Indeed, "this era does not need better management, but needs the revival of self-management"!
In order to trace back to the source and understand the theoretical research, reform process and practical methods of motivation, we should read the book Driving Force.
The book Driving Force was written by Daniel Pinker. Daniel Pinker is one of the 50 most influential business thinkers in the world. He used to be the chief speech writer of former US Vice President Al Gore, and was also a well-known media writer such as The new york Times and Harvard Business Review. In 2009, Pink was invited to give a speech on the theme of "The Mystery of Human Motivation" at ted, and put forward a subversive view: what really drives us is "Driving Force 3.0", which has become one of the 20 most popular speeches at TED.
The book Driving Force tells a question, that is, what is the motivation of people's behavior, or put it another way: how can we mobilize the enthusiasm of others? For example, how the boss can mobilize the enthusiasm of employees and work better; How can parents motivate their children to learn better? How can we mobilize our enthusiasm and start our own business? Daniel is also very interested in this problem, so he spent a lot of time studying it. He studied all the social science research results about enthusiasm in the past 50 years, and finally formed the content of today's book.
Zhou, chairman of 360 Company, said: In the Internet industry for more than ten years, I have never seen any team take money as the most important incentive factor, and the driving force from the heart is the strongest: I hope to make unique ideas, pursue perfection, pay attention to details, strive for perfection, and constantly seek higher goals. The book Driving Force vividly expounds this phenomenon, which challenges people's inherent management wisdom and will certainly affect the new trend of future business thinking.
Regarding the book "Driving Force", I mainly share three questions with you: First, what is the traditional way to mobilize enthusiasm? What's the problem? Second, what is the driving force 3.0 mentioned by the author? Third, how to play the driving force of human 3.0?
1. What traditional methods can arouse everyone's enthusiasm?
To put it bluntly, it is actually very simple, that is, rewards and punishments are clear, which is what we usually call "carrots and sticks." If the boss promises a raise, employees will work harder; If parents say that getting an A in the exam will be rewarded, children will study longer; If someone threatens to deduct money for being late, you will arrive on time. Reward and punishment are the traditional ways to arouse enthusiasm, but have they always been effective?
The author tells an experiment in the book. A group of scientists divided a group of children into three groups and let them draw freely in the room. The researchers told the first group that if you finish drawing this, you can get a certificate; The second group was asked by the researchers if they would like to draw. If they have, the researchers will give them a certificate, but they will not be told in advance. For the third group of children, there is no certificate for drawing or not. In addition, the situation of the three groups is the same. After two weeks of experiments, the researchers found that after the teacher arranged the paper and pen, the children who didn't expect the reward and the children who didn't expect the reward before drew pictures. They were very happy, but the children in the group who received the reward before spent much less time painting than other groups. It's weird. It is reasonable to encourage the first group of children through rewards, which can arouse their enthusiasm. But how to reward children, after a long time, children don't like painting? In fact, this phenomenon will also happen to us adults. For example, it has been found that when you take interest as a job, you may even lose interest. This is the negative effect of reward.
This experiment reminds me of my own experience. My child is 4 years old now, and he has to take early education classes every Sunday. There is a chain memory link, he has been doing badly, and I intend to motivate him with rewards. Once, he did 80%. Yes, I said to him, "honey, you did a good job in chain memory today!" Mom will reward you for eating ice cream. " Everyone was very happy at that time. However, when I went back the next week, the teacher was just about to start the chain memory link. My son came back and said to me, "Mom, what reward will you give me today?" I said, "Listen to the class first." As a result, he came to no good end. He said to me in frustration, "Mom, isn't there a reward today?" Certainly not. " In the following time, he has been particularly depressed and unable to concentrate.
So after reading this, I was particularly impressed by the negative effects of "if …… then ……" reward. For example, rewards make internal motivation disappear and turn interesting things into hard work; Rewards narrow people's attention and stifle creativity; Rewards increase the probability of risk-taking, uncooperative and immoral behavior.
