I recently read Dan Pink’s latest book, “Drive”. It caught my attention because the topic (motivation) was one of the topics I studied in relation to knowledge sharing (thus, motivation for knowledge sharing) a couple of years ago. Looking back in my blog postings I realize that I 
didn’t post much about it. It still has my interest though!
Pink analyzes literature on motivation, for me it didn’t contain much news. He calls the conclusions “shocking”, especially because companies don’t apply the results of the many studies about motivation and what motivates people. Companies think that the best way to motivate employees is to give them money. Perhaps the “carrot-and-stick” method worked in the past. However, nowadays people have different and more internal motivators. Pink summarizes those internal motivators as autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Pink calls this new form of motivation “Motivation 3.0”. He distinguishes between Type I and Type X behavior. Type X is motivated by extrinsic motivators, such as money. Type I is motivated by the three above-mentioned internal motivators.
Although much of the content wasn’t new for me, I enjoyed reading this new book of Pink. Actually, I liked the chapter about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi most, but maybe I’m prejudiced since I think C’s work is very interesting. Csikszentmihalyi has done more than describing “flow”, which is well reflected in this chapter.
There is a test on Daniel Pink's website where you can find out which type you are. I’ve tried it several times, with several other people and we always ended up as Type X, even when we filled out answer that we know are related to Type I. We wondered how reliable such test is…