Drive by Dan Pink

Drive
A review of Daniel H. Pink’s Book
By Peter A Hunter

Managers, recognising that Command and Control Management is no longer working, have been looking for the “something” to give to their workforces that will allow them to perform.

Their greatest mistake is assuming they know what it is that their workforces need.

All that managers really have to know is how to give their workforces what they already want.
All they really have to figure out is what that is.

Daniel Pink in his book “Drive” tells us what the workforce already want, and he also shows us how to give it to them.

There is a growing awareness today of the destructive nature of traditional management practices, usually called “Command and Control Management.”

Our workforces have long been aware of these problems but nobody ever listened to them.
What we are seeing today is an increasing volume of academic endeavour focussed on making management aware of those same problems because, as Dan Pink says;

“Management is not the solution, Management is the problem.”

Unfortunately management are not aware of the problems they create so they have no reason to look for solutions.

Daniel Pink, in this book “Drive,” not only very clearly and elegantly brings the problems to the attention of the reader but has also gone into some detail laying out many solutions that can be mixed and matched to suit individual circumstances/organisations.

All that we need to happen now is that the right people read this book, understand from Daniel Pinks analysis that they are the problem, and that they continue to read it as far as the solutions.

The book is divided into three separate parts;

The first takes the reader from a current position, perhaps of vague discomfort, or a mild annoyance that not everything seems to fit.
From this position Dan Pink takes us on a journey that starts, in time, in the late forties through an accumulation of seventy years of academic endeavour, largely disregarded because it did not fit with accepted notions of management and behaviour.

Dan summarises this section neatly with his “Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrot and Sticks.” Which he says can:
· extinguish Intrinsic motivation
· diminish performance
· crush creativity
· Crowd out good behaviour
· encourage cheating, shortcuts and unethical behaviour
· become addictive
· foster short term thinking

Together these flaws sum up the conditions that a conventional “Command and Control Management,” approach will create.

Dan quotes Richard Ryan who said that we all have the “Drive,” that is the title of the book, and that it is a part of our humanity, but whether it emerges, or not, in our lives depends on whether the conditions that surround us will support it.

In our working lives “Drive” tells us that these conditions are created by those who manage us.

What the first section of the book does is expose the management behaviour that crushes our “Drive” and leaves a potentially able and imaginative workforce unable to do original work, be creative or think for themselves.

Many managers will read this first section and genuinely believe that it does not apply to them.
These are the people who believe that the world begins and ends with them, who believe that without them nothing will happen and that other people exist to be used.

These are the people whose behaviour Dan Pink likens to coal.
“Cheap, easy, and efficient to resource but polluting and ultimately finite.”

The type of behaviour that must replace this antediluvian management model, Daniel compares to the Sun; “Clean energy that is inexpensive, safe to use and endlessly renewable.”

The book, having brought us to an understanding of the historical support for “Drive,” examines in more depth what this Drive actually consists of, how we can tap its potential and finally a whole host of tools that we can use on Monday morning to start to release the “Drive” that exists inside every single member of our workforce.

Daniel H. Pink with his book “Drive” has captured what generations of managers have never felt the need to acknowledge, that every single member of the workforce has experience, imagination and “Drive.”

The time will shortly be upon us when an organisation that has not released the “Drive” of it own workforce will not be able to compete in the same marketplace as those who have.

Those who have, will likely have read this book.

Peter A Hunter
www.breakingthemould.co.uk

Maverick, Ricardo Semler.

The book “Maverick” by Ricardo Semler is a narrative about a company identifying the need for a transformational change then telling the story of how that change was brought about.

The example however falls short of being a paradigm on a number of fronts.

Ricardo Semler had the right idea and the right goal but went about it the wrong way.

The book is an eight year litany of confrontation, bloody noses and sackings as Ricardo tried to force his employees to change.

He did not have the best people at the start, he had normal people.
His workforce were exactly the same as any other workforce on the planet, they were average people, but they were all individuals.

He inherited the company from his father; who was a traditional authoritarian boss. He demanded that it was done his way or the highway, and had no idea how destructive his uncompromising Command and Control style of management was.

His workforce was average and produced an average performance.

Ricardo's vision was that each employee was potentially exceptional but that it was the working environment they were kept in that prevented them from being exceptional.

Ricardo's' vision was to create the working environment that would allow his employees to be as good as they could be.

This involved getting the managers out of the way to stop them interfering with the ability of the workforce to perform and to give control of their lives back to the workforce.

The company in those eight years grew over ten times but the cost was the replacement of almost every single member of the management team.

The reason for this was that although the change was the right change, it was being driven by Ricardo, from the top down.

This made the workers and the middle management resist what was happening because they were being told what they had to do.

When you tell a human being what to do, whatever it is, the act of telling automatically generates resistance to whatever it was they were told to do.

It is not “What” they were being told that caused the resistance it was just “Being Told.”

At the end of eight years the employees were the same individuals but the environment that had been created for them to work in had allowed them to engage. That in turn allowed them to be exceptional and to produce exceptional performance.

Today we recognise the problem of top down driven change that Ricardo could not avoid.

It lost Ricardo his whole management team and eight years of superhuman effort to drive through his changes.

Today we can see how, by allowing change to come from the bottom up, we not only get the right change but we also avoid the resistance that the “Top Down” driven solution creates.

Ricardo Semler did his best with what he had.

Now we know better.

No matter how right the change being proposed, if it is driven from the top down it will create the resistance that will cause it to fail.

Peter A Hunter
www.breakingthemould.co.uk