Daniel H. Pink Discusses the Intersection of Lean Methodology and Motivation in His Book ‘Drive’

Dan Pink joins me to discuss his book Drive and the science behind what actually motivates people — ideas deeply aligned with Lean thinking and Deming. We explore why “if-then” rewards backfire for complex work, the dysfunctions of incentive schemes in healthcare, and how autonomy, mastery, and purpose drive real engagement far better than carrots and sticks.

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Episode #107 is something I've been looking forward to for some time now – an interview with Dan Pink, the author of some outstanding books including Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, among others.

Today, we're talking about Drive and a number of issues that will be familiar and relevant, yet thought-provoking, to Lean thinkers and students of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, ideas such as the dysfunctions of incentives and rewards, intrinsic motivation, and finding the balance between autonomy and following “standardized work” in a modern workplace.

We unravel Pink's differentiation of tasks – the simple, routine ones versus the complex and creative – and their differing responses to ‘if-then' motivators. As Pink reveals, this standard method of motivation can, in fact, hamper performance when it comes to non-routine tasks. In an era where tasks that require creativity and conceptual thought predominate, what place does the traditional understanding of motivation have? Stay tuned as we deep dive into this conundrum.

You can find Dan on Twitter as @DanielPink, and his website is www.danpink.com, which has his blog, and more. Dan has a paperback version of Drive coming out in the spring of 2011 and, if you've read Drive, you can send him ideas and feedback via this blog post of his.

In the podcast, I reference back to:

• An earlier interview with Alfie Kohn, on education
• A recent WSJ article on the decline of creativity in kids, thanks to our school system

To point others to this episode, use the simple URL: www.leanblog.org/107.

Alfie Kohn on Punished by Rewards, Deming, and Rethinking Motivation

For earlier episodes, visit the main Podcast page, which includes information on how to subscribe via RSS or via Apple Podcasts.

If you have feedback on the podcast, or any questions for me or my guests, you can email me at leanpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave a voicemail by calling the “Lean Line” at (817) 372-5682 or contact me via Skype id “mgraban”. Please give your location and your first name. Any comments (email or voicemail) might be used in follow ups to the podcast.

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The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Are you familiar with conventional wisdom about human motivation? It's commonly believed that rewards generate more of a particular action, and punishments discourage it. This principle, for instance, informs many incentive schemes at workplaces, where bonuses are shorthand for excellence and reprimands flag poor performance.

However, in his book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” prolific author Daniel H. Pink posits a somewhat unconventional perspective on human motivation. Marshaling evidence from 50 years of social science research, Pink argues that this “reward-and-punishment” model doesn't always hold up.

Before authoring “Drive,” Pink wrote several notable books, such as “A Whole New Mind,” “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko,” and “Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself.” His diverse background includes serving as a chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore from 1995 to 1997. He graduated from Northwestern University and holds a Law degree from Yale Law School.

The Dichotomy of Motivation in Our Work

Pink's starting point is the distinction between two types of tasks, namely the simple, routine, or algorithmic and more complex, creative, or nonroutine. The common assumption is that rewards, or “if-then” motivators, are generally effective for the simple tasks because they cultivate focus. However, Pink contends that this motivating method can inhibit performance for nonroutine tasks, allowing that incentives sometimes actually make performance worse. Such a reversal of conventional wisdom is likely to give pause to many businesses that operate on a traditional understanding of motivation.

An interesting dialectic arises when we consider the type of work most of us are doing today. Gone are the days when physical labor or following strict rules with your brain-defined work. Most workers today, white-collar or blue-collar, engage in tasks that require creativity and conceptual thought. Therefore, a system of motivation designed for rule-based work is incongruous with the reality of contemporary work.

How Motivation Plays Out in the Real World

How, then, does the dynamic of motivation operate in practice? Pink explores how the reward-and-punishment model can lead to unanticipated outcomes. He cites a hypothetical example in healthcare. If the total costs of all infections from hospital care amounts to $50 million, an intuitive solution might be to offer a $25 million bonus to the employees if they manage to eradicate infections.

However, this approach invites manipulation and fosters a narrow focus on money rather than enhancing patient care. For instance, this model could incentivize staff to reclassify infections as some other ailment, pass over riskier patients, or skew the priority from optimal patient care to bonus maximization.

