Book Review: Drive

I gravitate towards books that deal with our minds, how they work, how they fall short, how their functioning can be optimized. Whether it's Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer or others, I am captivated by the scientific forays into the human mind. Drive deals with motivation. I'm an economics major who recognizes the impracticality and inefficacy of economic modeling and forecasting, but fixates on incentives and the behavioral aspect of economics. Daniel Pink shows that incentives, while undeniably strong and mostly underutilized and forgotten, can produce results contrary to intuition and can hinder motivation. His findings are robust (not entirely original, but written and presented better than most) and compellingly shown. He gives many suggestions on how to leverage innate human behavior to create environments of massive motivation and production. As someone rooted firmly in the business world with an ever present eye to leadership and entrepreneurship, these lessons join the many already filed away in the recesses of my mind.