According to Audible on exactly the 21st of October 2019, I bought the audiobook version of “Drive – The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us” by Daniel H. Pink. A must-read for anyone who want’s to create a work culture driven by inclusion & equity.
This book was originally published in 2009 (so says Google), yet it predicted the new normal of #remotework. Shocking right! It’s even more shocking to me because I read the book around the same time the pandemic is believed to have started.
Pink presented a really cool theory about humans having different motivating factors and society running on different operating systems throughout evolution. Motivation 1.0 was survival. For example in the Stone Age when people would be hunting mammoths or fleeing from sabretooth tigers.
Motivation 2.0 was the industrial revolution where the world rotated around money. It sort of still does, but there is now also TikTok (don’t ask me what it is), Tesla and Virtual Reality.
Motivation 3.0 focuses on 3 elements – Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery. Right now we are seeing all 3 manifest. According to Pink, “autonomy is the desire to direct our own lives”. Since the onset of the pandemic, choosing where and when we work, has become key to our ways of living. I’m sure you’ve noticed the droves of people moving out of the major cities.
Fortunately, many companies have noticed and are taking action. Especially Code Untapped. It makes me really proud to be part of such an organisation. You see Code Untapped was built on an ethos of respecting everyone’s side hustles and allowing people to work from where they choose to. This has allowed me to continue to build my virtual reality start-up on the side and continue to battle my long-term back pain at home.
For that I want to say thank you to my team.
Lastly, congratulations to Travis Robinson the global head of diversity, inclusion, and belonging at Spotify – for ushering Spotify’s “work from anywhere” program. Congratulations as well to all the SMEs out there as well as the big tech giants like Twitter, Facebook and SalesForce for doing the same and helping create a new & better normal.
Welcome to Motivation 3.0
