Past Joshua made note of some book excerpts. Can't remember why... but I'm typing them out here in case I remember, then Future Joshua can write the blog post he intended to :)
Edit: ohhh, these are from Drive, by Daniel Pink (link below)
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A startup engineer must be all things -- he (or she) is a full time software developer and part time product manager/customer support guru/internal systems maven. As a company grows, an engineer spends less time building the things he personally wants in the product. Our hope is that 20% time gives engineers back dedicated stack time -- of their own direction -- to spend on product innovation, features, plugins, fixes or additions that they think are the most important.
This practice has a sturdy tradition and a well-known modern expression. Its pioneer was the American company 3M. In the 1930s and 1940s, 3M's president and chairman was William McKnight, a fellow who was as unassuming in his manner as he was visionary in his thinking. McKnight believed in a simple, and at the time, subvervise, credo: "Hire good people, and leave them alone." Well before it was fashionable for managers to flap on about "empowerment," he made a more vigorous case for autonomy. "Those men and women to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way," he wrote in 1949. McKnight even encouraged employees to engage in what he called "experimental doodling."
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Unfortunately, despite sweet-smelling words like "empowerment" that waft through corporate corridors, the modern workplace's most notable feature may be its lack of engagement and its disregard for mastery. Gallup's extensive research on the subject shows that in the United States, more than 50 percent of employees are not engaged at work -- and nearly 20 percent are actively disengaged. The cost of all this disengagement: about $300 billion a year in lost productivity -- a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal, Singapore, or Israel. Yet, in comparative terms, the United States looks like a veritable haven of Type I behavior at work. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to 3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their work.
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In his early teens, after witnessing the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Soviet takeover of his country, Csikszentmihalyi (his last name is pronounced "chick-sent-me-high") was understandably weary of compliance and looking for engagement. But he wouldn't find it at school. He dropped out of high school at thirteen. For nearly a decade, he worked in various Western European countries at a series of jobs, some odder than others, to support himself. And hoping to answer his youthful question about a better way to live, he read everything he could get his hands on in religion and philosophy. What he learned didn't satisfy him. It wasn't until he inadvertently stumbled into a lecture by none other than Carl Jung that he heard about the field of psychology and decided that it might hold the secrets he sought.
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...of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. (Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi titled his first book on autotelic experiences Beyond Boredom and Anxiety.) But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow. Goldilocks tasks offer us the powerful experience of inhabiting the zone, of living on the knife's edge between order and disorder, of -- as painted Fritz Scholder once described it -- "walking the tightrope between accident and discipline."
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Bringing our businesses in sync with these truths won't be easy. Unlearning old ideas is difficult, undoing old habits even harder. And I'd be less sanguine about the prospects of closing the motivation gap anytime soon, if it weren't for this: The science confirms what we already know in our hearts.
We know that human beings are not merely smaller, slower, better-smelling donkeys trudging after that day's carrot. We know -- if we've spent time with young children or remember ourselves at our best -- that we're not destined to be passive and compliant. We're designed to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren't when we're clamoring for validation from others, but when we're listening to our own voice -- doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.
So, in the end, repairing the mismatch and bringing our understanding of motivation into the twenty-first century is more than an essential move for business. It's an affirmation of our humanity.
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A central idea of this book has been the mismatch between what science knows and what business does. The gap is wide. Its existence is alarming. And though closing it seems daunting, we have reasons to be optimistic.
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Words matter. And if you listen carefully, you might begin to hear a slightly different -- slightly more purpose-oriented -- dialect. Gary Hamel, whom I mentioned above, says, "The goals of management are usually described in words like 'efficiency,' 'advantage,' 'value,' 'superiority,' 'focus,' and 'differentiation.' Important as these objectives are, they lack the power to rouse human hearts." Business leaders, he says, "must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty." Humanize what people say and you may well humanize what they do.
That's the thinking behind the simple and effective way Robert B. Reich, former U.S. labor secretary, gauges the health of an organization. He calls it the "pronoun test." When he visits a workplace, he'll ask the people employed there some questions about the company. He listens to the substance of their response, of course. But most of all, he listens for the pronouns they use. Do the workers refer to the company as "they"? Or do they describe it in terms of "we"? "They" companies and "we" companies, he says, are very different places.
