Dan Pink Bio

A free agent himself, Dan Pink says he "held his last real job in the White House," where he served from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. He also worked as an aide to U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich and in other positions in politics and government.

Pink's articles on business and technology appear in many publications, including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Wired, where he is a contributing editor. He has provided analysis of business trends on CNN, CNBC, ABC, NPR, and other networks in the U.S. and abroad. He also lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on economic transformation and the new workplace.

Pink earned a BA, with honors, from Northwestern University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a JD from Yale Law School. To his lasting joy, he has never practiced law. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and their three children.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

In February of 2010, Daniel Pink published his fourth book about work. Here is a brief outline of his work treatises:

1) 2002 - Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself  
This book looks at the rise of the individual entrepreneur, the creative, the "free agent" who seeks to do meaningful work for himself and rejects the structure and limitations of the corporate enterprise. Technology has reached the point that an individual can produce and connect like never before and compete with larger enterprises.

2)  2006 - A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future 
This book identifies the 6 new skills will define those that are irreplaceable in organizations of the future: story, empathy, sympathy, meaning, design, play.  This book was a breakout success in the independent school world as its ideas converged with a shifting in the conversation about how we are educating our students for a whole new technology driven "wiki world" that requires less content knowledge and more thinking skills and abilities. How are we in our schools fostering right brain skills?

3) 2008 - The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need
This book targeted the in college and recently graduated young adults to inspire them to jump headlong into the new world of work despite having been educated and indoctrinated by very conventional educational institutions.  There are 6 big ideas: 
1) There is no plan.  Learn as you go - lifelong learning
2) Think Strengths, not weaknesses.  Discover and make your strengths a competitive advantage.
3) It's not about you.  It's about empathy for your client.
4) Persistence trumps talent every time. Have a growth mindset
5) Make excellent mistakes. Learning is hands on.
6)  Leave an Imprint. Have a large, transformative purpose.


4) 2010 - Drive:  The Surprising Truth About What Motivates You
Drive is based on the premise that the factory model organization for the industrial age with its systems, structures, and motivation assumptions will not yield the inspiring, creative, innovative work environments that we need in today's culture.  The old Motivation 2.0 way of sticks and carrots (rewards and punishments), Pink argues, is actually a factor in perpetuating the sluggish status quo organization that keeps plugging along while the world changes around them.  

Motivation 3.0 is about three main ideas:  autonomy, mastery, purpose:

autonomy - self direction and trusted environments are fulfilling and motivating;
mastery - we need authentic feedback and challenges that match our skills and interests;
purpose - a sense of creating and impacting something larger than ourselves.

For schools, Drive can be used to think about three big areas:

an individual's personal performance and engagement;
an team or division's structures and systems and the motivation tools used as we strive to reach goals;
the classroom and the environment that the teacher creates  and manages for the learner.

Dan Pink at TED

The Science about what motivates us.

Finding Your Purpose

What is your sentence?

Daniel Pink asserts in his new book Drive:  The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that asking yourself two questions each and every day is a great discipline to becoming motivated and reflective about your own performance.

The first question of what is your sentence? (fill in the blank "________________________") asks us to think about our purpose, our legacy, our individual mission.  If we know what we are about and what we are working so hard to do everyday for ourselves, our family, our community and our world, then we should be able to express it as validation and aspiration in a single sentence.  This sentence becomes a powerful reminder of our mission and the legacy we are striving to create.

The genesis of the one sentence idea come from Clare Luce Booth's statement to President Kennedy that every great man is a sentence. Why? Because it focuses his energy, his efforts, his aspirations.  Bill Taylor, who blogs for Harvard Business Review, extends the one sentence challenge to companies in his article What's Your Company's Sentence?

The second sentence that Dan Pink recommends that we use, like a one-two punch combo, is was I better today than yesterday? Success at anything, personal or professional, takes intention, diligence, and discipline.  Improvement is incremental.  Each day is a part of the journey and it is through self-observation and self-reflexive objective feedback that we are able to chart our course.

Pink writes extensively about people not getting enough feedback, on the job and off. Annual professional reviews are hardly great sources of information that we are motivated to act on. Think of a professional athlete. They get feedback from their coach and from their own highly developed mechanism of self-awareness and self-observation with each attempt. Pink asserts that professionals on the job would not only benefit from more frequent and meaningful feedback but that they would be more motivated to act upon the feedback and adjust their actions.

Watch this vimeo to hear Dan Pink's story of the two questions.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

What's your sentence?

Inspiring and Motivating a Group

What makes a workplace engaging, healthy, fulfilling, and productive? This is one of the questions that Dan Pink addresses in Drive. The old industrial age thinking is that rewards motivate us and punishment encourages us to behave right.  Pink suggests that rewards and punishment work in the short term and for routine, tedious tasks that are quantifiable and measurable like stuffing envelopes on a tight deadline, paying per envelope is a good incentive.  But, Pink says, that sort of incentive does nothing to inspire and motivate creative, innovative thinking and problem-solving which is a huge part of most organizations these days, schools included, as we adapt to this very changed work environment with very shifted education outcomes.

So, what motivates and inspires creative problem solving? Below are a few suggestions from Dan Pink's Drive.


1) Google's 20% Time or Fedex Days
Having the time to focus and work uninterrupted on something that interests you, whose work you can direct the pace and depth of, that is meaningful and important.  Many of Google's innovative products and services have come from the autonomous work of their engineers during 20% time where they spent 20% of their work time of a project of interest to them.  Another version is Fedex days where everyone in the organization has to deliver something for the good of the whole overnight, they can choose the project scope, whom they would like to work with, how to present the results using the constraints of time and budget imposed by the company. This is a terrific way to get everyone focused on the whole and sharing the responsibility for innovation and improvement.


