[.ca] Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (ISBN 0787957852)

Who Is In Your Driver's Seat?:
At first glance this book seems to be leaning too much toward the scientific/academic side. I was actually dreading to read the book, however the authors have done a magnificant job of livening up each academic part with real world case studies. The main theme of this text is how we base our decision making on four psychological drives that every person is born with regardless of religion, race or other factors: 1.) The Drive to Acquire (D1) - We all have it, it is normal but some have too much of it. Those who have an overdose of D1 tend to teeter on the edge of self-destruction and those around them. 2.) The Drive to Bond (D2) - Everybody likes to feel wanted and belong to some type of organisation (family, cultural, religion, hobby, etc., When a person engages in decicion making, they will usually decided positive for the person who has something in common with them. 3.) The Drive to Learn (D3) - Learning is a part of life and when this drive is not satisfied in people they become aggressive and restless. Have you ever seen a highly intelligent well-paid co-worker leave a job although this person never had any problems with peer or superiors? Chances are that this person was in dire need of a cerebal orgasam i.e. The person was somebody who needed to be mentally challenged. 4.) The Drive to Defend (D4) - We have learned certain beliefs and take them to be true until proven otherwise. When somebody attacks or tries to show us otherwise we become agitated, angry or beligerent because deep down in our subconscious we have a defense mechanism that does not want to be proven wrong. This is an excellent book for markets, negotiators and employers. What makes us tick inside our crainium. The authors have excellent examples taken from Hewlett-Packard and how they created a bond between employees and the company. Other scenarios show why some companies work extremely well with labour unions and some companies never seem to have any peace between management and unions. Why do we prefer a product over another? All of these answers are in this text.

Great concept:
The book lays out the concept of four human drive. To Acquire, To Bond, To Learn, and To Defend. The concept is pretty much lecture by the Franklin Covey seminars and many books as preaches by the great Stephen Covey, the author of 7 habits of highly effective people. It says 4 things drive people. To Live, To Love, To Learn and To Leave a Legacy. The fourth drive from this book and Franklin Covey is similar but not the same. Overall its a good book.

Good start for unifying theories ... but:
Lawrence & Nohria reduce human drives to biological drives that they say are rooted in the physical structure of our brains. These drives are to (1) Acquire, (2) Bond, (3) Learn, and (4) Defend. The authors search broadly through various disciplines to support their theory, significantly focusing on evolutionary sciences and neuroscience. Their work is a contribution to the literature on organization development vis-à-vis human biology and neurology, but unfortunately does not go far enough and reveals errors and lack of depth. For one, they postulate a Great Leap forward in human evolution dating back 70,000 years, but fail to account for the fact that although human 'evolution' per se seems obvious, evolutionary science to date does not link man directly to earlier non-human life forms (i.e. the "missing link"). The authors likewise delve into neuroscience in an attempt to prove a unified theory of our drives by linking them to neurological activity in the limbic center of our brains, but stop short of including or even alluding to respected research that explores links between activities such as meditation and brain functioning (e.g. neurotheology, AUB), much of which supports a uniquely human neurology linked to spirituality (while not necessarily claiming to prove or disprove a God). Even their case studies make errors of omission. They overlook key variables in their cases involving the economies of Russia and Ireland, and do not account for global economic influences. Today it seems more commonly acknowledged that the failure of capitalism in Russia had less to do with factors related to the imbalance of these 4 drives than with the monopolizing of the country's natural resources and large business ventures by the old party elite, and the economic successes of Ireland that they site as evidence of a country that balances these 4 drives is somewhat dated as Ireland today has budget deficits and the highest rate of inflation in all of Western Europe. It would seem wise for Lawrence & Nohria to supplement their 4 drives with non-biological human drives such as our commonly acknowledged spiritual quests, for one. If we have an innate drive to transcend this material world and to know God (Western theists), our Ultimate Reality (Eastern spirituality) or our higher power (atheists), and if we at times even 'deny' the other 4 drives in this quest, some even to the point of martyrdom, how can Lawrence & Nohria claim to have captured the essence of human nature? If for instance, the Jews of old gave up family, nation, and even life to remain true to their spiritual drives; and if early Christianity evolved 'in spite of' the persecutions and against the accepted teachings of the day to acquire ("it is better to give than receive"), bond (in lieu of their own family members who did not accept Christianity), learn (as per their traditional mindsets) and defend (martyrdom, etc.); if early Islam likewise revealed a community of early believes who went against most of these drives to later establish a human system that embraced a vast expanse of land from North Africa to Portugal to Arabia; and today if Baha'is give up money (acquire), family (bond), school (learn: it is illegal for Baha'is to go to university in some nations), and even life (defend) as they are driven by faith in lands where it is fiercely persecuted; and finally if a cross section of humanity including humanists and atheists can sacrifice all for fellow humanity, how again can Lawrence & Nohria with such confidence claim to have the best unified theory of human nature that is reduced to our DNA?