Reimagining Engagement in The Workplace

Given the inadequacies of the standard motivational paradigm, what is the way forward? From influential research, Pink proposes three factors for enduring motivation during complex tasks:

• autonomy,
• mastery, and
• purpose.

Here, autonomy signifies self-direction, mastery is the innate interest in improving one's skills, and purpose refers to the sense of contributing to a larger cause beyond oneself.

In terms of fostering engagement, the author argues that autonomy is fundamental. Emphasizing self-direction is key to achieving genuine engagement from employees. Pink maintains that compliance, often the goal of management, doesn't equate to engagement. Instead, it's fundamental to human nature to engage when self-motivated, not when coaxed or controlled. Offering continual feedback rather than an annual review can cultivate this preferred motivational culture.

Yet striking the perfect balance between guidelines and freedom is easier said than done. As tasks become more complex and variable in nature, distinguishing between when to apply rule-based algorithms or integrate flexibility for creativity is less clear.

Nevertheless, as long as the organizational culture cherishes continuous improvement and sees making suggestions or improvements as part of usual work, employees will likely be intrinsically motivated to contribute to development.

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Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast. Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. Now here's your host, Mark Graban.

Mark Graban: This is Mark Graban. This is episode 107 of my podcast for December 20, 2010. I'm very happy to be joined today by author Daniel H. Pink. We're going to be talking about his most recent book called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Dan is previously the author of books including A Whole New Mind, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, which is a manga format Japanese comic book subtitled The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. And his first book was called Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself. Now, Dan is a free agent himself. He worked in the White House, though, as a chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore from 1995 to 1997, and has held other positions in politics and government. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and he has a law degree from Yale Law School.

So today we're going to be talking about his book Drive and some of the overlap between the ideas there that will be very familiar to Lean thinkers and students of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. So I want to thank you for listening. You can find previous episodes at leanpodcast.org.

Well, Dan, it's a great pleasure to have you here on the podcast today. Thanks for taking some time to chat.

Dan Pink: It's a pleasure to be on your podcast.

Why Incentives Can Backfire

Mark Graban: Well, we're going to talk about your book, Drive, and there's a number of core themes in the book that I think are familiar and relevant to people in the Lean world. But the book certainly adds a lot of the research basis and a lot of new ideas there. I wonder if you could talk first, maybe just kind of introduce one of the core ideas in the book about incentives and some of the dysfunctions around how research has shown that incentives can actually make performance worse.

Dan Pink: Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the big concepts in the book. And what I did in this book, Mark, is look at about 50 years of social science on human motivation and field studies and laboratory experiments. And what's so fascinating about it is that all of us know about motivation. We have this intuitive sense about motivation. We have this intuitive sense of the physics of motivation, the same thing.

We have an intuitive sense of the physics of our natural world. And we tend to believe that if you reward something, you get more of it, and if you punish it, you get less of it. And that's true a lot of the times. But what this science shows is that it's actually not true all the time. And that, to me, overturns an orthodoxy that most of us didn't even realize was an orthodoxy.

And again, what the science shows, I think is particularly relevant in the world of work, is that for relatively simple, routine, algorithmic types of tasks, the classic suite of motivators, the classic kind of incentive, what I call an “if-then” reward — as in, if you do this, then you get that — for the simple algorithmic stuff, they work pretty well. They get you to focus, look straight ahead, barrel into the right answer. But for the more complicated conceptual, creative work, those kinds of “if-then” motivators, the science is pretty darn clear, just don't work very well, and can often backfire. And that wasn't a surprise to me. I think it's a surprise to many businesses.

And I think what alarms us a little bit is that many of our businesses are operating based on a very outdated, erroneous, kind of old wives' tale knowledge of motivation.

Beyond Frederick Taylor: Work Has Changed

Mark Graban: So in the book, you mentioned a name that would be familiar to, I think, my listeners and my blog readers — Frederick Taylor. This is going back 100 years, and I guess if you're paying someone to shovel pig iron, the more you pay them, the more they might shovel. But most of us don't work in that realm. I think it's good to revisit this.

Dan Pink: But I think what's interesting is that even we sort of accommodated ourselves to think that we have moved from shoveling pig iron to doing white collar work. But I think that one of the things that we didn't quite fully understand was that for a long time in this country, especially, a lot of white collar work was routine. It wasn't following rules with your body, as shoveling pig iron is, but it was following rules with your brain. It was very algorithmic work. It was adding up columns of figures.

