The central claim of Drive is that the motivational model underlying most management, education, and parenting in the developed world is not only empirically wrong but actively counterproductive for a wide range of important human activities. The model, which Pink calls Motivation 2.0, assumes that human beings are primarily motivated by external rewards and punishments: pay people more and they work harder; threaten consequences and they comply; offer bonuses and they perform. This model was adequate for the routine, mechanical tasks of the industrial era. It is destructively inadequate for the cognitive, creative, and collaborative work that now dominates modern economies.
The replacement Pink proposes, Motivation 3.0, is grounded in five decades of social science demonstrating that human beings have an innate drive toward autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are not luxuries or supplemental incentives. They are the conditions under which human beings do their best thinking, produce their most creative work, and sustain effort over time. When those conditions are present, people are more engaged, more productive, and more innovative. When they are absent, and particularly when they are replaced by contingent external rewards, people become less creative, less persistent, and less satisfied, even when they are working on tasks they would otherwise enjoy.