Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Then We Came to the End BY JOSHUA FERRIS

have realized that creating flow-friendly environments that help people move toward mastery can increase productivity and satisfaction at work.4

“As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies,”

“The goals of management are usually described in words like ‘efficiency,’ ‘advantage,’ ‘value,’ ‘superiority,’ ‘focus,’ and ‘differentiation.’ Important as these objectives are, they lack the power to rouse human hearts.” Business leaders, he says, “must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as hon

Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.

Meantime, while you’re investigating Montessori, check out two other approaches to learning that also promote Type I behavior: the Reggio Emilia philosophy for the education of young children and the Waldorf schools. For more information, visit these websites: www.montessori-ami.org, www.montessori.org, www.amshq.org, www.reggioalliance.org, and ww

Kimley-Horn and Associates, a civil engineering firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, has established a reward system that gets the Type I stamp of approval: At any point, without asking permission, anyone in the company can award a $50 bonus to any of her colleagues. “It works because it’s real-time, and it’s not handed down from any management,” the f

Of course, because most workplaces still reverberate with the assumptions of the old operating system, transitioning to autonomy won’t—often can’t—happen in one fell swoop. If we pluck people out of controlling environments, when they’ve known nothing else, and plop them in a ROWE or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they’ll struggle. Organizat

3. IF YOU USE PERFORMANCE METRICS, MAKE THEM WIDE-RANGING, RELEVANT, AND HARD TO GAME Imagine you’re a product manager and your pay depends largely on reaching a particular sales goal for the next quarter. If you’re smart, or if you’ve got a family to feed, you’re going to try mightily to hit that number. You probably won’t concern yourself much with