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Five Questions on Motivation with Daniel Pink

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Daniel Pink is one of the leading business thinkers of our era. One of his best books is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. In it, he presents the case for managing people from intrinsic motivation rather than chiefly extrinsic motivation. It is a life-changing paradigm.

I remember learning about the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation way back in middle school, so I still find it astonishing that so many companies do not manage this way. As Pink points out, much business practice has not caught up with what science has known for decades. But there are many businesses that do understand these things, and as a result they are thriving.

In a recent interview, Pink talks more about what factors that lead to motivation in our work. Here is a short description:

In the years since publishing Drive, a handful of forward-thinking companies have built cultures that hinge on intrinsic motivation. And, spoiler alert, those companies tend to thrive. But why is this approach not yet the norm? Sarah Goff-Dupont of Atlassian sat down with Mr. Pink to learn more about the role intrinsic motivation plays in our own success and in the future of work.

Read the whole thing.

Five Fundamental Beliefs for Business Success

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In his excellent book A Business and its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM, Thomas Watson Jr. (the second chief executive of IBM) gives us five great lessons on business success.

From the time of our divisional reorganization we have found that an ingrained understanding of the beliefs of IBM, far more than technical skill, has made it possible for our people to make the company successful. 

In looking back on the history of a company, one can’t help but reflect on what the organization has learned from its years in business. In thinking specifically of the period since the war when IBM faced the twin challenges of great technological change and growth, I would say that we’ve come out with five key lessons. They may not be applicable to all companies. All I can do is attest to the great value these five lessons had for us. 

  1. There is simply no substitute for good human relations and for the high moral they bring. It takes good people to do the jobs necessary to reach your profit goals. But good people alone are not enough. No matter how good your people may be, if they don’t really like the business, if they don’t feel totally involved in it, or if they don’t think they’re being treated fairly-it’s awfully hard to get a business off the ground. Good human relations are easy to talk about. The real lesson, I think, is that you must work at them all the time and make sure your managers are working with you. 
  2. There are two things that an organization must increase far out of proportion to its growth rate if that organization is to overcome the problems of change. The first of these is communication, upward and downward. The second is education and retraining. 
  3. Complacency is the most natural and insidious disease of large corporations. It can be overcome if management will set the right tone and pace and it its lines of communication are in working order. 
  4. Everyone — particularly in a company such as IBM — must place company interest above that of a division or department. In an interdependent organization, a community of effort is imperative. Cooperation must outrank self-interest, and an understanding of the company’s particular approach to things is more important than technical ability. 
  5. And the final and most important lesson: Beliefs must always come before policies, practices, and goals. The latter must always be altered if they are seen to violate fundamental beliefs. The only sacred cow in an organization should be its basic philosophy of doing business.

The British economist Walter Bagehot once wrote: “Strong beliefs win strong men and then make them stronger.” To this I would add, “And as men become stronger, so do the organizations to which they belong.”

Don’t Save Your Own Time at the Expense of Others Time

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Sometimes we take shortcuts to save ourselves time, but which cost others a lot of time because of the sub-par work product our time-saving shortcuts created. This is not an overall savings of time, but a wasting of time. Hence, though it seems efficient, it is not. We must think deeper.

Garr Reynolds illustrates this very well in his excellent book Presentation Zen. Though his specific example pertains to presentations, the principle applies to anything you do:

I can save time on the front end, but I may waste more time for others on the back end. For example, if I give a completely worthless one-hour death-by-PowerPoint presentation to an audience of 200, that equals 200 hours of wasted time.

But if I instead put in the time, say, 25-30 hours or more of planning and designing the message, and the media, then I can give the world 200 hours of worthwhile, memorable experience.

Software companies advertise time-saving features, which may help us believe we have saved time to complete a task such as preparing a presentation and “simplified” our workday. But if time is not saved for the audience — if the audience wants its time because we didn’t prepare well, design the visuals well, or perform well — then what does it matter that we saved one hour in preparing our slides?

Doing things in less time sometimes does indeed feel simpler, but if it results in wasted time and wasted opportunities later, it is hardly simple.

 

Why AI Will Not Rule the Future

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I read an article the other week where the author argued that within about 50 years, we will have a robot artificial intelligence for president. This is simply an extreme form of an increasingly common way of thinking. It goes like this:

These types of decisions will eventually be made much better by an AI than by humans, because AI is developing at such a fast rate that just about every task that requires human intuition and intelligence will be solvable by AI….

So if you have AI that is better at say economic planning than any human, which would you sooner have in charge of your country’s economy, a human or a superior AI?

Aside from the fact that in a free democracy it is emphatically not the task of the president to plan the economy (thus we see one additional reason we should not trust these folks that say AI can do everything better — often, they don’t even understand basic principles of freedom, economics, and philosophy), there are at least three major flaws with this line of thinking. There are more, but I’ll keep this post at three.

