Drive

Malcolm Gladwell has selected the New Yorker book-of-the-month for March. It’s Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. An excerpt from Gladwell’s brief introduction to the month-long discussion that begins today:

But Pink follows though on their implications in a way that is provocative and fascinating. The way we structure organizations and innovation, after all, almost always assumes that the prospect of financial reward is the prime human motivator. We think that the more we pay people, the better results we’ll get. But what if that isn’t true? What the research shows, instead, is that the great wellspring of creativity is intrinsic motivation—that is, I do my best work for personal rewards (out of love or intellectual fulfillment) and not external motivation (money).