Pink takes a look at much the same evidence base as Lawrence and Nohria do in Driven with a slightly different purpose. His take is that organizations rely too heavily on extrinsic motivators (carrots and sticks) at the expense of tapping into much more powerful intrinsic motivators. He is less interested in building a robust model of human behavior in organization than he is in trying to distill some practical short term advice. It makes for an easier read than Driven and Pink is a much better story-teller than Lawrence and Nohria. On the other hand, it sacrifices some important depth in the process.

Pink was also a speaker at last year’s TED conference; the video from that talk gives you the gist of his argument in 20 minutes:

I recently finished Seth Godin’s excellent new book Linchpin (see Choosing to Draw Your Own Maps for my review). In it, he devotes a central chapter to the notion of resistance and how we get in our own way in the pursuit of our goals. Godin recommended Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art for more insight.

I’m sure the fact that the book has been lurking in my ‘to read’ stack for several years is deeply meaningful.

Godin’s recommendation was enough to push Pressfield’s book to the top of that stack. If you find that you can be your own worst enemy facing creative work, don’t take as long as I did to get to this short but deeply insightful book. Pressfield is the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and, more recently, has been blogging at Steven Pressfield Blog. The War of Art is an extended reflection by Pressfield on the practical challenges of creating.

Pressfield breaks his book into three sections. In the first, he takes a close look at resistance and the myriad ways it works to keep us from trying and carrying on. Ways both obvious and devious. For all the legitimate barriers and delays and excuses, resistance ultimately boils down to self-sabotage; our lizard-brain trying to protect us from fears it cannot understand or articulate.

In the second section, Pressfield offers his answer – turn pro. Show up and do the work. Forget about inspiration. Pressfield has good company here. Here’s a sampling of advice from various creative pros, all with the same fundamental message:

Anyone who waits to be struck with a good idea has a long wait coming. If I have a deadline for a column or a television script, I sit down at the typewriter and damn well decide to have an idea.

Andy Rooney

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas

Linus Pauling

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at none o’clock sharp.

Somerset Maugham

For all the advertisements and enticements promising instant gratification, we all know that it’s really about doing the work. And this is true whether the work is carpentry or sculpture. Pressfield lays out the following qualities that distinguish a professional from an amateur:

1. We show up every day
2. We show up no matter what
3. We stay on the job all day
4. We are committed over the long haul
5. The stakes for us are high and real
6. We accept remuneration for our labor
7. We do not overidentify with our jobs
8. We master the technique of our jobs
9. We have a sense of humor about our jobs
10. We receive praise or blame in the real world.

(The War of Art. pp.69-70)

In the final section, Pressfield reveals the payoff of facing resistance with professionalism. He elects to couch it in spiritual terms, but substitute your own terms if that troubles you. Here’s the payoff to professionalism:

Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.

This is the secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. we have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. ideas comes. Insights accrete.

(The War of Art. p. 108)

We can’t  control how the world will react to what we create. All we can control is whether we show up to do the work and whether we have mastered the tools of our craft. Pressfield’s promise is that if we do our part, the Universe will notice and may help.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love offers a similar perspective in a talk she gave at TED last year:

Seth Godin continues his quest to become the next Tom Peters. Linchpin is the latest installment of Godin’s advice to today’s knowledge workers and aspiring entrepreneurs. Here he shifts his focus from broader issues of marketing to the individual.

Godin is the latest in a long line of thinkers who’ve been arguing that the way we’ve designed and organized the current economic system has reached its limits and needs fixing. Godin is less interested in where the system as a whole is going, than in what you as an individual can do to carve out a more satisfying perch now.

The economy of the twentieth century was 0.01% insight, 0.09% design, and 99% execution. Mass production begat mass markets begat mass media. What that system demands is an occasional new idea plus a way to turn out lots of copies. There’s a playbook and most people have a tightly prescribed assignment to follow. Color outside the lines and the system, by design, will grind you up and spit you out.

