Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us pdfdrive com

SETH GODIN, Author of Tribes, Purple Cow, and the world’s most popular marketing

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With these unorthodox ideas percolating in his mind, this unlikely corporate heretic established a new policy: 3M’s technical staff could spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects of their choosing. The initiative felt so counter to the mores of Motivation 2.0, so seemingly illicit, that inside the company, it was known as the “bootlegging policy.” And yet it worked. These walled gardens of autonomy soon became fertile fields for a harvest of innovations— including Post-it notes. Scientist Art Fry came up with his idea for the ubiquitous stickie not in one of his regular assignments, but during his 15 percent time.

Today, Post-its are a monumental business: 3M offers more than six hundred Post-it products in more than one hundred countries. (And their cultural impact might be even greater. Consider: But for McKnight’s early push for autonomy, we’d be living in a world without any small yellow squares stuck to our computer monitors. A chilling thought indeed.) According to 3M’s former head of research and development, most of the inventions that the company relies on even today emerged from those periods of bootlegging and experimental

doodling.⁸

McKnight’s innovation remains in place at 3M. But only a surprisingly small number of other companies have moved in this direction, despite its proven results. The best-known company to embrace it is Google, which has long encouraged engineers to spend one day a week working on a side project. Some Googlers use their “20 percent time” to fix an existing product, but most use it to develop something entirely new. Of course, Google doesn’t sign away the intellectual property rights to what’s created during that 20 percent—which is wise. In a typical year, more than half of Google’s new offerings are birthed during this period of pure autonomy. For example, scientist Krishna Bharat, frustrated by how difficult it was to find news stories online, created Google News in his 20 percent time. The site now receives millions of visitors every day. Former Google engineer Paul Bucheit created Gmail, now one of the world’s most popular e-mail programs, as his 20 percent project. Many other Google products share similar creation stories—among them Orkut (Google’s social networking software), Google Talk (its instant message application), Google Sky (which allows astronomically inclined users to browse pictures of the universe), and Google Translate (its translation software for mobile devices). As Google engineer Alec Proudfoot, whose own 20 percent project aimed at boosting the efficiency of hybrid cars, put it in a television interview: “Just about

all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time.”⁹

Back at Atlassian, the experiment in 20 percent time seemed to work. In what turned out to be a yearlong trial, developers launched forty-eight new projects. So in 2009, Cannon-Brookes decided to make this dose of task autonomy a permanent feature of Atlassian work life. The decision didn’t sit well with everyone. By Cannon-Brookes’s back-of-the-blog calculations, seventy engineers, spending 20 percent of their time over just a six-month period, amounted to an investment of $1 million. The company’s chief financial officer was aghast. Some project managers—despite Atlassian’s forward-thinking ways, the company still uses the m-word—weren’t happy, because it meant ceding

some of their control over employees. When a few wanted to track employees’ time to make sure they didn’t abuse the privilege, Cannon-Brookes said no. “That was too controlling. I wanted to back our engineers and take it on faith that they’ll do good things.” Besides, he says, “People are way more efficient about 20 percent time than regular work time. They say, ‘I’m not going to [expletive]ing do anything like read newsfeeds or do Facebook.’ ”

These days, when a finance guy, pearls of sweat rolling from his green eyeshades, objects to the price tag, Cannon-Brookes has a ready response: “I show him a long list of things we’ve delivered. I show him that we have zero turnover in engineering. And I show him that we have highly motivated engineers who are always trying to perfect and improve our product.”

Autonomy over task is one of the essential aspects of the Motivation 3.0 approach to work. And it isn’t reserved only for technology companies. At Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., for instance, many nurses have the freedom to conduct their own research projects, which in turn have

changed a number of the hospital’s programs and policies.¹⁰ Autonomy measures can work in a range of fields—and offer a promising source for innovations and even institutional reforms.

Initiatives like FedEx Days and sanctioned side projects aren’t always easy to execute in the day-to-day maw of serving customers, shipping products, and solving problems. But they’re becoming urgent in an economy that demands nonroutine, creative, conceptual abilities—as any artist or designer would agree. Autonomy over task has long been critical to their ability to create. And good leaders (as opposed to competent “managers”) understand this in their bones.

Case in point: George Nelson, who was the design director at Her-man Miller, the iconic American furniture maker, for a few decades. He once laid down five simple tenets that he believed led to great design. One of these principles could serve as a rallying cry for Type I’s ethic of autonomy over task: “You decide what you will make.”

Time

Ever wonder why lawyers, as a group, are so miserable? Some social scientists have—and they’ve offered three explanations. One involves pessimism. Being pessimistic is almost always a recipe for low levels of what psychologists call “subjective well-being.” It’s also a detriment in most professions. But as Martin

Seligman has written, “There is one glaring exception: pessimists do better at law.” In other words, an attitude that makes someone less happy as a human being actually makes her more effective as a lawyer.¹¹ A second reason: Most other enterprises are positive-sum. If I sell you something you want and enjoy,

we’re both better off. Law, by contrast, is often (though not always) a zero-sum

game: Because somebody wins, somebody else must lose.

But the third reason might offer the best explanation of all—and help us understand why so few attorneys exemplify Type I behavior. Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little “decision latitude.” Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it’s another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don’t have much of it. The deprivation starts early. A 2007 study of two American law schools found that over the three-year period in school, students’ overall well-being plummeted—in large part because their need for autonomy was thwarted. But students who had greater autonomy over their course selection, their assignments, and their relations with professors showed

far less steep declines and actually posted better grades and bar exam scores.¹²

“Nothing is more important to my success than controlling my schedule. I’m most creative from five to nine A.M. If I had a boss or coworkers, they would ruin my best hours one way or another.”