The energetic author, Daniel Pink, has a new book coming out at the end of the year. It’s called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I expect it will be a good one for which I will want to do one of my book reviews.

In the meantime, I strongly recommend that you view the 20-minute presentation Pink did earlier this year at the TED conference.

Best bosses know how to create an environment that motivates their people. What Dan Pink nails in this piece is how high performance in 21st century knowledge-based and creative thinking tasks require intrinsic motivators, based on on internal desire to do a job well because it is interesting, challenging, causing us to grow, and has a purpose greater than ourselves.

He relegates the traditional carrot-and-stick approach that is still the knee-jerk style of so many of today’s managers to only those jobs and tasks that are simple in steps and clear in deliverables.

As Pink says, science already knows this. Business just hasn’t caught up. As a result, managers are “leaving on the table” a lot of additional performance for which they are paying but not receiving. I will be coming back to this phenomenon in future posts.