In the economic system that has been slowly emerging over the last several decades, the proportions between insight, design, and execution are shifting. Insight and design, always important, become more so. Equally important, the system as a whole operates at a higher speed. It makes less sense to invest heavily in optimizing for execution in a business model that will become obsolete in a few years. What this all leads to is a need for more people who can see a bigger picture of how their world hooks into the broader system and can improvise when the unexpected inevitably occurs. In Godin’s parlance – linchpins.

There are two particular strengths in Godin’s approach. One, he’s very clear that choosing to act as a linchpin will entail a great deal of both intellectual and emotional work. This is not about visualizing all the good things you wish would flow in your direction. This is about grasping how the system is evolving and seizing the opportunities it opens up.

Because change is occurring throughout the system, seizing opportunities is not constrained to an elite, however you choose to define the elite. We’re all equipped to see and exploit opportunities to make things work better. We are all capable, as Godin puts it, of "creating order out of chaos." There’s certainly more than enough chaos to work with.

The second strength of Godin’s approach is in focusing on the emotional work it will take to become and succeed as a linchpin. Fitting into a carefully defined role is safe and imposes little apparent emotional cost. Choosing to look freshly at the territory and draw new maps is scary. Explorers end up with arrows in their backs. Godin understands this and devotes a key central chapter to dealing with resistance. Significantly, he locates the primary source of resistance in our own hearts and minds. He opens this chapter with Steve Jobs’s admonition that "real artists ship." Excuses are easier to deal with than feedback on finished work, so we become adept at handling excuses instead of finishing.

Godin stays true to his argument and does not offer a step-by-step action plan. That, as they say in math class, is  left as an exercise for the reader.

Lawrence, Paul R. and Nitin Nohria

What happens when you combine what we are learning about evolutionary biology with what we have learned about how organizations work? One of the wellsprings of thinking about organization and organization design has been the Organizational Behavior group at the Harvard Business School. The Hawthorne Effect was articulated based on the earliest research efforts of this group in the 1920s.

Paul Lawrence has been part of this group since the 1950s and Nitin Nohria has been part of it since the 1980s. Their laboratory has been large-scale organizations and their primary methods have been anthropological and ethnographic. They’ve been in the field observing how real people operate inside real organizations. In Driven, Lawrence and Nohria take time away from the field to reflect on that knowledge in the light of what others have been learning about evolutionary biology. The result is a fascinating and provocative book. Warren Bennis, in an Editor’s Note, describes it as a near perfect book "applying the truths of one domain, the biological and neurological sciences, to another, the embryonic and needy organizational sciences."

Instead of working with the overly simplistic theories of human behavior that seem to underlie most current business and economic thinking, Lawrence and Nohria develop a simple theory grounded in the biological sciences that may account for what we actually observe in organizations in the wild.

They propose an model of human behavior built on top of four fundamental drives. Each drive is distinct and like elementary particles in differing combinations they account for all the more complex behaviors we see in organizations. It’s a strong claim but Lawrence and Nohria make a strong case for why their hypotheses are plausible in light of what we do know. Moreover, they propose straightforward ways we could go about testing them.

The four drives they propose are:

1. To acquire – both actual and reputational assets and power
2. To bond – with other individuals and with groups
3. To learn – new things and new skills
4. To defend – the above against threats

Lawrence and Nohria draw on everything from fMRI studies to ethnographic accounts to establish that they choices are plausible. In the process, they take us through a powerful synopsis of what multiple scientists in multiple disciplines have to tell us about human behavior. In an effort to develop a unified theory, they pursue of strategy of triangulating from these multiple perspectives to close in on a likely underlying model.

Given this hypothesis of four fundamental drives, Lawrence and Nohria then turn their attention to how these drives interact with cognition and emotions to create behavior. They synthesize their model using the following schematic:

One of the more interesting aspects of this model is the central role that emotions play in decision making. Lawrence and Nohria believe that their fundamental drives operate through the brain’s limbic center. First, signals from the outside world are filtered through the drives and essentially prioritized in terms of their emotional relevance. Nothing gets through to the rational centers of the brain unless it has been tagged as emotionally relevant by one or more of these underlying drives. Second, emotions provide the motivating energy to translate thought back into action.

