Driven - Lawrence & Nohria.pdf - 2014-07-10 Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Book Collection - world_of_courses

Driven

How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices

by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria

315 pages

Focus

Take-Aways

Leadership

Strategy

Sales & Marketing

Corporate Finance

Human Resources

Technology

Production & Logistics

Small Business

Economics & Politics

Industries & Regions

Career Development

Personal Finance

Self Improvement

Ideas & Trends

• Scientists now believe that many behaviors are genetically inﬂ uenced.

• Our brains are hardwired with four drives: to acquire, bond, learn and defend.

• The drives affect us all. For example, obesity might stem from the drive to acquire.

• The drive to acquire is insatiable. It will never be satisﬁ ed; you will never acquire enough.

• Religion is one result of the human drive to learn.

• The drives to bond and to acquire are not interchangeable. One cannot buy affection

or love.

• Our ability to bond with organizations is a key component of social evolution.

• Companies’ fates depend on leadership that carefully balances the four innate drives.

• The success of your company may depend on how well you counterbalance the

drive to acquire with the drive to bond with others.

• Capitalize on the drive to learn by properly training individuals in your organization.

Rating (10 is best)

Overall

Applicability

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V i s i t o u r w e b s i t e a t w w w. g e t A b s t r a c t . c o m t o p u r c h a s e i n d i v i d u a l a b s t r a c t s , p e r s o n a l s u b s c r i p t i o n s o r c o r p o r a t e s o l u t i o n s .

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Relevance

What You Will Learn

In this Abstract you will learn: 1) How four basic drives inﬂ uence all human behavior,

both individual and organizational; 2) The critical impact of the drive to acquire, the

drive to bond, the drive to learn and the drive to defend, and 3) Why and how leaders

must harness these four drives to fulﬁ ll collective corporate goals.

Recommendation

Leave it to two Harvard business professors — Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria —

to break every rule of conventional academic etiquette. Their transgression? Applying

their knowledge of companies and individuals to present a uniﬁ ed explanation of

human behavior, thereby encroaching on the academic ﬁ efdoms of evolutionary biology,

psychology and anthropology, just to name a few. They use the four basic human drives

that inﬂ uence behavior to offer deep insights into corporate and individual actions.

getAbstract.com strongly recommends this ambitious, far-ranging book to management

students, executives searching for understanding and for anyone who delights in tweaking

the collective nose of academia.

Abstract

The Four-Drive Theory

Imagine your organization as a great petri dish, where all the discordant strains of

human nature are allowed to play out, revealing eternal scientiﬁ c truths about each

member of your company. Like it or not, that’s essentially the circumstance that you face

every day — and the question then becomes, do you really understand what drives your

people to do what they do? Or are you just guessing? The fact is that four basic drives

are hardwired into the human organism. You couldn’t escape them if you tried. Your

success, and the success of your colleagues, depends on how well you balance those four

drives, which are:

1. The drive to acquire and control objects in order to improve your status relative to others.

2. The drive to bond with other people in long-term commitments of mutual caring.

3. The drive to learn and understand the world around us.

4. The drive to defend yourself, your loved ones, your values and your resources from harm.

Why does everyone have these four innate drives, these endowed capabilities or

tendencies that deﬁ ne human behavior? Genetics holds the answer.

In The Beginning

The modern human gene pool is so small that it makes the concept of different races

scientiﬁ cally meaningless. All modern Homo Sapiens descended from a very small

group of perhaps 4,000 to 10,000 people. Some 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, this group

of hunter-gatherers diverged from other hominids, left Africa and began to spread its

civilization globally. Biologists agree that the same evolutionary process that shaped the

other human organs also shaped the human brain, the most complex system ever created

by evolution. Strong evidence also indicates that human language and symbolic str ucture

are also hardwired.

“Human brains

seem to be built in

a way that makes

it difﬁ cult to dis-

place prior ideas.

When others try, it

triggers the drive

to defend current

beliefs more often

than the drive to

learn new ones.”

“Although human

behavior is cer-

tainly greatly inﬂ u-

enced by culture,

our four drives are

universal. Their

roots lie in human-

ity’s common evo-

lutionary heritage.”

Modern human brains contain a hundred billion neurons, and each neuron has up to

1,000 synapses that connect with other neurons. The electrochemical impulses that

convey information from one cell to the next ﬁ re 40 times per second. About 3,200 genes

inﬂ uence the brain’s structure and response — half again as many as affect any other

organ in the human body. Genes endow the human brain with a set of hardwired skills.