If there are many problems with "carrot" as a reward, is it better to use "stick" as a punishment? Let's have a look. For example, the company's attendance system punishes employees for being late. At first, everyone went to work on time in order not to be fined, but because of various things, they were always late once or twice. But later, they felt that they would be fined if they were late. As long as they paid the money, it didn't matter, but they felt at ease. You see, the punishment model was originally designed to mobilize enthusiasm, but it eroded enthusiasm.
The traditional incentive method with clear rewards and punishments sometimes seems to be different from the expected realization. What is the reason? The pattern of "carrot and stick" comes from an old story. To let the donkey go, put a carrot in front of it or chase it with a stick. In fact, there is an implicit premise assumption in this model. This assumption is that human nature is lazy and lacks autonomy. If you don't reward them, scare them and punish them, they will be content with the status quo and won't act on their own. So if you want to motivate a person, either give external incentives or external punishment.
"Carrots and sticks" is not always a bad thing. There is a reason why this method has been active for so long. But this method needs to be effective in specific scenarios. After research, the author found that the "carrot and stick" method is actually more suitable for those simple mechanical repetitive tasks. For example, if you are a soldier on an assembly line, you just need to finish the work without thinking. At this time, the "carrot and stick" method is effective. However, when it comes to knowledge, creativity and dedication, the carrot and stick method often doesn't work. Our society is gradually moving from the traditional agricultural society and industrial society to today's information and knowledge society. Knowledge and dedication are more and more important. It may be wrong to use the traditional way of "carrots and sticks" to arouse the enthusiasm of others.
Second, what is driving force 3.0?
So in the new era background, how can we mobilize enthusiasm? The answer is the third driving force found by the author. Since there is a third driving force, there must be a first and a second. The first driving force refers to the biological driving force of basic survival needs, such as eating when hungry and drinking water when thirsty. The second driving force comes from external motives, such as rewards and punishments. The boss promised to raise his salary if he works well, and fire him if he doesn't. The aforementioned "carrot and stick" model belongs to the second driving force.
So what is the third driving force? This should start with an experiment. Harry Harlow, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin, made an experiment about learning behavior. He put a group of monkeys in a cage. In the cage, he put an interesting device, a bit like an organic lock. You can open it by pulling the hook and lifting the lid. Of course, people can see at a glance how to make this device, which is very simple, but for monkeys, this may be a more difficult task. Interestingly, the staff put the equipment in the cage and did nothing to observe the monkey's behavior. It was found that these monkeys began to concentrate on the equipment without any reward or punishment, and the experimenter did not give them any hints or instructions. Moreover, they seem to be in a state of never giving up until they untie their vows and enjoy it. After a while, the monkeys figured out what the device was like. By the time the experiment has been going on for nearly two weeks, the monkeys are already familiar with it and can open it quickly. In two-thirds of cases, it takes 60 seconds to open it.
What we care about is not that the monkey learned to open this device, but why did the monkey open this thing? From the traditional two driving forces, this device can neither eat nor drink, so there is no basic opening requirement. Secondly, there are no rewards and punishments and no benefits. Why did you open it? Therefore, the traditional way of "carrot and stick" to arouse enthusiasm has not solved the behavior of monkeys. What is the reason?
So Harlow put forward a new hypothesis and theory, which is the third driving force. He thinks that monkeys do this because they think it is an internal reward. In other words, monkeys think the device is turned on because they think it is interesting and they like to do it. The pleasure of completing this task is a reward. Therefore, we don't necessarily need radishes and sticks. We all have a desire to do things well in our hearts, and this is the internal driving force.
In fact, this phenomenon is very common in our life. Suppose the time goes back to 1995, and there are two encyclopedias, one of which has just come out and the other will be released a few years later. The first encyclopedia was provided with sufficient financial support by a very rich company, and the most professional author and first-class editor were hired, and the project manager was hired with high salary to supervise the progress of each project and ensure that it was completed within the specified time. The second encyclopedia, not only started late, but also had no money. It can only ask others to help it, and no one gives you the arrangement and guidance of the progress, let alone the budget. Who do you think will succeed in these two encyclopedias after a period of time? According to traditional cognition, the first person who has the money and time to have a professional team must be the first to succeed, and the second person who has no money, no one and no salary is not worthy.