Applies sociobiology to business:
Excellent book that synthesizes recent research in sociobiology (a term coined by E.O. Wilson in On Human Nature)psychology, evolutionary biology and anthropology and applies the results to organization behavior and business management. Even if you disagree with the basic findings of Lawrence and Nohria the book contains a wealth of information explained pragmatically via case studies (Russia, HP etc). You can immediately apply as a framework to understand your daily life. If you enjoy it I recommend checking out "On Human Nature, and Jared Diamond's books "The Third Chimpanzee" and "Guns, Germs and Steel".

Adam Smith discovers evolutionary psychology:
This is evolutionary psychology as seen by two professors from the Harvard Business School (!). While some readers may be familiar with a lot of what is presented here, it is agreeable to get a perspective from another academic discipline and a new sense of application. It is especially pleasing because professors Lawrence and Nohria write well and have an appreciation of what an exciting time of biological discovery we are living in, a time when the convergence of knowledge and techniques from various disciplines is giving us the ability to look inside the black box of human nature previously closed. The authors' use of the term "drives" to designate the source of behaviors is familiar, but the idea that these drives come from modules in the brain, or a network of modules, is what is relatively new. Whether this is just another construct like Freud's ego, id, and superego is an open question. However--and this is important and at the very essence of what is going on in brain science today--unlike Freud's construct, the one presented here is based on something tangible in the brain's structure. As the authors report, recent advances in technology allow us to discern the brain's structure as it works. These observations provide a scientific basis for constructs attempting to explain human behavior. Whether there are four fundamental drives, as messrs. Lawrence and Nohria think, or some other number, or whether an entirely different construct is required, is also an open question. Personally, I find their array persuasive, and I think the idea of "drives" a valuable one. More important though is their understanding that we are motivated by more than rational self-interest, the so-called "invisible hand" from Adam Smith and the market place. Here are the drives as defined on page 10: D1 is to acquire objects and experiences that improve our status relative to others. D2 is to bond with others in mutually beneficial, long-term relationships. D3 is to learn about and make sense of ourselves and the world around us. D4 is to defend ourselves, our loved ones, our beliefs, and our resources. In should be noted that these four drives do not in any way contradict the general finding in biology that individuals tend to behave in such a way as to enhance their reproductive success. What is new is that such "selfish" behaviors include behaviors usually seen as altruistic. Yet I think the authors would enhance their understanding of the idea of "altruistic behavior" by reading Amotz and Avishag Zahavi's The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle (1997) in which the adaptive function of some altruistic behavior is to directly advertise fitness. It should also be noted, as the authors do on page 63, that "What drives behavior is a contest among the emotions, not the rational calculation alone." In other words, rationality leads to the creation of an emotion which competes with the instinctive emotion. This is an important concept. It is not the rational mind overcoming the emotional mind, but the employment of emotion by the rational mind to overcome instinctive imperatives which sometimes lead us in the wrong direction. Through the process of "social bonding" as presented on page 83, the authors embrace the idea of group selection, an idea disparaged by notions from Dawkins's "selfish gene" and elsewhere. The idea that there could be the selection of genes that "orient behavior toward the good of the group" has long been discounted by the establishment in evolutionary biology. (This view is changing.) The seemingly very convincing argument has been that "any carrier with a genetic disposition to be nice to others would be, in time, wiped out by the selfish free-riders in the population." (Still on page 83.) My feeling, however (similar to that of the authors), is that for human beings the "in time" part has never had a chance to kick in. This is mainly because of the constant struggle of tribe against tribe throughout human and pre-human history. The benefit to the tribe from individuals willing to risk life and limb for the good of the tribe is clear. What has not been realized by many is that the benefits to the individual by enhancing the tribe's fitness more than offset the loss incurred from taking risks. True, if the tribe faced no outward danger for a long period of time, the genes of the "selfish free-riders" would predominate in the population and the altruistic genes would die out. But that hasn't happened. Consequently groups (bands and tribes) that contained many "altruistic" individuals survived while groups with fewer altruistic individuals died out. Therefore we have the "group selection of individuals" (which is a way I have seen this phenomenon phrased). I should also like to note that religion, the cultural evolution of, is accounted for in a similar way. Those tribes that had religious beliefs strong enough to facilitate bonding and altruistic behavior survived more often than tribes that did not. This is something that E.O. Wilson pointed out some years ago in his book On Human Nature. I think this is an excellent book for the general reader and a fine melding of the ideas of evolutionary biology into the culture of the work place and other loci in the modern world. The authors do a good job of showing how the ideas of evolutionary psychology go far beyond the retelling of "just so" stories, ideas that can help us to understand ourselves and the world in which we live.