Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Drive was first published in 2009, around the end of the Great Recession, which spanned approximately 18 months from 2007 to mid-2009. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this was the greatest period of economic decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Though many factors contributed to the Great Recession, one of the biggest culprits was the subprime mortgage crisis caused by loosely regulated banks and finance companies that prioritized short-term profits over the long-term health of the market.

In Drive, Pink argues extensively that the profit motive, while useful in many circumstances, can have negative effects on both individual people and large organizations. Some of these negative effects include short-term thinking and a willingness to cut corners and disregard ethical concerns for the sake of an immediate reward. Pink directly references the recession as an example of the negative consequences of profit-driven short-term thinking.

At the same time, the 1990s and 2000s saw the dramatic rise of Silicon Valley in California. As the economic and cultural influence of the internet continued to grow exponentially, more and more future-facing startup companies began to pop up, offering new and creative jobs that were different from any that had ever been seen before. This period saw the rise of many companies that are now fixtures of our society: Google, Facebook, Amazon, to name a few. In this context, Daniel Pink has his eyes fixed on a future where traditional work, like factory jobs, will be outsourced more and more to machines, and humans will increasingly take on jobs that required innovative, creative thinking. The rising prevalence of tech is why Pink chooses to speak about social systems in terms of computer operating systems (“Motivation 2.0” and “Motivation 3.0”), and also why he insists that companies must adapt their practices to the future or be left behind.