But the fact is that the first encyclopedia was Microsoft Encyclopedia, and many people may not have heard of it. The second is Wikipedia, which is what we think of as an army of miscellaneous brands, but it has become the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world. You know, Wikipedia is made by a group of people who are unpaid, have no professional qualifications and have to volunteer their time. Why? Money and interests are of course important, but people's motivation comes not only from money and interests. Tens of thousands of volunteers from Wikipedia donated money to it even if they had no money, but they defeated such a strong opponent as Microsoft. For them, the driving force is not external encouragement or punishment, but the third driving force from the heart.
The third driving force is intrinsic motivation. People want to dominate their own lives, learn and create new things, and make themselves and the world around them better. Pay attention to the inner satisfaction of the matter itself and pay attention to the inner return.
Third, how to mobilize the third driving force?
This question has been with me since the moment I opened the book. The truth is good. It is difficult to stimulate internal motivation. For example, for a 4-year-old son, how to abandon "carrots and sticks" and try to use the third driving force in the face of English homework?
If internal drive is an innate ability, why not find or mobilize this enthusiasm at ordinary times, and sometimes use the way of "carrot and stick" to urge it? This is because, in fact, there are some external conditions for the internal driving force to play, and it is necessary to mobilize this internal driving force in some specific circumstances. It's like we are a very good software, but the current system does not provide support and compatibility, so we can't play it. Therefore, if you want to bring your own driving force into play, you must create an environment that can stimulate your internal motivation.
What should we do to mobilize and stimulate the third driving force, that is, internal motivation? The author puts forward three points: autonomy, specialization and goal.
The so-called autonomy is easy to understand, that is, making your own decisions. If you can't make a decision yourself, where can you get the enthusiasm? The traditional way of motivation thinks that if you give a person freedom, he will be irresponsible, will escape, will be lazy and will take advantage of the loopholes. But the internal driving force doesn't think so. It assumes that people are willing to take responsibility for anything they like.
What is the truth? An entrepreneur named gunther did an experiment in his own company, so that some employees didn't have to go to work on time, let alone finish their work in the company. As for how to do it, when to do it and where to do it, it's up to the employees themselves. This practice may make most business owners very worried. What if the employee stays at home with the children and the work is not finished? What if the quality of work decreases? Or did he give the job to someone else? Or maybe he didn't say anything when he could have worked more? All kinds of worries make bosses afraid to do so.
In fact, not only the boss, but also the employees don't adapt. At first, these employees were afraid to implement this rule after hearing about it. They still follow the previous standards and regulations, but slowly, some people began to say that I could be late, and some people said that I could go out to do other things at work. Slowly, everyone adapted to this change. After a period of time, many people have found their best working conditions. Therefore, compared with other employees, these freelancers are more efficient because they have less pressure.
So the entrepreneur found that people can improve their work efficiency, because people may pay more attention to the work itself. They don't have to worry about whether they will leave the company to watch the football match with their daughters before 3 pm, and whether someone will say that they are lazy because they are not in the company. Especially now, science and technology are more and more advanced, and there are more and more modes of production. With the application of artificial intelligence, a lot of work can actually be done in multiple scenarios. So for us, it is not necessarily limited to where to work, so when we can give them more autonomy, maybe they will be more creative.
What kind of environment can better stimulate everyone's autonomy? I think we should pay attention to the following points: freely decide what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and who to cooperate with. These points are very important.
For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, the chairman of the famous 3M company was William mcknight, and he had an idea, which is very advanced and even subversive today. That is: you just need to hire a good man, then leave him alone and give him full trust. Under this concept, he made many new attempts in the company. For example, the technicians of 3M Company can spend 15% of their time on their own selected projects, not necessarily work projects. The post-it notes that everyone is using in the office today came into being in this 15% spare time. Even the director of R&D in this 3M company said that most of the inventions relied on today were produced in this 15% independent time.
