Drive - Reflections 1

A few thoughts to play with.

As I sit reading this book, Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, I am not struck by the initial message in the book that intrinsic motivation in business is lost or is at least not as pervasive as it needs to be. However, since then, I can not stop thinking about how motivation relates to my sales career, my colleagues and the higher-ups in all organizations influence on motivation.

Looking into myself, I ask what is at the core of my motivation in sales? How does this impact my daily routine? What value is there in sales teams where motivational cores are disparate? How do I maintain personal motivation in this situation?

Going a few pages further I am confronted by the idea of sales being a heuristic task rather than a algorithmic task. A heuristic task requires creativity while an algorithmic task is straight forward requiring no creativity. The former tends to provide great motivation in the workplace with that motivation adversly impacted by algorithmic rewards. As Pink states, "External rewards and punishments can work nicely for algorithmic tasks but they can be devastating for heuristic ones." My mind boggles at the fact that solution or consultative sales of high complexity are heuristic tasks which are monitored by management who employ primaralyextrinsic algorithmic reward models.