Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Drive is about intrinisic motivation or self motivation. The drives which lead us to excel; autonomy, purpose, and mastery. It is about how these drives are becoming more prevalent in the modern workplace. White collar work is going through the same route as blue collar work. It is being outsourced, homesourced, and automated. The creative aspects of white collar work are what survives. Daniel H. Pink is trying to counter current management theory which is often inadequate to deal with modern workplaces. He argues this is one of the reasons there has been so much economic uphieval.

He argues for an end to a focus on a rote work environment with strong fixed hours, routine work, and incentive plans. He also attacks carrot and stick management styles. In his view, there should be solid wages, more autonomy for workers, greater learning opportunities, and a focus on more than just profits.

Some of the changes in work which he describes are the ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) created by Best Buy where scheduling becomes very flexible and Google's focus on giving its engineers 20% of their time to work on projects of their own design.

He also introduces us to psychological theories of motivation that are focused on what goes on inside people. He describes how optimal experiences and performance at work are not necessarily tied to incentives, but have a lot to do with the environment in the workplace. Two people he focuses on are Edward L. Deci and Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.

Sometimes, I think Daniel H. Pink draws too much from mainstream management theorists to make his point. Peter F. Drucker, Gary Hamel, and Jim Collins are all very standard business leaders. It seems like he is often making points using people who have a different management style than the one he is proposing.

I liked his list of recommended reading. I plan on reading Infinite Games A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse. I have already read Talent Is Overrated What Really Separates World Class Performers From Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin.

This book would be good for people whose work is autonomous; artists, writers, programmers, and other creatives. I saw the book mentioned on Tobias Buckell's blog who is a science fiction writer. It also might be helpful for people who have to manage in an increasingly creative work environment.

Daily Thoughts 8/31/2009

This picture was taken by David M. Alexander in the early 1980s on Jack Vance's boat in San Francisco Bay. Alexander has hereby released his copyright to the picture and has placed it in the public domain to be used for any purpose and by anyone who wants to use it, as long as he is credited as being the photographer. Hayford Peirce 20:16, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Daily Thoughts 8/31/2009

This morning I was at the mechanics for my car inspection which passed. I sat in the waiting room and finished reading The Management Myth and The Practice of Management. I even had a chance to write the rough drafts on my thoughts on these two books. The waiting room had coffee, but no donuts. I guess they are trying to save money.

The Management Myth Why The Experts Keep Getting It Wrong by Matthew Stewart.

Matthew Stewart has a Ph.D. in philosophy. This is both the story of how he became a business consultant and a critique of the practice of business management. Mr. Stewart uses his background to attack the foundations of management theory initially focusing on Frederick W. Taylor and Elton Mayo, both who are considered to be cornerstones of the concept of "scientific management." He does not critique Edward Deming or Peter Drucker, however.

The book can be funny, pointed, and acerbic. He has quite a bit of bile for consulting. He makes some very irreverent claims; the moment a consultant says the word strategy you start paying money and the real purpose of consulting is to do the things which a company cannot do by itself but knows needs to be done. There are points where the book became hard to read because there was so much angst.

We learn about hunting whales or clients flush with cash. Simple principles like the Pareto or the 80/20 Principle allow consultants to create self evident truths they can charge for. The world of consulting that Matthew Stewart describes is one of excessive pay, venality, and a focus on short term business gains above all else.

The book attacks many of the accepted ideas in business. He points out most business gurus rely on past data from successful companies to make their points, there is a utopian streak in the idea that workers will accept lower pay and higher performance, and points out numbers often don't predict the future.

If you can take a lot of angst, black humor, and a story of greed and lawyers you may like this book. Matthew Stewart ultimately successfully sued his employer for not paying him to be let go from his consulting practice. If you also want a very pointed attack on the underlying assumption that business management is reasonable and an MBA (Masters in Business Administration) is useful read this book. It pricks and deflates many assumptions.