Although the principle goal of this book is to lay out a theory consistent with what we’re learning from the biological sciences, Lawrence and Nohria do draw on four broad case examples to test the essential plausibility of the emerging model. They examine GM, HP, Russia, and Ireland in terms of how their model helps interpret where these institutions have been and where they are likely to go. They do so in enough depth to make a plausible case for their model.

Lawrence and Nohria have been engaged in working out the implications of their model since Driven was first published in 2002. Lawrence is at work on a new book extended his thinking and developing materials can be found at http://www.prlawrence.com/. In the meantime, if you are trying to make sense of the complex world of the human animal operating in complex organizations, Driven ought to be at or near the top of your reading list. Warren Bennis made the following claim at the beginning of this book:

When you dig in and begin to understand the four-drive framework of human nature, I doubt that you will ever look at your organization, your work group, your world, your family in the same way. Or yourself, for that matter. I also doubt that you will cling to or be content with a simplified hegemony of one basic Uber Alles motive anymore; the sort of stuff we read in the pages of economic texts that venerate acquisition and self-interest exclusively or in the classic Freudian writings that elevate the psychosexual drive to the exclusion of others, or certainly in the faux-heroic pages of Ayn Rand
                                                    (Warren Bennis, Editor’s Note, pp. xiii-xiv)

I thought this was a bit of marketing puffery before I finished Driven. Since then, I think Bennis has it just about right. More and more, I am finding myself integrating the ideas from this book into my thinking and my practice.

Earlier this year, I came across the Darwin 150 Project, an effort to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. They’ve got a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and all the rest of today’s modern social environment.

I found them by way of Kendall Crolius, a long-time friend from my college days. One of the sponsors of the event was Reading Odyssey, which was hosting reading groups for folks who wanted to read and discuss the book. As one of those classic works I was familiar with, but hadn’t actually read, I signed up to force myself to start and finish the thick paperback that had been sitting patiently on my shelves for many years. Well worth the effort.

More than anything else, I got the opportunity to watch science done in its purest form. Darwin starts with the evidence and some head-scratching, Andy Rooney "did you ever notice" questions. He subjects them to a relentless logical assault of working out the simplest explanation that can account for the facts and stand up to all the objections he can dream up. I was especially struck by his willingness, even eagerness, to wade into the messiness of the data. His Occam’s razor is very, very sharp and he wields it with extraordinary precision. Darwin shows exactly how powerful and robust a good theory can be.

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, MacLeod, Hugh

Maybe all business authors should be encouraged to start their writing careers doodling on the back of business cards. Wouldn’t we all be better off if more of us invested in distilling our messages as crisply as Hugh MacLeod does here.

MacLeod started drawing on business cards to pass the time hanging out in bars in New York city, graduated to thinking in public on his blog, Gapingvoid, and now has his very own book. All of which is pretty compelling evidence as to which side of the following notion he comes down on:

Ignore Everybody collects a number of MacLeod’s cartoon with his observations on creativity. It’s particularly relevant if you’re called on to exercise more creativity in the chaotic stew that is today’s business world. Here’s a sampling of some of his keys:

• The idea doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be yours
• Good ideas have lonely childhoods
• Allow your work to age with you
• Put the hours in

Blinding insights? Not particularly. Smartly packaged lasting truths isn’t bad. Certainly more than worth the short and pleasant time it will take you to peruse MacLeod’s gift to us.

Scott Berkun is an ex-software development manager from Microsoft who is in the midst of a transition from manager/geek to author/public speaker. So far, I’ve interacted with Scott in his writer persona and have yet to hear him deliver wearing his speaker hat. Based on Confessions of a Public Speaker I’d happily grab a seat at the front of the room.

Confessions combines tales from the trenches of public speaking with substantially more practical and useful advice than the average book on this topic. As someone who has also presented in front of audiences from ten to a thousand, i can attest that Scott’s advice is immensely relevant and highly pragmatic. What he is especially good in capturing are the emotional highs and lows of putting yourself in front of masses of strangers to inform (and possibly entertain) them. A couple of his chapter titles give you a sense for what you’ll find:

• I can’t see you naked
• How to work a tough room
• Do not eat the microphone
• The science of not boring people
• The little things pros do
• What to do if your talk sucks
• What to do when things go wrong

Berkun’s advice is not theoretical. Nor is it dressed up. He opts to share his stories and tips in the bar after the gig. The stories are good. The advice is better.