It was doing things that you could reduce to a recipe. And today, relatively few people, either in the blue collar or the white collar workforce, are doing that kind of work. It just isn't very valuable anymore. And what we have is this kind of motivational scheme built for that kind of work, for rule-based work. And today we have more and more people doing work that requires creativity, conceptual thinking.

And so I think the system is profoundly out of sync in many ways.

Mark Graban: It's good that you mentioned the blue collar world. I saw an article the other day about General Electric bringing more factories back into the US. And a lot of those factories are operating under more of a lean, team-based culture. And there was a quote in the article — a 29-year-old college graduate that used to work in the mortgage industry said, well, this isn't a grimy place, I'm paraphrasing, where you chuck your brain at the door. We actually have to make a lot of decisions.

Dan Pink: Exactly. That's the thing. I mean, that's just my own personal beef. My own personal annoyance is — I don't even want to start a rant here, but let me start a rant. If you look at, say, political ads and people talk about good middle class jobs, and the visual representation of that is very often a 59-year-old burly white man with some grease on his shirt. And first of all, that's not what the typical middle class job in America is today.

You want to know a typical middle class job? Show me a 41-year-old Hispanic woman in healthcare. What's more, that's not even what blue collar work is today, right? Thanks in part to the lean revolution that allowed the United States to have an incredible manufacturing output with fewer people doing more sophisticated work. A lot of the folks on the assembly line now — well, this guy probably might have a four-year college degree.

A lot of folks have associate degrees. They're programming computers, they're working in teams, they're making decisions. And so even blue collar work in this country, at least, is not routine anymore.

Should We Pay People for Suggestions?

Mark Graban: So I'd be curious to get your thoughts on the idea of employee suggestions. You see this in manufacturing and in healthcare and a lot of times people kind of agonize over the idea of, do we need to have a reward system? Do we need to pay people for making suggestions to improve their work? And there's a lot of people who fall on the Theory Y side of the McGregor balance. People are naturally motivated — they want to improve quality, they want to make their jobs easier. What incentive do they need? We need to just get out of their way. Versus some workplaces where they say, well, we're going to pay you for each idea. Do you have some thoughts or what that research might indicate?

Dan Pink: I think that the research shows that the Theory Y folks are generally right, to a point. That is, if the main reason that you want to give a suggestion is to get money, then you're going to be focused on the money rather than the suggestion. Now, that said, I think one of the things that hardens people's cynicism in the workplace is what you could call a lack of efficacy. That is, they'll make a suggestion and nothing will happen.

Mark Graban: The dreaded suggestion box.

Dan Pink: Yeah, well, I think the suggestion box is just one of the things that's fostered an enormous amount of cynicism in the workplace. I think people will make suggestions and will be intrinsically motivated to improve things if their suggestions are taken seriously and, if they're good suggestions, implemented. If it's simply this kind of kabuki theater where you make a suggestion because the boss is trying to make it seem like he or she listens to your suggestions, then I actually think it does harm. If the cynicism is so deeply rooted that the only way to show you're serious about suggestions is to pay for them, then that actually makes a little bit of sense. But I think, in general, a culture that prizes suggestions and — to appropriate some of the kaizen language — continuous improvement, I think those things come organically. That's what it is to do your job. It isn't something separate. It's what you do.

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

Mark Graban: Now, when I talk about what we do and the why we do it, in your book, you lay out kind of a framework of what organizations can do to get engagement as opposed to just having compliant drones. Could you summarize those three points for the listeners?

Dan Pink: Yeah, well, I think what I'm arguing here, again harvesting this 50 years of science from some incredible scholars, is that for complicated conceptual work, carrots and sticks are less effective, far less effective, than we think. And what really leads to enduring motivation for those sorts of tasks are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is a sense of self-direction. Mastery is our desire to get better at something because we just like to get better at stuff. We like to improve our capacities.

And purpose is seeing that what you do connects to a larger whole, contributes to something larger than yourself. And I think when it comes to engagement, autonomy is really the most important thing. And this goes back to Frederick Winslow Taylor and the whole notion of management itself, which is very much designed to get compliance. I mean, that's the goal of management. And we do want some measure of compliance in our organizations, but what we really want is engagement.