Give everyone autonomy and there will be a lot of creativity. Of course, the most famous case is Google. Google has a policy that encourages engineers to spend one day a week doing by-products or 20% of their time doing what they want, which has nothing to do with normal work. We often use Google Mail and Google Translate, which are very popular products from this 20% time. Alec, an engineer at Google, said in a TV interview that almost all of Google's new ideas were generated in those 20% of the time. Therefore, if you can decide your own work independently, the stimulation to creativity is actually very great. It's not just what you decide to do, but what you can do to arouse your enthusiasm.
In the past, customer service was a job with a particularly high turnover rate. Why? Because of boredom, I hear people complain on the phone every day, saying that you are poor and that you are unqualified. Please solve this problem for me as soon as possible ... it's all about negative emotions. These customer service staff also have no decision-making power, and these problems are not caused by them, but they still have to listen to complaints, and they can only repeat mechanical work, read the manuscript, and answer according to regulations: Dear customers, I am very sorry ... so to speak. Therefore, the turnover rate of this job is particularly high, and no one wants to do it. The traditional way to solve this problem is to add carrots and sticks. What did management say? In order to improve customer satisfaction, we should monitor customer service calls and listen to what they say, good praise and bad punishment. It also depends on whether they communicate for a long time, praise and communicate for a short time, punish and so on. These reward and punishment systems make this boring and collapsed job terrible, and the high turnover rate is natural.
The problem of high turnover rate of customer service staff, what kind of working methods can arouse their enthusiasm and improve their work happiness? Let's take a look at the classic case of JetBlue.
JetBlue allows employees to decide their own working methods, such as family packing, which means that customer service staff can even work at home all the time. Since JetBlue took this measure, its customer service ranking has greatly surpassed its competitors. Why? Because on the one hand, employees feel more comfortable working at home, less monitoring, and easier to be in a good mood; On the other hand, this method of deciding the place and way of working independently enables many people who have leisure and time, such as retired people, to deal with customers' needs in their own way, because they have more life experience but handle it better. In this way, we can achieve higher satisfaction at a lower cost, which is the role of autonomy in helping us mobilize the third driving force-internal driving force.
In addition to autonomy, there is a second important factor to mobilize enthusiasm, and that is specialization. Specialization means that we have the desire to do things better and better. For example, in the "carrot and stick" mode, our motivation is to satisfy the reward or avoid punishment, as long as we can be rewarded or not punished. However, specialization is to keep doing things better. However, to have this desire, it is unnatural not to have independent conditions. For example, sometimes no one cares about us, and we choose everything ourselves, but after doing it for a while, we don't do it because we feel boring. At this time, even if you have autonomy, you can't have high enthusiasm. Then how can we arouse our desire for specialization? The author says that if you want to motivate yourself to devote yourself to one thing, you often have to start with the experience of creating flow.
The so-called flow refers to the best experience when the challenge and ability just match. In this case, we are fully involved, as if time had stopped. If you can choose your own job, it is very important to choose the conditions that can create traffic.
There is a logistics company in Sweden, and their trainers have established a set of training methods, which is to let employees know the operation mechanism of flow. Every month, they let managers talk to employees to find out whether the workload of these employees is too heavy or too light, and then adjust their workload and let them do something just beyond their ability. Results Two years later, the company achieved its first profit since its establishment 125 years ago, and the company's executives all thought that the key reason was to find a flow-centered working mode.
Since this flow state is so effective, how should we stimulate it? In addition to the above, the task can neither be too difficult nor too simple. The author has another way, that is, chemical industry as entertainment.
Mark Twain told such a story in his The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom received such a boring thing that his period asked him to paint the fence. His friend saw it nearby and was about to laugh when Tom had an idea and said, Why are you laughing at me? In fact, painting is not a chore, but a privilege. You have no right to paint the fence yet. At this time, his friend suddenly felt that painting the fence seemed very attractive and asked if he could brush it a few times. Tom also said no, it's my privilege. Finally, his friend took out his own apple in exchange, and Tom gave him a chance to brush the fence. As a result, it was laborious and boring to paint the fence with buckets, but Tom turned it into an opportunity to play with his companions, which inspired everyone's enthusiasm and completed the task quickly and well. The whole process was full of fun.
