“Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” Dan Pink

After viewing Dan Pink’s “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, I have a new knowledge on the brilliant idea of the purpose motive. In his short film he explains how incentives given to employees as a profit motive has led to the finding of the astonishing idea of the “purpose motive”. This purpose motive is the new and better work ethic characteristic to have in the work field. The examples of giving a first, second, third place monetary reward to the top three performers seemed like a brilliant task however as Dan has learned this type of incentive theory did not work for conceptual thinking. In my opinion and from what I have learned in class I feel that this type of profit motive that involves monetary rewards is a linear type of thinking. One must be told the task, achieve the task, and receive the reward resulting in a linear system. This experiment was then taken to another part of the world where the participants actually needed the money and would result in better performance. The experiment was taken to Madurai, a rural part of India where money was a drastic necessity and found that again higher incentives led to worse behavior and really did not challenge a person’s thinking or talent. So at the end of the day Dan Pink found that in order to have better results corporations should pay their workers a salary where people do not have to worry about money and they will spend their time and effort to produce the highest innovations throughout the work field. He found that autonomy and mastery among individuals in a work place are two great qualities to have when top innovations are needed. Autonomy is the desire to be self directed, and is better for producing engagement within a work place. Along with autonomy, people also need mastery the urge to get better at something for their specific talent within their career field. There is a software company named Atlassian, overseas that once a month it allows their staff to get together, without any specific task given by the company and they have seen that with this their staff emerges with better innovations and ideas for the company. This is a perfect example of the purpose motive, we can see that these skilled professionals when given the time and ability will freely produce the best results due to a purpose motive rather than a profit motive. Within the profit motive when it becomes unhitched from a purpose things usually go bad and poor results. If society starts treating people as people and look at the science that makes people better off which we see here as the “purpose motive” then we will start to have a better world.