And I just think that you or I or any of your listeners or any human being — we don't engage by being managed. We don't engage by being controlled. The only way that human beings engage is if we get there under our own steam. And that's why I think that self-direction is the pathway to engagement.

And if we try to manage people into engagement, it's inevitably going to fail. We're essentially using the wrong technology for the task.

The Tension Between Autonomy and Standardized Work

Mark Graban: Yeah, I think the autonomy piece is so important to either my own work or people I work with. In hospitals, there's often discussion within the lean framework — in any setting — of there's a lot of compliance talk, unfortunately, as opposed to engagement talk. How do we get people to buy in? Which to me usually means, how do I get people to do what I want to do? There's all kinds of phrases that get thrown around of, well, it's just because people don't like change.

I think a lot of times it comes down to people just — nobody likes to be told what to do to an overly detailed extent.

Dan Pink: Yeah, I think that's true. In general, for the people who are skeptical of this, what I always do is say, okay, tell me about the best boss you ever had. Describe the best boss you ever had. And you very rarely hear people say, oh, the best boss I ever had was — she was awesome. She breathed down my neck the whole time. She told me exactly what to do and how to do it. She gave me no discretion. I didn't grow at all. You hear different lyrics, but you hear the music of autonomy. And I think that's even more necessary for creative and conceptual work.

Now, I think the interesting question is one that you've wrestled with, I know, in your work and in your blog — how do you integrate a notion of autonomy and self-direction in a lean system that requires a certain amount of rule following, particularly in healthcare, where there are huge safety concerns as well?

Mark Graban: And I like the way you break down in the book the difference between algorithmic work and heuristic work. There's certainly elements of each in healthcare. I think sometimes, strangely, things get reversed where the things that are algorithmic — like how do you insert a central line into a patient — that's proven from a patient safety standpoint. If that's done a very precise, consistent certain way, people don't get infections, using checklists or lean methods. And then there's heuristic work of the more creative diagnostic work and the caring side of healthcare that you can't put into a procedure or a checklist. It seems oftentimes in healthcare, people are left to do as they please on the algorithmic, and then for the heuristic work, they're being given overly top-down training rules.

It seems like maybe things are reversed because healthcare can be as bad as a stereotypical manufacturing environment in terms of being very top-down command and control, which is surprising considering healthcare certainly has purpose down and there's a lot of opportunity for mastery. But it's this autonomy piece that can trip people up. What's the right balance?

Dan Pink: Yeah, I don't know if there is a single right balance. I find it alarming, that trend that you're talking about, as if we're going to have checklists for empathy. First you say your name, then you look deeply into the patient's eye — step two. I just think that's kind of silly and inhumane. I think it's possible to square the circle in a way.

I'm not a patient, but like any human being likely to be a patient at one point, I want my doctor or nurse following a checklist if it's proven that a checklist is a way to ensure my safety. Now, the thing about that is that in a lot of that kind of environment, there needs to be a measure of autonomy in the sense that — in an operating theater, if there's a checklist, and I'm just using “checklist” loosely here, I know that checklist and lean aren't interchangeable — but if you just think about a certain checklist approach to surgery, there has to be autonomy in that operating theater because if the head surgeon skips a step, then anybody there who knows the checklist has to be able to raise their hand and say, doctor, you forgot step four. And so there is autonomy in that kind of system.

And I think it's just a matter of being algorithmic where algorithms work and being heuristic where heuristics work and trying to divine the difference between those two. And again, ironically, there's not an algorithm for that. I mean, it's the kind of tough judgment calls that go on. I think one of the great things about Lean that I like is the collaborative nature of it. And I think some ways groups end up — the sort of group intelligence can help make that decision in an effective way.

The Toyota Model: Follow the Standard, Then Improve It

Mark Graban: With the lean methodology, or if you look at what Toyota teaches, I've heard them describe the balance as — it's every employee's job first to do the work as it's defined, and people have a role in defining that current best practice. But then secondly, and this is what's missing in so many workplaces, you have an obligation — not just a right, but an obligation — to help improve that method. Which sounds an awful lot like autonomy, as opposed to a top-down model that says, here's the standard operating procedure, follow it or you're fired.

