Overview
Offering his outstanding work to the world, the author of “Drive”, Daniel Pink, aimed to help every reader find the essence of life and realize one’s inner potential to become successful, happy, needed, self-sufficient, and find real purpose in life. The book is organized into three parts each making an overview of an important aspect of motivation and self-realization.
The first part entitled “A New Operating System” consists of three chapters. This part has addressed the right and wrong strategies of motivation along with the explanation of the factors that impact the effectiveness of motivation. In this section, Pink shares his first revelation that “Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement” (Pink, 2011, p. 27). From this statement, the long-implemented approach of control has a quite low effective output of mere compliance, while autonomy that goes hand in hand with the right motivation allows shifting to the principally new level of engagement.
The second part “The Three Elements” also includes three chapters that discuss the key self-realization matters related to autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The main idea of this section is well described in the following quotation that can be found in it, “human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another, and when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives” (Pink, 2011, p. 79).
The final part of the book is entitled “The Type I Toolkit”. This section of the book makes an observation of scientific facts providing that business owners should readdress their approach to employee motivation and doing business in general. The main argument of this part amounts to the essence of the following statement, “within organizations, people need to have a purpose: In goals that use the profit to reach purpose; in words that emphasize more than self-interest; and in policies that allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms” (Pink, 2011, p. 223).
Purpose
Pink’s purpose is to challenge approaches to doing business that exists in the majority of businesses nowadays. The author is confident that the traditional idea that providing rewards and punishment to workers to induce their actions is outdated and low effective, and moreover, this approach appears to be the cause of the poor performance of many businesses around the world. The scholar attempts to convince the wide public that the time for changes has come.
He encourages business owners to revaluate the olden strategies of employee motivation, and shift to the new approaches. The intended audience is then the business audience including business owners, CEOs, HR managers, and individual employees on their own.
Reference
Pink, D. (2011). Drive. New York, NI: Riverhead Books.