In fact, Tom Sawyer's method can be used in real life. Amy and Jane, business school professors, found that the job of hospital cleaners is actually boring. They just clean up the garbage regularly every day. However, it will be interesting to redesign their works. For example, in the process of cleaning, they can chat with patients and help nurses. There are some extra jobs like this, which are just beyond their previous experience, but they can take on such responsibilities after learning the skills, which greatly enriches the work of cleaners and makes them feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. It encourages them to learn new skills and makes them feel like playing games when adjusting their jobs, because you don't know what will happen next, and you may encounter many interesting situations to deal with. In this case, even in jobs with low autonomy, the enthusiasm and internal driving force of employees can be mobilized by designing these game links. Therefore, by designing this method which is neither too difficult nor too easy, we can stimulate our specialization.
Speaking of these two factors, the last one is the goal. Why does mobilizing people's internal drive have something to do with goals? Actually, this is easy to understand. For example, if you do something, there is a big difference between having a goal and not having a goal. You plan to earn 654,380,000 yuan this year and 654,380,000 yuan this year, which can arouse your enthusiasm.
Is it possible to mobilize your internal driving force well as long as you set a goal? The author says that it is not enough to set goals, but also to set correct goals. People have different goals. Which goals are correct? Is it incorrect? If there is a difference from the perspective of driving force. In fact, people's goals can be roughly divided into two types: one is external goals, such as wealth and success, which are interest-oriented goals; There are also some internal goals. They are willing to help others improve their lives and make people grow better. This goal comes from within.
In fact, only internal goals can lead our hearts and inspire our enthusiasm for a long time. If people only pursue external interests, they will feel that their lives have not become better after realizing these interests. Their biggest reaction is that it is because the goal is not big enough and they need to earn more money or higher status to be recognized. In fact, this will lead people to a more unhappy road, and they still think that this is the only way to success and happiness. In this process, enthusiasm and motivation will gradually decline, and once one day the goal is achieved, it will feel very empty. On the contrary, what people really want to build is the desire and goal beyond personal interests, the desire to do what they want to do, not just their own interests.
In other words, for external goals, we often use a mode of thinking, "If so, so be it". For example, if I achieve100000, I will be very happy. If I earn 200 million, I will be very happy. The author suggests that we change our thinking mode. "So what?" For example, since I love helping others, I will do such a thing. Since I am willing to contribute to this family, I will go all out. Therefore, people who use "if ……" are far less able to stimulate their inner enthusiasm than those who use "since …". When we set our ambitions and goals beyond our own interests and spill positive power to those around us and those in need, more power will be injected into the self-realization of life. We not only make sweet cakes for survival, but also strive to satisfy that sweetness. We also share this sweetness, send applause, flowers and blessings to more people, and make life more colorful.
The above is the core content that the book "Driving Force" wants to share, and then review what this book tells us.
We are not only driven by external "carrots and sticks" or basic survival needs. We are born with the power to dominate our lives, eager to learn and create new things, and hope that we and the world we live in will become better. But we often lose this internal driving force, mainly because the surrounding environment does not provide us with such conditions, and we have not stimulated it.
To stimulate the internal driving force, we need to start from three aspects: autonomy, specialization and goal: autonomy refers to creating an independent environment for ourselves as much as possible, and being able to decide what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and with whom. At the same time, we should pursue Excellence and have the desire to do things better and better. If you want to enter this state, you must stimulate your own flow, do a slightly more difficult but achievable task, and try to make the process interesting. Finally, we must set an internal goal, which we are eager to do and beyond our simple interests. Only in this way can we really mobilize the third driving force, self-driving and self-motivation, thus mobilizing the enthusiasm of work and life.