter and imagine that you worked at the place? Where? When you first began to consider a career or potential fields of interest, what came to mind?

Though my own work life started at age fifteen, bagging groceries — within a year, I’d move up the food chain, as it were, for a decade-long tenure in restaurants — I can’t recall thinking much about a prospective career until freshman year of college, when I Scotch-taped something I’d read to the side of my computer.

Generations come and go but it makes no difference. Everything is unutterably weary and tiresome. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied…. So I saw that there is nothing better for men than that they should be happy in their work, for that is what they are here for, and no one can bring them back to life to enjoy what will be in the future, so let them enjoy it now. —Ecclesiastes

Lest you confuse the youthful me for some Biblical scholar, understand that I found the quote in the liner notes of a John Cougar Mellencamp CD.

Apparently at eighteen I feared a lifetime of workaday, indentured servitude. Because I was reading a lot of Vonnegut at the time? The source lies deeper, I suspect. One of my earliest memories harks back to the first day of elementary school, and the distinct sense that my life would never be quite so free again. Doom, pinned to a child like mittens. True, my father wore a suit and tie to the office virtually every day of his working life — and I’ve never been a big fan of dress-up — but he seemed happy enough in his jobs, certainly happy in the life that they had provided for our family, as far as I could tell.

Undoubtedly, Daniel Pink would stand by the idea that “there is nothing better for men [and women] than that they should be happy in their work.” The bestselling author of A Whole New Mind (and former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore) stopped by the studio to discuss Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. (More of our conversation will be posted in weeks ahead.)

Here’s a taste of Drive:

Too many organizations — not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well — still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. They continue to pursue practices such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures usually don’t work and often do harm. Worse, these practices have infiltrated our schools, where we ply our future workforce with iPods, cash, and pizza coupons to “incentivize” them to learn. Something has gone wrong.

The good news is that the solution stands before us — in the work of a band of behavioral scientists who have carried on the pioneering efforts of [Harry] Harlow and [Edward] Deci and whose quiet work over the last half-century offers us a more dynamic view of human motivation. For too long, there’s been a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. The goal of this book is to repair that breach.