People who want to work together can do amazing things. Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence, in Driven, spoke of the Drive to Acquire, the Drive to Defend, the Drive to Bond and the Drive to Learn.
Note: In Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, the authors combine the latest thinking from the biological and social sciences to lay out a new theory on human nature.
The idea: We are all influenced and guided by four drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, and defending. In this excerpt, Lawrence and Nohria examine how an organization built around the four-drive theory might look.
JP Rangaswami on Four Pillars says, “I do so like their model, so much more than that of Maslow fifty years earlier. People want to bond. People want to learn. People want to defend that which they hold as precious. And people want to acquire, yes, but not at the cost of the other drivers.”
“Sure, any form of collective action has its perils and its misuses. But hey, any form of anything has its perils and its misuses. So let’s celebrate the different ways people work together in different contexts.