Book's description by B. Eckel:

"... there's a gap between what science knows and what business does." This is the mantra that Dan Pink repeats throughout his book, describing how we unintentionally demotivate through our mistaken beliefs about how motivation works.

This gap occurs in many other areas as well, but I think Pink is correct in choosing motivation as the most important target for business, school and life in general. Nothing is more fundamental for the success or failure of a company than the motivation of the people working there. It turns out that the "natural" approach of using threats and rewards is actually counterproductive -- it makes people reduce their productivity.

If it was that simple it wouldn't be quite as puzzling. The problem is that threats and rewards do work, but only for repetitive mechanical tasks -- the very kinds of manufacturing jobs that are continuing to leave the country (even though manufacturing itself has steadily increased). But threats and rewards are only effective when what you want is compliance.

It's like Newtonian mechanics, which seems like the only truth there is, as long as you do everything within the Newtonian domain. As soon as you get very small, large, fast, heavy, etc., you realize you've only been working with a subset of the rules. In the same way, as soon as you move away from menial labor where, sure enough, if you offer people more they'll work harder, you discover that the carrot-and-stick approach no longer works. For creative work, it's demeaning; it removes the intrinsic motivation and turns creativity into drudgery. When that happens, people lose their motivation and work less.

The same thing happens in schools. When you offer students extrinsic rewards, they learn to work only for extrinsic rewards, and not to learn. "Teaching to the test" is a short-term political move that has long, deep and very destructive results.

Pink gives us the components necessary for a happy and productive workplace which he defines as "Motivation 3.0." He stops short of defining "Business 3.0" (which is what I would like to do). This is understandable, as he's trying to make an airtight case, to drive an unarguable wedge into the old business practices. Coming up with an untested structure for Business 3.0 would distract from the force of his arguments, so it was the right choice (although he does point out some working companies that embrace his principles).