Since I am taking a short vacation, I will not be posting again in 2 weeks (my usual interval between posts) but in 4 weeks. To compensate for it, here is an extra-long post. Enjoy!

I am going to contrast and compare two different books: Dan Ariely’s latest, The Upside of Irrationality; and Daniel Pink’s  Drive.

Both books are terrific. They read very well. They are very engaging. The authors make an extra effort to illustrate their concepts in the simplest and most understandable way. They both use metaphors that are clear and effective in their power to explain. Not only these two books are a pleasure to read – they are also very informative.

Ariely’s book is sort of a sequel to his hugely successful Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Behavior. However in The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely’s takes a more compassionate stance towards the bias that make us irrational decision makers, a.k.a. humans. In keeping with this softer perspective, the book shines with many personal stories that are going to touch the reader. And it is no accident that the focus of this book is not “the consumers’” behavior but how people behave at work and in their own personal life. So we have 5 chapters about “how we defy logic at work”, and another 5 about “how we defy logic at home”.

Dan Pink’ s Drive feeds on the work of Ariely and many others on the science of motivation. Pink is a master in making the insights gained by recent research  understandable and readily usable by managers and businessmen. Drive is a call for a general and comprehensive rethinking of the ways in which we organize what we do.  Pink’s metaphor of assumptions that societies have about human behavior as being their operating system is brilliant and enlightening in and of itself! Moreover, the second part of the book is a treasure trove of practical advice - simple strategies to implement the ideas illustrated in Drive.

It is not my intent here to summarize the 2 books.
For two very good reasons:
1 – they are excellent books and I recommend you read them
2 – the authors themselves did an excellent job in summarizing and presenting their key points: here, here, here and here.

There is a difference, though, between the two books:  Ariely’s book is nuanced. Pink’s book less so.
Ariely explains the experiments used in his research in detail: who the subjects were; what the conditions were: what the context was. Readers are invited to “participate” in the experiments, by imagining how they would react in the very same, specific situation. And in doing so, the reader can both appreciate how the results are counter-intuitive on one hand but also how they make sense, in a way – that is how we behave!
All these details are not only a way to make reading easier. They are precious because they qualify the results. Extrapolations to larger samples without taking into account the context of a specific experiment make for bad science.

Pink’s book is very much… driven! The author is a brilliant speaker and popularizer – research results are transformed into simple recipes for action. And the chasm between current ways of organizing / thinking and what drives us is emphasized. When ideas are turned into slogans they become abstracted from the context and they seem more… novel, catchy, revolutionary, true, absolutes…
Nothing wrong with that – Pink is doing his job.

However, I wanted to contrast the authors for two reasons, one epistemic and the other personal.

- Epistemic: getting rid of contextual information when relaying research results is all fine and dandy. But we need to keep in mind what elements we failed to specify when popularizing science. Some conclusions can be quite reasonably extrapolated and generalized to the population as a whole, while some other conclusions might need to be qualified (i.e. relayed with the context) or replicated with a more significant sample.

Here are some of Pink’s statements: “the science shows that the secret to our performance…“, “bringing our businesses in sync with these truths…”

And here are some of Ariely’s more measured, “scientific” statements: “these findings make it clear that figuring out the optimal level of rewards and incentives is not easy. I do believe that the inverse-U relationship originally suggested by Yerkes and Dodson generally holds, but obviously there are additional forces that could make a difference in performance. These include the characteristics of the task (how easy or difficult it is), the characteristics of the individual (how easily they become stressed), and characteristics related to the individual’s experience with the task…” Most of these qualifying statements are lost in Pink’s account.

One thing is to find out, doing carefully controlled research, that paying bonuses might backfire and so we need to find the right balance between rewards and incentives, as Ariely does – quite another to claim, as Pink does, that rewards do not work in our advanced economy and therefore we need to redesign the Operating System of our society.
Mind you: I agree with what Daniel Pink is saying; I love his message: I just want to issue a warning about how the message is delivered.

Case in point: happiness vs. life satisfaction.
Starting from Easterlin’s 1974 paper “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence“, the notion that money does not buy happiness made its way into the mainstream – to the point that some economists suggested that GNH (Gross National Happiness) should be the main indicator for growth, instead of GDP.
From the 2000s, this idea merged with the newly born Positive Psychology movement to spur the growth of a cottage industry about happiness - and indeed, some interesting psychological research proved that wealth does not automatically lead to more happiness. There are plenty of reasons for that: the hedonic treadmill and our ability to adapt; our tendency to compare ourselves with others; loss aversion; and so on and so forth.
However, the researchers were mostly using a very specific method: sampling participants’ moods at random intervals. So we learned that the same factors that lead us to irritation, sadness, frustration, anxiety affect the wealthy, too – and that many activities that we thought make us happy, actually do not.
Conclusion blared left and right by journalists and bloggers: money, once you earn enough to take care of basic needs, does not matter.
It is not quite accurate: first of all, positive psychology researchers do not say that – actually they can show us how to “get more bang for our bucks“, i.e. how to better spend our money to be happier: buy experiences rather than possessions.
Second of all: Easterlin’s analysis of data turned out to be questionable, at the very least.
And now it turns out that there is an important thing that money can buy: life satisfaction.
There is a distinction about feeling good and feeling satisfied. Wealth affects the latter, not so much the former. This distinction was lost when the idea that money does not necessarily buy you happiness was made popular.

So if we forget the context and the method by which researchers get to their results, and we generalize the findings to a societal level (Gross National Happiness as indicator, Motivation 2.0 as new Operating System for our businesses), we might get in hot waters later on, with the risk of having to throw away the baby with the bath water.

- Personal: I am definitely more of the Ariely’s extraction than Pink’s.
I like subtleties, details, nuances. I pay attention to the context, because the context is everything.
I believe that allows me to be a very effective brief coach and workshop leader. However, that very same trait makes for terrible marketing – prospects need to see you as someone who already has a solution, someone who is very confident and assertive. Being met by more questions or by tentative answers usually is not a very good marketing strategy.
That is why I resonate strongly with Ariely’s book and I envy Pink’s style - both in writing and in speaking.
That is also why almost all of my clients are either clients who come back to me for additional training / coaching needs or clients who approach  me thanks to what their buddies in the companies I worked with tell them.
But I promise – I will try to be less blue, more Pink, without losing Ariely’s stance.

Tags: book review, brief coaching, coaching, Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink, Drive, epistemology, marketing, motivation, psychological bias, science, The Upside of Irrationality, training