The Practice of Management by Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker claims to be the father of modern management practice. When reading his books, his ideas come across as being authoritative and sensible. They also seem more philosophical to me than anything else. A lot of his thoughts are focused on ethics. They also seem to have become the standard practice in many modern corporations. I am not sure this is completely a good thing. If you read books on Japanese lean manufacturing and Edward Deming's quality circles, they are very different than what Mr. Drucker is saying.

You can quote what Peter Drucker is saying very easily, he is a wonderful communicator. Some quotes are "In hiring a worker one always hires the whole man," and "Whatever the manager does he does through making decisions." These quotes have a nice feeling to them.

Peter Drucker focuses on iconic American companies that were very successful in his time, General Motors, Ford, IBM, and Sears. Now, General Motors and Sears are not doing so well, but they were excellent at that time in history. The book shows how things change. As ideas are adopted they are built on further.

We learn about the place for the professional in the scheme of management as well as the worker and manager. We learn a lot of truisms like managers must manage. There is little that can be directly refuted. There is also a slightly utopian streak. People should work at peak performance and money is not the best motivator for employees. These are common beliefs held by many managers.

If you want to understand many of the ideas behind management practice read Peter Drucker. You may not agree with it, but it seems to set a standard for business practice across industries.

I spent quite a bit of time reading both of these books. They are often quite insightful. A lot of it is just learning the language which is being spoken. I think sometimes when you read this material, it helps clarify what people are saying. There is a professional language attached to business administration and public administration degrees which often uses coded meanings which are not always apparent to people who are line workers or professionals.

I spent some time this evening reading a bit of Graceling by Kristin Cashore. I also have the novel, Fire by Kristin Cashore on hold. Both of these are young adult fantasy novels.

Daily Thoughts 8/11/2009 ( Keeping Customers )

Front door of Brooklyn Public Library at sunset June 3 2008. From Wikimedia.

Daily Thoughts 8/11/2009

Today has been another quiet steady day. I started weeding the 800s which is the literature section and made sure the older books were removed from the new arrivals section. I took some time to read some more of Keeping Customers.

I am considering buying all of Charlaine Harris's mass market horror paperbacks. They are on both the Locus Magazine bestseller list and the Publishers Weekly bestseller list.

I spent some time looking through our purchase alerts for items with a lot of hold requests. I picked out some large print items that have multiple holds and a few fiction titles.

I read some more of Keeping Customers on the train. I find this book fascinating because of the way language is used. There is a language that is almost nonsensical which surrounds business management and consulting. Staple yourself to the customer, go to the war room, and look at the workflow charts to help determine the way to achieve TQC (Total Quality Control). It has this rhythm to it which at the same time shows command as well as shows wild confusion. I can understand how this kind of language encourages excess and highly risky decisions. At the same time it is both the language of highly successful companies like General Electric and at the other extreme Enron.

For me, some of it is like reading Alice In Wonderland. A lot of the business management books make absolutely no sense, especially from the perspective from someone in the nonprofit sector working to help other people. There is an incredible drive to profit. At the same time it has this really motivating, energizing quality about being goal driven. There are some books on nonprofit management, but not that many. For example, Peter Drucker has a few books like Managing The Nonprofit Organization on nonprofits, but is mostly focused on corporations. So what happens is people who work in nonprofits often generalize reading from the for profit sector to the nonprofit and government sector.

How do you generalize ideas from books like Keeping Customers into a nonprofit or government setting. You can take some ideas, but most things are simply not applicable. It is useful insofar as helping people find material to read who are in a business setting. How do I even judge or rate the ideas in this book? I am not sure I can or should. I could review it, but there are parts of it that I don't understand. It is very interesting reading. Some of the parts that are most interesting are the parts that are least applicable. I find it intellectually stimulating.

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie came in for me to read. I think this is the book I will read next. Our library is a Carnegie building. He donated the money to build many libraries throughout the United States. He also was a steel magnate. I am hoping it will give me some insights into why he gave money to have so many libraries built.

