| CBI Interview |


DP: People enjoy very little autonomy in their day-to-day work. And, the flip side of job security, it’s very difficult to affect the other side of the bell curve—to get rid of people who aren’t performers. There’s virtually nothing you can do about it. It seems that, on the whole, with respect to government, it’s hard to get anything done. The main revelation for me, having been on the inside, is not how little gets done, but, rather, how much gets done—because the system is basically constructed so that nothing can be done.


CBI: You’ve written four interna- tional bestsellers, but, perhaps, the most unorthodox was Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, created in the Japanese manga comic style. What inspired that experiment?


CBI: Your newest book is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and the title of your upcoming IHRSA presenta- tion is “Drive: What the Science of Motivation Can Teach You About High Performance.” What’s the point you’re trying to make?


DP: When it comes to motivating employees, we’ve completely oversold the value of carrots and sticks— that’s the big conceptual takeaway. Carrots-and-sticks, rewards-and- punishments, can, in fact, be an effective management tool, but only for a relatively narrow range of tasks. The notion that they’re effective in every situation is just flat, flat wrong! They’re actually useful for a very small number of things. When it comes to conceptual, creative activities, they


“Johnny Bunko is the tale of a hapless dude, an accountant at a big firm, who experiences a dark night of the soul.”


DP: I’d done a fellowship in Japan in 2007 and had studied at the Manga Institute. Manga comics are a much bigger medium in Japan, and are used for everything—not just stories about superheroes or teenage romance. They’re also utilized for history, politics, cooking, and as financial and relationship guides. Johnny Bunko is the tale of a hapless dude, an accountant at a big firm, who experi- ences a dark night of the soul. But, thanks to the intervention of some magic chopsticks and a butt-kicking career advisor named Diana, he pro- ceeds to learn the six essential lessons that underlie any satisfying, productive career. Johnny Bunko is essentially a career guide in manga. It’s also the only graphic novel that’s ever become a Business Week bestseller.


38 Club Business Internat ional | JANUARY 2011 |


simply don’t work very well. What works much better is purpose, autonomy, and mastery. I think that’s something that people


who are drawn to the fitness industry understand intuitively: they have purpose; they make good use of auton- omy; and they understand mastery— that it takes a long time to get good at something.


CBI: Having said all of that, com- pensation remains critical, doesn’t it? Staff turnover will he heavy if clubs don’t pay competitively.


DP: I’ve got nothing against raises at all. Money is an important motivator, but, generally, not quite in the way we imagine. If you don’t pay people enough, or if you don’t treat them


www. ihrsa.org


fairly, you’re not going to get much in the way of morale, motivation, or performance. Period! Like any employer, club operators have to pay people enough; indeed, it’s wise to pay a bit more than that. In other words, the best use of money, as a motivator, is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. It’s fair to give someone a raise


because they’ve worked hard or have contributed a lot—no problem! Where it gets dicey is when you ask people to be creative and try to “motivate” them by saying, “If you do this, then you’ll get that.” That usually backfires.


CBI: So how can a company transi- tion from carrot/stick to motivators based on purpose, autonomy, and mastery?


DP: I think it’s difficult. I’ve written a little about “20% time,” which allows employees to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want. I actually don’t recommend it for most businesses; I


think it’s too abrupt. I think what’s important for most companies is to simply do something—to take some


small step. So, with respect to auton- omy, they could, for instance, hold a “FedEx day,” a single day—a day of intense autonomy—which has generated a host of ideas for the firms that have tried it.


CBI: FedEx day?


DP: Atlassian, an Australian software developer, is one of the firms that has used it to good effect. Once a quarter, on Thursday afternoon, they say to their developers, “Go work on whatever you want. Just show us the results on Friday afternoon.” It’s called a FedEx day because people have to deliver something overnight. Well, this one day of autonomy has yielded a lot of great innovations. A program like this is small and doable for just about any company.


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