The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: Dan Pink

Daniel Pink is an open-minded thinker, who sees the world as a place able to be changed with the right amount of creativity and new thinking. His TEDtalk about the drive describes Pink's views on the modern-day business industry and how nowadays, their way of driving employees to do better is in need of change.

The old business "If/then" theory is that if one gives an incentive or reward to an employee, then that employee will perform better in their work in order to gain that incentive. This is true only for the mechanical jobs of today's society, and those are dwindling as we enter the new Conceptual Age. What Pink's talk told me was that humans aren't predictable. When it comes to jobs that require broad, right-brained thinking, the drive people need is not a prize, it is the self-want to succeed at a task because one has the independence an choice to do so.

The video of Dan Pink's talk was a live animation of someone drawing out Pink's talk, which was both creative and intriguing. While there aren't many videos that demonstrate someone drawing out the meaning of a talk, it is interesting to see how someone's words are interpreted on paper. Although Pink was not physically visible, he used his strong voice to carry it throughout the crowd.

Dan Pink does a great job in proving his points through fact and reason. When he references certain colleges and schools that have done similar tests on students, it is easy for the crowd to agree with him because he bases his argument on true fact and evidence, rather than feeling and opinion.

I think this Pink's video connects with the world because as our world becomes more technologically savvy, there is less need for the simple mechanical jobs and more need for abstract jobs no computer can do. Pink gave an example of an Australian software company called Atlassian demonstrating autonomy. Autonomy, in Pink's case, is the desire to be self-directed. Autonomy goes hand-in-hand with mastery, which is like the second stage of varsity. Mastery is the urge to "get better at stuff" in order to carry on the initial want of working independently. This is exactly what Atlassian does because once every quarter, it allows its employees an allotted 24 hour period in which they can do whatever they'd like. It turns out according to studies, that new ideas and software fixes erupted from this individual time.

What matters to Pink is the giving of employees the gift of autonomy. When people aren't being forced to help, they end up wanting to do their job simply for the joy of doing it themselves.