1. Not All Problems Have One Best Answer

First, this is classic “one best way” thinking. In some decisions, there is only one best way. But that is only one kind of decision. In many cases, there are multiple good paths to the destination (and multiple choices among a destination). These are called design problems (as opposed to engineering problems). In design problems, there is more than one legitimate path. It is up to us to use our judgment and intuition and preferences to determine which path we want to create.

The notion that AI will take over all jobs (including that of president) because of its superiority is assuming this “one best way thinking.” It is assuming that for almost every decision, there is one optimal approach, and since computers have such immense processing power, they will soon have the capacity to always be able to figure that out better.

But what if there is not just one best course for many decisions? This brings us into the realm of art, emotion, beauty, and freedom — some of the greatest things about work and the world. If there is not just one best decision to make in most cases, then there will always be a definitive place for human beings, no matter how powerful computers become. It is not about what is the one “best” way to do something; it is about “What do we want to do? What seems great and most interesting, and reflects our values and style in the best way? What do we care most about? What do we believe?”

2. Human Participation is Part of the End Goal

Which leads to the second point: this thinking that if AI is more efficient and smarter that it should therefore do everything fails to understand one of God’s ultimate purposes in creation — namely, human participation. Consider: God himself is smarter than any human or any computer that ever will or could be. Yet he does not make all decisions for us. He doesn’t say “just sit back and watch — I can do this better.” Instead, he gives us a role — that is part of his very purpose in creation (Genesis 1:28).

Why does he do this? Because his goal is to have a people like Christ. Which means a people who are wise and capable of making their own decisions and playing a part in charting their course in life and human society. God cares about the development of the individual. He’s not just after “the right” decisions (though sometimes, of course, there is a right decision and it does matter). He is after mature individuals who are capable of working with him and playing a part in shaping their own destiny. If we have computers end up doing everything because they can “do it better,” then we are missing one of the key purposes of life altogether: namely, that we play a part in things, rather than outsource our decision making.

A world where humans have a part in shaping their work, their lives, and society is better than a world where all of those decisions are made for us, because part of the end goal itself is our act of making those decisions. In other words, the act of decision-making is meaningful in itself, and not merely an ends to a destination that could be arrived at by another means.

In contrast, a society where AI makes all the decisions is a society where humans have, by definition, become slaves. We would no longer be a free people, but rather a people ruled by another entity — justified, as it always has been, on the notion that this other entity can “do it better,” all the while failing to realize that doing it yourself, even with mistakes, ought to be an essential part of what we mean by “better” in the first place.

3. The Logic of AI Supremacy Leads to Nihilism

Also consider: if we were to follow the logic all the way that computers should always take over a task they are better at (to do this we have to forget point one, of course, but bear with me), then what’s left for people to do? Just watch. Don’t be a painter–computers can do it better. Just go to the museum and look at the paintings robots created. Don’t direct a movie–robots can do it better. Just go watch the movies that robots create. Don’t be a teacher — just let a computer adopt Wikipedia into its memory and teach students for you. Oh, wait, don’t be a student either — computers can do that better also.

This notion misses the fact that creating things is itself part of the fun. The point is not to create perfect movies, or perfect art, or perfect classes, or perfect investment decisions. The point is to have a part to play in the running of the world and doing of these things, which is the real ultimate purpose for how God glorifies himself in the world. If all that was for us to do was watch and follow in a society led by computers, with computers doing all of the work, we would become diminished, atrophied human beings. With that being the case, could we really say that the computers that are running everything really are making the best decisions? Perhaps they forgot to make a decision about the most important question of all: who makes the decisions.

Even more, if all that were left to us to do is just watch, why not outsource that as well? Can’t AI do that better, also? The notion that “AI does it better, so it should do it” ends up undermining all of human life. In other words, it ends up in pure nihilism.

*Note: Some readers might wonder how I can say that God has given us a part to play in shaping our destiny, when I believe in the absolute sovereignty of God over all things. The answer is the historic Christian doctrine of compatibilism: God does indeed determine all things, and at the same time humans make real decisions and are responsible for their actions. And in making our decisions, we don’t try to find out what God decreed, but use our judgment in alignment with Scripture. God does not whisper the answer to us, but expects us to use wisdom.

**A funny side note: As additional proof of the inflated evaluation of AI we sometimes have, autocorrect changed “compatibilism” in the above paragraph to “compatibility” without my permission. Come on, autocorrect. There is no such theological doctrine called “compatibility.” We’ve had enough of this vandalization that you bring to our sentences, in the name of knowing the English language better than real people do.

5 Keys to Long-Term Business Success

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These are the five keys for long-term business success, as summarized by Willie Pietersen in his excellent book Strategic Learning. 

If you think about it deeply, you see that this framework brings together the most powerful concepts into a very simple framework.

  1. Vision: Clarity of focus
  2. Strategy: A unique point of difference that creates superior value for customers and shareholders
  3. People: A motivated workforce
  4. Tactical Excellence: Operational effectiveness, coupled with strong financial disciplines
  5. Innovation: The capacity for change and renewal