They are:

“Any ﬁ rm that

establishes social

contracts that pro-

vide all partici-

pants with good

opportunities to

fulﬁ ll their drives

will, in all like-

lihood, grow to

dominate its indus-

try.”

• Understanding of how objects can be manipulated.

• Intuitive understanding of how plants and animals work on a basic level.

• Basic concepts of quantity and numbers and orientation concepts, like mapping.

• Intuitive understanding of the best territory to support human life.

• Danger signals and things to look out for, including snakes and heights.

• What foods are likely to be good to eat.

• The ability to monitor your own health and well being.

• Understanding of disease and how to avoid contamination.

• Human intuition, the ability to predict others’ responses.

• Recollection of the identities of others and awareness of yourself as a separate person.

• Kinship, an intuitive ability to recognize kinship relationships.

• Mating, a built in preference for certain types of potential mates.

The Drive to Acquire

“I own, therefore I am” seems to be many peoples’ motto today, but the drive to acquire

extends far beyond the mere possession of physical objects. Part of what you “own” is

your status. Anyone who works in a bureaucracy knows that people will defend their

own turf. Consider for example the most elemental human need — hunger. As with the

people of other nations, Americans spend billions of dollars on often-futile fad diets and

weight-loss programs. While such behavior may seem irrational, it is not, if you view

it through the process of evolution. During the era when modern humans evolved, the

Pleistocene period, the biggest threat was not heart disease but starvation.

“Once a plausible

ideology becomes

established in the

minds of a commu-

nity of people, it is

very difﬁ cult to dis-

lodge.”

Individuals with a taste for calorie rich foods would presumably have a better chance

of survival, and this survival characteristic is more likely to be passed to their children.

Now, you might imagine that a superior trait would be cognitive ﬂ exibility, that is, the

ability to choose to gorge oneself in circumstances of scarcity and, yet, consume scanty

portions when food is in abundance. However, a powerful drive that manifests itself in

conscious emotions focuses behavior and attention in a precognitive way that does not

require cogitation. Your best chance of survival might be to gulp down the big meal

ﬁ rst, and worry later about why you sated yourself. On a business level, the drive for

immediate acquisition might help explain the short-term thinking predominant among

most middle managers. For example, when it comes to organizational change, managers

are more inclined to take short-term steps such as downsizing, rather than longer-term

adaptive measures such as changing corporate culture.

“For billions of

years evolution

was a blind, mind-

less, trial-and-

error process.

Now, in the last

few steps toward

evolving humans,

it was being

guided by a pur-

posive mind. Hom-

inids were, in

effect, pulling

themselves up by

their bootstraps.”

The unhappy reality is that for most people, the drive to acquire is insatiable. Successful

acquisition may quell one’s passion to acquire for a brief period, but the urge almost

always returns full-force. To the extent that this drive dominates the other human

drives, most people will probably never be completely satisﬁ ed. Moreover, the drive

to acquire appears to be relative. When test subjects are asked to choose between

earning $90,000 a year in a world where their neighbors earn $100,000; or $110,000 in a

neighborhood where everyone is pulling down $200,000, they are more likely to choose

the former than the latter. Two of the most powerful, negative, human passions stem from

acquisitiveness: ambition and envy.

The Urge To Merge

Another powerful drive that motivates us, however, is the drive to bond with others.

All humans share a powerful, innate drive to bond with others. People need to build

relationships. Theory says that those without a strong urge to bond have less chance of

passing down their genes. Men who fail to demonstrate these bonds are less likely to be

chosen as good mates.

“Organizations as

well as individuals

easily drift into an

overemphasis on

one drive. This

leads in time to

the frustration of

all drives.”

Of course, the drive to acquire does not assure success in bonding, because bonding

is essentially different from acquiring. Bonding can only be fulﬁ lled with another

person acting in a harmonious or cooperative way. Threats of violence or intimidation

will not facilitate bonding. The bond must be mutual and involve some commitment.

Every human relationship involves a mix of acquisitive (or competitive) and bonding (or

cooperative) elements. Naturally, these two drives sometimes conﬂ ict, but other times

they can be complementary, such as on a sports team. Marriage ceremonies, the most

obvious example of human bonding, take place, in some form, in all cultures as a public

declaration of a lasting commitment.