Makers, Doctorow, Cory

Cory Doctorow is turning into one of my most useful ‘cheats’ in making sense of the ongoing collision between technology and human drives that is today’s world of electronic commerce, social media, enterprise 2.0, and the teeming mix of catchphrases, acronyms, and neologisms cluttering my inbox and browser windows. Doctorow does just the opposite of "teching the tech;" that lazy approach to storytelling of sprinkling random technological terminology into an otherwise ordinary story. Instead he takes a solid understanding of current and near term technology trends, extrapolates them in not just plausible, but defensible directions, and then explores how real people are likely to react and respond to that imagined environment. The result is an absorbing, and sometimes moving, story of our human need to create, connect, and matter.

The core of Makers is the story of two tinkerers, Perry and Lester, driven by the desire to make interesting stuff out of whatever is lying around. In Doctorow’s near future, this includes last year’s kids toys loaded with robotics, speech synthesizers, and multiple sensors discarded for this year’s models. Rip off an idea from an old Keystone cops movie, mix in some open source software and he has you imagining a golf cart maneuvered by half a dozen creatures out of Toy Soldiers. Down one path, this creative energy might lead to radically new models of work. Down another, it might trigger ugly immune responses from a threatened corporate economy and their lawyers. Doctorow explores several of these and other paths. Through it all he keeps us and his story grounded in human scale and human needs and wants.

Along the way, Doctorow generates multiple scenarios of new models of organizing work and likely responses from existing organizations and professions threatened by change. Because of his keen eye for the human reality of his stories, Doctorow’s scenarios are both more plausible and more compelling than similar efforts from pundits and consultants peddling their theories.

From time to time, government agencies and large organizations invite certain kinds of writers to come in and help make sense of the changes on and just over the horizon. These efforts draw an extra share of ridicule from outsiders who assume that the exercise is about predicting specific inventions and innovations. Here, Doctorow offers a stellar example of how the process really works. In a recent essay titled "Radical Presentism" he offers more reflections on how this imagining process works. But you’ll have more fun reading the story itself.

Alan Webber was the managing editor of the Harvard  Business Review and, wearing an entrepreneurial hat, was a cofounder of Fast Company magazine. He’s hung out with and paid attention to lots of smart people and he’s managed to acquire substantial experience in his own right. In Rules of Thumb Webber seeks to distill some of the lessons he’s learned for the benefit of the rest of us.

These kinds of books depend on whether the authors can tell a good story and whether they have any substantively useful insights. As you might expect, Webber has an excellent collection of stories, well told. More importantly, he delivers on the insights side. A few of his rules fall flat or feel clichéd but the bulk reinforce and extend themes I find important and frequently open up new perspectives.

Here are the rules Webber presents; it’s worth your effort to see what he does with each.

