the new motivators: what drives us now
The business metrics of ROI are changing in ways even successful management may not be aware of, especially if historically it has been left-brain dominant. But, successful management can use its left-minded logic to resolve that something new is happening that requires something new to keep ahead and succeed.
In Daniel Pink’s two recent books, “A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future,” and “Drive,” the author hits on themes I’ve inherently felt as a hybrid left- and right-minded marketing director. He makes salient points on the business values of employing a different kind of individual and company mindset than what fueled success in the past era of “left brain” dominance (law, accounting, software, data+knowledge-based innovation) — the Information Age that the left-brain era engendered.
In our landscape-changing world, the new analytics for ROI are shifting to “right-brain” qualities – inventiveness, empathy, meaning – to complement, not replace, left-brain logic and technical prowess to solve a different set of business challenges that require pattern recognition, connecting the dots, and making high-concept leaps of innovation and performance. Hence, there is a pressing need to re-calibrate how we motivate our new, whole-minded organizations: 
1. Rethink everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people — the old “carrot-stick” approach just doesn’t work like it used to.
2. High performance and satisfaction today come from
- the deeply human need to direct our own lives to learn and create new things
- to do better by ourselves and our world
3. There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does for motivating people for today’s challenges.
4. It’s a given, a base expectation, for employees to be incentivized by salary, bonuses and stock options. But for a company to out-think, out-innovate and outperform its competitors, the new motivation it needs to trigger come from three new hot-response areas:
Autonomy- the desire to direct our own lives.
Mastery- the urge to get better and better at something that matters.
Purpose- the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