One important application of the urge to bond is people’s inherent tendency to bond

with the organizations for which they work. Without this, employers would have no

reason to believe that employees would do more work than they absolutely had to do to

keep their jobs.

The Drive to Learn

Strong evidence indicates that the human drive to learn is also genetically inspired. The

universality of religion as a way to explain the world is a strong piece of supporting

evidence. Art, also, could be viewed as part of the human drive to understand a

greater reality. Darwin himself observed, “The belief in unseen or spiritual agencies…

seems to be universal. Nor is it difﬁ cult to comprehend how it arose. As soon as

the important faculties of the imagination, wonder and curiosity, together with some

power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to

understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his

own existence.”

“In the last anal-

ysis, the story

behind the ups and

downs of organiza-

tional life is one of

leadership.”

Learning can occur on an organizational as well as an individual level, so one of the most

important functions of any organization is constructively focusing the drive to learn.

As new members join an organization, they are socialized and indoctrinated with the

organization’s collective knowledge, including how its members contribute to its pool

of knowledge. This process can have a critical impact on the ongoing success of any

organization. As science discovers more about how to facilitate learning, the workplace

is likely to be affected. Industrial theorists have long studied the importance of creating

working conditions conducive to satisfying the intrinsic human desire to learn.

The Drive to Defend

The drive to defend is one of the most powerful human drives. When a loved one is

threatened, your initial sensation of alarm quickly gives way to either fear or anger.

Scientists now believe that the human mind is preconditioned to adopt various defensive

responses based on speciﬁ c threats, a skill set that can be enhanced with socialization

and training.

“In relation to the

drive to defend,

work groups must

be provided with

the means to fend

off external

attacks.”

The drive to defend is always reactive — though the other drives are arguably proactive,

in that they involve searching for a desired object or condition — yet defense is often

coordinated with other drives. The drive to acquire results in ownership of property

that must be defended. The drive to bond results in relationships that, if threatened,

stimulate the drive to defend. The drive to learn can result in a willingness to defend

threatened values or beliefs. Because you may bond with your organization, your drive

to defend can swing into action if you perceive that your organization or its values are

under attack.

“Human genes do

not determine

behavior, they

actually require the

exercise of free

will, albeit as

constrained by

environmental con-

ditions.”

Applied Dynamics of the Four Drives

The four drives apply to modern business and corporate life. For example, consider the

drive to defend. Often departments or task forces take on a life of their own, defending

themselves from outside threats. Companies defend themselves against competition.

Corporations accumulate war chests of reserve funds to ﬁ ght hostile takeovers. Anyone

who ever cheered at a football game understands it as a symbolic battle to defend a

city’s honor.

The four-drive theory implies that every employee in an organization, from the

CEO to a temporary intern, brings a predictable set of responses to work. Thus,

an organization’s leaders need to align employees’ innate drives to facilitate the

achievement of collective goals. This calls for a delicate balancing of the drive to form

bonds with the drive to acquire. The goal is to develop the constructive tension of

respectful competition among all the groups involved. Yet, organizational changes and

reforms must always be undertaken with careful consideration of the four basic drives

that motivate each employee.

“All four of the

drives of our

human nature at

work in our every-

day lives can,

when in balance,

help us ﬁ nd the

right road forward.”

Current literature thus emphasizes two tasks incumbent upon corporate leaders. First,

leaders can facilitate the acquisitive drives of others. Second, leaders can facilitate their

employees’ bonding needs. Four-drive theory leaders must also facilitate learning and

defensive drives. Some leaders use the drive to defend to motivate employees to work,

seeking to motivate people with threats and intimidation. While this may work, it only

elicits minimal rote compliance. Leaders must rise to the challenge of understanding how

to balance the drives of individuals within an organization to maximize its effectiveness.

In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “Human nature will not change. In any future great

national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as

silly and as wise, as bad and as good.”

About The Author

Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria teach at Harvard Business School, where Lawrence

completed his master’s and doctorate. His research has been published in some 24 books

and articles. His work focuses on the human aspects of organization design, organization

change and human management. Nohria received his Ph.D., from the Sloan School of

Management at M.I.T., and his bachelor’s from the Indian Institute of Technology in

Bombay. The seven books he has co-authored or edited include the award-winning The

Differentiated Network . He has written more than 75 professional articles.

Buzz-Words

D rive to acquire / D rive to bond / D rive to defend / D rive to learn / F our-drive theory

Driven - Lawrence & Nohria.pdf

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