Dan Pink: Right. Which is a way to guarantee the minimum level of compliance necessary for someone not to get fired.

Mark Graban: And I work with some healthcare leaders that thankfully are moving away from just that compliance view because, from a practical standpoint, in a 24/7 operation, this one leader I'm thinking of in particular came to the realization of — well, even if I wanted to breathe down people's necks, I can't be there 24/7. And if I'm relying on compliance, people are only going to be compliant when someone's looking. From whatever starting point you come from, I think a lot of people are starting to come to the realization that some of these methods either aren't right or they just don't work. A lot of that research you cite in your book kind of shows that.

Why You Can't Just Pay People to Eliminate Infections

Mark Graban: One other scenario I might just throw out because it might be fun to discuss. If you look at incentives and the idea of, if you want more of something, let's reward people for it — look at healthcare hospital infections. It seems like if the world were that easy, at the basic physics level, as you called it, we could just add up the cost. Let's say if all the infections that our patients get cost us and society $50 million, why don't we just offer the employees collectively a $25 million bonus if they have zero infections?

But if it were that easy, we would already have that licked. We just can't offer prizes or bribes for good performance.

Dan Pink: Right. And the other thing is there are other kinds of unintended consequences of that, obviously, in that it invites some measure of cheating. So that thing that that guy has — that's not really an infection, that's something else. Or, oh, maybe we shouldn't do this procedure on this guy because he might be susceptible to an infection.

So even though this might be the right approach medically, we don't want to take the risk because if he's prone to an infection, it's going to drive our numbers down and therefore screw up our bonus. And so one of the things about these contingent rewards is that they raise the salience, as psychologists would call it, of money. And except if you're like a bond trader, for most professionals, raising the salience of money can actually impair performance.

So if I take a kid into a pediatrician — we have an excellent pediatrician, I can't imagine her doing this. But imagine if she retired and we had to go to another pediatrician and that pediatrician had some kind of elaborate incentive scheme. I don't want in that pediatrician's head them saying, oh, what's the best way to get my bonus in treating this kid? I want the pediatrician to say, what's the best way to treat this kid? I think that's really the huge danger.

The Power of Feedback Over Financial Incentives

Dan Pink: Now, that said, and I think that you might have even written about this — giving people the feedback on that and the data on that can be very useful. It just doesn't necessarily need to be tangled up with money.

So I've seen stuff — I don't know chapter and verse at all — but I remember hearing that giving doctors feedback and data on how they were performing relative to others actually ended up improving their performance. There wasn't a payoff for that. They just wanted the feedback and wanted to know. Part of it could be ego and competitiveness, I think in this case somewhat harnessed for good, although you can still have those same kinds of unintended consequences. But people want to know how they're doing.

And I think we innately want to do better. And I think the yearning to do better is very healthy. I think the yearning to do better in order to get money is less healthy in many contexts.

Mark Graban: Yeah, I've seen a lot of situations where posting comparative results or data for different surgeons drives improvement, which — whether you call it ego or competitive — seems to be driven by intrinsic motivation of, well, I want to be good, I want mastery, I want good outcomes for my patients because that's my purpose.

Dan Pink: It's feedback. I think that's a way to look at it. It's feedback on your performance. And the truth is that some performance needs to be assessed relatively. That is, I want to know whether I'm a good surgeon. I want to know how I'm doing relatively.

I say that as a writer — if I sell X number of books and I think, wow, that's pretty good. Well, I don't really know whether it's any good unless I know what other people have done and where it fits in relatively. Again, my point is that it's not completely this ennobled view. Especially with surgeons, I think this form of competitiveness, this desire to be number one, can have all kinds of problems.

But I think enriching the feedback in that kind of work or any kind of work is really valuable because I think workplaces are largely a feedback desert for most people.

Performance Goals vs. Learning Goals

Mark Graban: Yeah, that ties into the ideas around annual reviews, where instead of continual feedback, people get a number at the end of the year, or they get one meeting with their boss. But it's back to the idea on data. I think that data can be either used as a source of information or a source for punishment. You're right to bring up the dysfunctions that would come if surgeons were being punished. And I think it discounts the fact that, let's say, infection rates aren't strictly up to the individual — there are systemic factors.