1. When the going gets tough, the tough relax
2. Every company is running for office. To win, give the voters what they want
3. Ask the last question first
4. Don’t implement solutions. Prevent problems
5. Change is a math formula
6. If you want to see with fresh eyes, reframe the picture
7. The system is the solution
8. New realities demand new categories
9. Nothing happens until money changes hands
10. A good question beats a good answer
11. We’ve moved from an either/or past to a both/and future
12. The difference between a crisis and an opportunity is when you learn about it
13. Learn to take no as a question
14. You don’t know if you don’t go
15. Every start-up needs four things: change, connections, conversation, and community
16. Facts are facts; stories are how we learn
17. Entrepreneurs choose serendipity over efficiency
18. Knowing it ain’t the same as doing it
19. Memo to leaders: focus on the signal to noise ratio
20. Speed = strategy
21. Great leaders answer Tom Peters’ great question: "How can I capture the world’s imagination?"
22. Learn to see the world through the eyes of your customer
23. Keep two lists. What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you up at night?
24. If you want to change the game, change the economics of how the game is played
25. If you want to change the game, change customer expectations
26. The soft stuff is the hard stuff
27. If you want to be like Google, learn Megan Smith’s three rules
28. Good design is table stakes. Great design wins
29. Words matter
30. The likeliest sources of great ideas are in the most unlikely places
31. Everything communicates
32. Content isn’t king. Context is king
33. Everything is a performance
34. Simplicity is the new currency
35. The Red Auerbach management principle: loyalty is a two-way street
36. Message to entrepreneurs: managing your emotional flow is more critical than managing your cash flow
37. All money is not created equal
38. If you want to think big, start small
39. "Serious fun" isn’t an oxymoron; it’s how you win
40. Technology is about changing how we work
41. If you want to be a real leader, first get real about leadership
42. The survival of the fittest is the business case for diversity
43. Don’t confuse credentials with talent
44. When it comes to business, it helps if you actually know something about something
45. Failure isn’t failing. Failure is failing to try
46. Tough leaders wear their hearts on their sleeves
47. Everyone’s at the center of their map of the world
48. If you want to make change, start with an iconic project
49. If you want to grow as a leader, you have to disarm your border guards
50. On the way up, pay attention to your strengths.; they’ll be your weaknesses on the way down
51. Take your work seriously. Yourself, not so much
52. Stay alert! There are teachers everywhere

"Free" is an excellent hook for Chris Anderson’s newest book from a sales and marketing perspective; whether it holds up as a core intellectual hook is less clear. I got my copy of  Free for free, of course, in exchange for a promise to review it. Nothing new about review copies, although the numbers may be skewing a bit with the proliferation of potential outlets for reviews. As the editor of Wired and the author of a previous successful book, The Long Tail, Anderson probably doesn’t have to worry about getting attention for his books. Free easily warranted reviews from Virginia Postrel in the New York Times and from Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker.

Anderson’s book represents one more attempt to extract appropriate business lessons for the emerging internet/information/flat economy. Choosing free as an organizing principle offers him the latitude to explore a wide range of phenomena and gather up a provocative collection of historical and contemporary tales. What it doesn’t do is provide enough of an organizing framework.

Zero has always been an interesting number beyond its use as a price. But it gains in power from the way it operates within a broader system, whether that system is mathematics, psychology, or economics. It’s the interaction between free and the rest of the system that is interesting. Focusing on free by itself detracts from understanding the system within which free is embedded.

Anderson summarizes the essential argument for free as follows "price has fallen to the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of everything online is close enough to zero that it pays to round down." This is the essential economic theory of perfectly competitive markets coupled with the long term economic trend of digital technologies driven by Moore’s Law. The problem of focusing solely on price is that it encourages shortchanging the more complete economic analysis that needs to be done to design a sustainable business in this evolving economic environment.

There’s a big problem and a little problem to address in this emerging environment that Anderson chronicles. The little problem comes in doing the necessary complete economic analysis that fully incorporates fixed and variable costs and the relevant cost trends over time. Whether "free" is a relevant part of the pricing strategy must be embedded in this more comprehensive analytic framework.

The  big problem is understanding whether we’ve reached or passed boundary conditions that make conventional economic guidance suspect.The reason zero is an interesting number in so many systems is that certain equations fall apart when variables hit zero. The answers are undefined. This is the question that Anderson skates up to but ultimately doesn’t address.

Free is a useful and relevant entry in this ongoing exploration. However, if you expect it to supply the answers, you have yet to understand the questions. You had  better be prepared for a more extensive reading, thinking, and action program if you hope to prosper in this evolving environment. Here’s one cut at an initial reading list:

• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Ariely, Dan
• Unleashing the Killer App : Digital Strategies for Market Dominance, Downes, Larry; Chunka Mui
• Net Worth : Shaping Markets When Customers Make the Rules, Hagel, John
• New Rules for the New Economy : 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World, Kelly, Kevin (Web version – full text)
• Out of Control : The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization, Kelly, Kevin (Web version – full text)
• Information Rules : A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Shapiro, Carl; Varian, Hal
• The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Benkler, Yochai