2) Peer to Peer Bonuses
Recognition and validation for good work is a huge motivator. One firm Pink highlights in Drive has authorized the whole team to give any co-worker a $50 bonus on the spot for work that is remarkable and exceptional.  There is great meaning and sense of reward in one's work being noticed and revered by peers who are more trusted and considered more authentic than management.


3) What's our company's one sentence and how are we doing at that?
One thing that should characterize an good independent schools is that there mission is relevant, actionable, and transformative. And, that each person and each division in the environment strives to live that mission.  So, being mission-driven could provide a unifying sense of purpose, a specific plan and focus for mastery, as well as opportunities for autonomy and creativity.

Motivation: Whose Responsibility is it?

One of the questions that Dan Pink raises in Drive is whose responsibility is it to motivate me - me or my boss? Really the answer is that the individual should seek to use the aspects Motivation 3.0 to become more excited and engaged in their work AND that the organization should seek to create, reinforce, and support an exciting, fulfilling, creative, motivating work environment with its structures, systems, aesthetics, and policies.

Unlike Motivation 2.0 where the system is structured around fear and scarcity, perform or be punished, Motivation 3.0 is about the mutual alignment of the individual becoming fulfilled and self-actualized as well as the aims of the organization reached in the process.


Here are some ways that Dan Pink suggested that an individual might increase their own motivation:

1)  What's your sentence?
Develop your one sentence purpose statement that is transformative and gives meaning to your daily effort; gauge your own mastery and fulfillment of this purpose each day.


2)  Take your own Flow reading.
Stanford psychologist Mihalyi  Csikszentmihalyi quantified and writes about the concept of "flow" where one is so focused and deep in thought about an idea or activity that you lose all sense of time. This is a feeling when your effort is so enjoyable and meaningful that you work without knowledge of the time passing. Developing knowledge of what circumstances and areas of interest give you flow or  that feeling such that your skills are matched with the challenge at hand and you want to work endlessly in that arena will allow you to self-direct your projects, your assignments and responsibilities, and your daily rhythms to enhance the feeling of flow. If your environment and work never offer you a sense of flow, maybe you are in the wrong line of work.


3)  DIY Performance Reviews.
It is common, standard practice in organizations to have performance reviews.  Most are not helpful because the employee has little to no interest or say in what is review, how, when, where, etc.  Pink suggests that if you are truly interested and desiring and mastering your field, set your own goals because you want to not because you have to, and make your own strategic plan for mastery, routinely give yourself helpful, honest feedback and write each month your own performance review of your own effort, work ethic, feedback system, etc etc.  He even suggests, if you are serious about this, to solicit others' opinions willingly about your performance.


4) Two important questions.
Similar to the exercise to develop your own sense of purpose, Pink suggests using Alan Webber's guiding questions to develop a higher sense of purpose.  Alan Webber was the co-founder of Fast Company magazine and author of the recent book Rules of Thumb. Webber suggests two questions for an individual looking to be fulfilled, inspired, and sustained over a long career. The two questions are:

What gets you up in the morning?

What keeps you up at night?

Webber suggests writing out one sentence answers to these two questions over a period of days or weeks until you hit upon two one sentence answers that offer you clarity about what you do each day and why, in effect becoming beacons of purpose.

Motivating Students

The question of motivating students is really about developing intrinsic motivation and a desire to learn and engage in practice v. creating an environment where students are motivated by external rewards like stickers, privileges, grades, money.  Pink suggests that external rewards can be effective for some tasks that are routine and easily defined and measured for the short term but actually external motivation can also intimidate a child from taking risks and reaching for hard tasks. 

Pink's ideas are grounded in Carol Dweck's work about the difference between fixed mindset and growth mindset.  A child with a belief that intelligence if a fixed entity and that hard work is not necessary if you are smart will stop working toward mastery because lack of high performance might symbolize lack of intelligence and acceptance. Where are a child that believes hard work results in better performances will be internally motivated to work hard to achieve and grow over a sustained period of time.

Pink offers some interesting ideas to motivate students:


1)  Scrutinize homework for autonomy, mastery, purpose. Ask these questions:

Am I offering students any choice and self direction opportunity in how, when, with whom to do this work?

Does this assignment promote mastery or is it repeating something we know how to do?

Do my students understand the big picture purpose of this assignment?

2) Have Fedex Days for students.

Set aside a large block of time for students to identify and solve a problem that is important to the classroom or school environment. Let them chose the what, when, where, and how and deliver results in a public forum. Lots of 21st century skills would be required and reinforced for this project like collaboration, teaming, entrepreneurialism, critical thinking, communication, initiative, etc, etc.

3) Try DIY report cards.

Guide students in the process for identifying a goal, making a plan, working the plan, gauging process, gathering feedback and adjusting.  While this is an important strategic learning thinking process, it is also an important life skill.

4) Reinforce a growth mindset. Model a growth mindset.

Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence or outcome.

Make praise specific.

Praise in private.

Offer praise only when there's good reason for it, when something is exceptional.

5) Turn students into teachers.

Give students a learning objective while teaching a lesson and then let them direct the specifics. One of the best ways to accomplish mastery is to try to teach it. It would be ideal if a student could combine this experience with an area of interest or passion and then you might be able to expose a kid to the feeling of flow as he engages in teaching something he is already motivated about.