Dan Pink: Right. There's research on this too, and it's a very close analogy to schools. And when we think about grades, there are some people out there saying, let's eliminate grades. And I don't necessarily buy that. But I think that we need to think about grades as a form of feedback.

I think for many students, grades are the goal. That's the purpose. That's why you study. And Carol Dweck and others have done a lot of research that shows that when people pursue performance goals — i.e., getting an A — that doesn't necessarily lead to learning. Performance goals and learning goals are very different things. Now, in many cases, people who pursue learning goals end up performing reasonably well. But the converse isn't true. People who pursue performance goals often have a kind of shallow, short-term understanding of the material they're supposedly learning, even though their grades and scores are high.

Extrinsic Rewards and the Decline of Creativity

Mark Graban: I was glad in your book that you mentioned Alfie Kohn, who I was fortunate to have interviewed previously, and when he talks about how those extrinsic rewards really do a number on people in terms of draining creativity out of very young children. I even saw a story this week that said kids' creativity scores — I don't know how you score creativity in an objective way, but there is a metric.

Dan Pink: It's called a Torrance test. That's a metric of divergent thinking and conceptual thinking. I mean, it's not perfect, but it's one way.

Mark Graban: Yeah, but the recent news story I saw compared scores from 1990 to 2004 and how those scores had plummeted. And so the question being raised was — the focus on scores and teaching to the test and some things that are maybe dysfunctional within education, is that getting worse and going to have an impact?

Dan Pink: Well, I mean, again, both of us know that a correlation is not cause and effect. That said, this decline in creativity correlates almost perfectly with the rise in emphasis in standardized testing and extrinsic rewards. I'm just saying.

Where to Learn More

Mark Graban: Well, Dan, this has been great fun talking to you about — boy, we've just scratched the surface on some of the themes that are in your book Drive. I would certainly encourage people listening, if they haven't picked it up yet, to grab their Kindle or order it on Amazon or go to their library. You have a paperback version coming out?

Dan Pink: Paperback version is coming out this spring, Mark, with some new material and what I'm hoping will be even more tools and tips and exercises for people.

Mark Graban: And if people want to read more, engage with you online, what are some ways they can find you?

Dan Pink: Well, you can always find me online at DanPink.com. I blog somewhat frequently, and there are other kinds of stuff on there that people can find out about the books if they want. We have some videos and all kinds of stuff, all for the low, low price of nothing.

Mark Graban: Are you working off of intrinsic motivation or something, Dan?

Dan Pink: Well, I'm working on my own business model, which is — you and I were talking about this before — to lose money on every transaction but make it up in volume.

Mark Graban: Can I tell you one quick story about blogging, though, before we wrap up? So I started blogging in 2005, totally from that intrinsic motivation standpoint of enjoying writing and liking to interact with people who read my stuff and basically doing it for free. Now, there was a two-year period where a now-defunct online publication was paying me a sum, not a huge amount of money, every month to simply republish stuff that I had already written. It was basically copy and paste and let them publish it on their website. And it felt like such drudgery — oh, I've got to log in again.

And it was something they were paying me for. And it kind of clicked when reading your book and hearing you talk about this — well, wait a minute. It seemed to fall in line with the idea that doing something you enjoy, not that I'm going to do all of my work for free, I need to put a roof over my head —

Dan Pink: But yeah, of course.

Mark Graban: It sort of struck me as, well, that was kind of odd that something that should have been easy for a little bit of money wasn't nearly as fun as the creative process of writing.

Dan Pink: Very interesting. Very interesting.

Mark Graban: Well, you're kind to say that. My little indulgent story —

Dan Pink: No, it is, but it's totally consistent with it.

Mark Graban: Well, Dan Pink, and I was going to mention, in terms of intro, I'm proud you are an alum of Northwestern University and you're out there doing great work and making us all proud.

Dan Pink: It's up to all of us Northwestern graduates to be out there blogging for free.

Mark Graban: It was a real pleasure to have you on the podcast today, and thanks for sharing the ideas that are in your outstanding book Drive.

Dan Pink: Mark, it's been a pleasure being on your podcast. Thanks for having me.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. This has been the Lean Blog Podcast. For Lean news and commentary updated daily, visit www.leanblog.org. If you have any questions or comments about this podcast, email Mark at leanpodcast@gmail.com.