Good To Great By Jim Collins

Good To Great Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't By Jim Collins

This book is about how companies go from being good companies to companies that create long term sustained great performance. The book identifies eleven publicly traded companies from the Fortune 500 that went from barely beating the market to having continuous returns of at least twice the market for stockholders. I am not sure how this applies to libraries, but the book attempts to define a set of principles on making a company great.

The message in this book was easy to identify with. There are no complex strategies, flashy leadership secrets, or special financial techniques. This book is about how to inspire discipline, find a consistent simple purpose, create continuous incremental change, choose the right technologies, and bring very focused leadership on board.

One of the first things that Jim Collins writes is that it is impossible to implement any sustainable strategy without first bringing the right people on board. He also writes that it is as important to choose what not to do as what to do.

The book has a number of metaphors sprinkled throughout. One of them is the Stockdale Paradox: be brutally honest and at the same time know you will prevail. For discipline, there is the metaphor of rinsing your cottage to remove all the extra fat. This was done by a champion triathlete.

Most of the examples in this book are very concrete. Philip Morris introduced flip top boxes for cigarettes, Nucor introduced continuous slab casting, and Kroger was the first to experiment with scanners in supermarkets. These are all examples of introducing the right products and technology to gain market advantage.

My favorite metaphor in the book is the flywheel metaphor. Change happens not because of big fantasy initiatives, but because of continuous pressure. A flywheel speeds up because of continous sustained momentum. I like to think of the same idea with pushing an iceberg where it is very slow to move, but becomes very hard to stop once it is in motion.

The book contains no photographs. There are a few black and white charts that are easy to understand. Also, there is an index, bibliographic notes, and a detailed set of appendices explaining how the research on the companies being written about was done.

I read the companion monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer as well. The monograph is very short, 35 pages and distills the essence of the larger book focusing on nonprofits and government agencies. A few of the organizations covered are the New York Police Department, the Girl Scouts, and the Cleveland Orchestra. There are a number of metrics on how to measure greatness in social sector companies. This is worth reading before you read the larger book.

There's No Elevator to the Top by Umesh Ramakrishnan

There's No Elevator to the Top A Leading Headhunter Shares the Advancement Strategies of the World's Most Successful Executives by Umesh Ramakrishnan Vice Chairman of CTPartners

This book is about the process of becoming a successful CEO. The book is international in scope. It gets stories and anecdotes from CEOs from all over the world; Steve Reinemunde of Pepsico, Lucas Chow of MediaCorp Group, Nadia Zaal of Al Barari, Javier Gutierrez of Ecopetrol, and many other international CEOs.

The book takes the view that we live in an international world. It is necessary for a CEO to travel and live in the countries which they operate in. Mr. Ramakrishnan calls the search for talent, worldsourcing.

Unlike most books on CEOs, there are very nice sections on family, interests, and health. It is suggested that regular sleep, exercise, and strong family support are necessary to run a company. It is very easy to burnout in the position as chief. People should have at least two outside interests. This can be as simple as reading and golf.

There are a lot of tips on networking and advancing ones career. The point of networking in this book is not to advance ones career but to get more done on the job. People who network to be more effective on their current job are more likely to have their contacts help them. It is not good to be too comfortable in a job. It is as important to make lateral moves inside a company as it is to move upward. Manage up, down, and sideways or you will never move up inside a company.

There are also ideas on how to succeed as CEO. You are not #1, the company is. When you reach the top, you cannot rest, your job is to improve the place you work for.

On a personal level, this book made me realize that there are always sacrifices in time, family, and committments when you move up in position in any job. More responsibility brings more stress and requires you to pay closer attention to your health and family. At the same time, this book gave me some ideas on how to better manage my own career. I found the book both useful and entertaining.

Umesh Ramakrishnan is the Vice Chairman of CT Partners, a global executive recruitment firm that recruits CEOs, directors, and senior management positions. This book has a website at http://noelevatortothetop.com/