Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us pdfdrive com

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 the quarter after that or the health of the company or whether the firm is investing enough in research and development. And if you’re nervous, you might cut corners to reach your quarterly goal.

Now imagine you’re a product manager and your pay is determined by these factors: your sales for the next quarter; your sales in the current year; the company’s revenue and profit in the next two years; levels of satisfaction among your customers; ideas for new products; and evaluations of your coworkers. If you’re smart, you’ll probably try to sell your product, serve your customers, help your teammates, and, well, do good work. When metrics are varied, they’re harder to finagle.

In addition, the gain for reaching the metrics shouldn’t be too large. When the payoff for reaching targets is modest, rather than massive, it’s less likely to narrow people’s focus or encourage them to take the low road.

To be sure, finding the right mix of metrics is difficult and will vary considerably across organizations. And some people will inevitably find a way to game even the most carefully calibrated system. But using a variety of measures that reflect the totality of great work can transform often counterproductive “if-then” rewards into less combustible “now that” rewards.

Type I for Parents and Educators: Nine Ideas for Helping Our Kids All kids start out as curious, self- directed Type I’s. But many of them end up as disengaged, compliant Type X’s. What’s going on? Maybe the problem is us—the adults who are running schools and heading families. If we want to equip young people for the new world of work—and, more important, if we want them to lead satisfying lives—we need to break Motivation 2.0’s grip on education and parenting.
Unfortunately, as with business, there’s a mismatch between what science knows and what schools do. Science knows (and you do, too, if you read Chapter

2. 
   that if you promise a preschooler a fancy certificate for drawing a picture, that child will likely draw a picture for you—and then lose further interest in drawing. Yet in the face of this evidence—and as the world economy demands more nonroutine, creative, conceptual abilities—too many schools are moving in the wrong direction. They’re redoubling their emphasis on routines, right answers, and standardization. And they’re hauling out a wagon full of “if-then” rewards—pizza for reading books, iPods for showing up to class, cash for good test scores. We’re bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement.
   

We can do better. And we should. If we want to raise Type I kids, at school and at home, we need to help them move toward autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Here are nine ways to start the journey.