Adrian Gostick

The problem with The Carrot Principle is its assumptions. The authors look at the current vocational landscape, filled with dissatisfaction, lack of motivation, and pining for other jobs and conclude that these are problems management can solve. Sure, management can make them better by with goal setting and better communication—and then the glorious carrot. But the authors are mistaken to pin our workforce problems on a lack of goals, talk, and carrots. What if your company’s goals have show more no intrinsic value? What if, when you communicate more clearly, it just means that your employees see that the customer is just a means to line the stockholders’ pockets? To be fair, Gostick and Elton correctly assert that creative affirmation is the best way to honor employees—both from a personal perspective and a business one—but it’s not the long-term solution they claim. Employees should be rewarded with things other than money. Thoughtful and personal recognition is sorely lacking in today's corporate world. The authors must be commended for hammering that point home. I hope managers pick up on it.

Unless the employees feel valued in an enterprise which is actually worthy for them to be a part of, estrangement will inevitably return. Over time, The Carrot Principle’s practice of recognition will just delay the inevitable, as managers help combat employee alienation through
Amusing Employees to Death. show less

As a member of the genre of self discovery books associated with a quiz, this book is quite good. The premise of this book is that what motivates a person may not be the same as what they are good at, so understanding motivation is just as important as understanding strengths.

Like most in this genre, the book itself is nothing spectacular: background about the assessment plus detailed descriptions of different motivators and the profiles that they are grouped into. This book does get some show more credit for going beyond that and including a short but vital section on how to follow-up and use the information to sculpt your job into one that motivates you more. The set of worksheets and examples is only a dozen pages in total, but they do a great job of helping answer the "now what" that self-assessments so often neglect.

The authors identify 23 motivators: autonomy, challenge, creativity, developing others, empathy, excelling, excitement, family, friendship, fun, impact, learning, money, ownership, pressure, prestige, problem solving, purpose, recognition, service, social responsibility, teamwork, variety. These are grouped by similarity and correlation in the research into 5 identities: Achiever, Builder, Caregiver, Reward-Driven, and Thinker.

I found the results of the quiz to be useful. That my primary motivators fell largely into the Achiever identity was not surprising. As soon as I saw that it's attributes of problem solving, pressure, and ownership were on the list of motivators, I knew that was likely where I would fall. I'm generally most excited about my work when I can control the means and resources to solve an important problem that requires timely completion (which isn't the same as having an artificial deadline).

My second identity was more of a surprise. I don't think of myself as rewards driven. I don't really care about promotions or earning ever more. However, I do identify very strongly with aspects of that identity such as being motivated to maintain a good reputation and wanting to have others adopt my ideas (less charitably: wanting to win). Thus, while I am not strongly driven by material awards or by status markers, I am strongly driven by the reward of sincere esteem from others.

Some of the caveats that the authors note follow.

The identities are just an approximate grouping for the 23 motivators that they found in their research. Most people will identify with aspects of all the identities. For me, my number 1 motivator, learning, is an attribute of the thinker identity which neither the quiz nor my reading of the identities found to really fit well. It's important to go beyond the coarse labels.

This is not a strength assessment. It's an assessment of what gets you most excited for your work. You may be good at something which doesn't motivate you. For example, I'm very detailed oriented and do legitimately get excited by things like organizing tasks and bugs. However, I find writing specification documents to be about as exciting as watching paint dry.

All of the motivators are positive, and likely things you value. This can make it hard to see some of them ranked low. For example, my lowest ranked motivator is fun. I like having fun. I like having people around who make my work environment more fun. But fun is not what makes me excited to go into work each day. I do like that the authors make this clear by grouping the ordered list of motivators into strong, moderate, and neutral motivators. (As an aside, I like that they give you the full list without making you pay extra. I'm looking at you Strengths Finder.)

Motivators are not personality. They often change over time. What motivates someone can easily change as they age. Even though this particular generalization isn't as strong as conventional wisdom would make it seem, this is captured well in the idea that people are at their most creative out of college, materialistic in their middle years, and then purpose driven again in their golden years.

I think that this assessment could be useful for a team, but I probably would structure it as something do for themselves and then share with their manager and team at their discretion. Some of these motivators may be seen as more shallow than others, and it's important that people feel comfortable being honest. (I'll admit to a moment of shame when I first saw that Rewards-Driven was my second ranked identity.)

Overall, a worthwhile use of my time. show less

This was like other business management books I have read. There are some good ideas in it, but overall, the book is one you can scan for the main points. The authors draw on extensive surveys and corporate examples to make their points. However, after a while, you get a bit tired of hearing yet another story from some corporation, and to be honest, at times, some of the stories seemed a bit "pie in the sky." When I read books like this, I am looking to see what I can learn in terms of show more leadership and management that I might apply to my profession in librarianship. I did find some applicable lessons, and I did take some notes. I may do a longer write-up in my blog later.

The main point of the book is getting managers to establish climates of trust and openness so you can then have a good workplace where your workers buy in to what you are trying to accomplish. To me, some of this seems like common sense, but I may well bring the bias that I have experienced some negative workplaces where trust in the management was a significant issue. The steps the authors suggest to improve things, for the most part are viable. Their list in the last chapter is uneven: there are some very good ideas, and there are other ideas that are corny to be perfectly honest. I suppose you can pick and choose what you as a manager think may work in your place. So overall, the book was alright; it had some good ideas, but all in all it was somewhat uneven. This is one to scan, pick the good things, and move on. show less

This was the unabridged audio book, read by one of the authors (Gostick).

A good general overview of how lightening up at work can pay dividends. Nicely paced and lightly delivered. There are not a lot of new concepts in this book and even some of the ideas for creating levity are a little stale. I guess good levity never gets old.

The authors contrasted the techniques used by different companies that were voted "the best to work for". I found this quite informative, and was quite shocked to show more learn that people enjoy working at more companies than just Google.

I valued this book simply because it got me thinking about my workplace and how I can take ownership for making the environment more positive. Now that I have thought about it,I can conscientiously shut myself into my cubicle and wait for blessed retirement to overtake me. show less