Daniel Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers about business, work, creativity, and behavior. He hosts a popular MasterClass on sales and persuasion, and his work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, and other publications. Before becoming a writer, editor, and commentator, he served in politics and government, including as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore.
Pink joined Wharton Business Daily host Dan Loney for a lively discussion about navigating the changing landscape of professional work. (Listen to the podcast.) Following are highlights from their conversation:
On Work-life Balance
Pink said he doesn’t like the terms “personal growth” and “career development” because they are abstract. People are searching for meaning in their lives, which requires combining the professional and the personal into something more concrete.
“I’ve written a lot of books, and they’re nominally books about business, economics, and so forth. But as I get into every book, every single book comes back to meaning. People are looking for meaning in their life. Why am I here? What am I doing? How do I spend my days? I think that those questions sit at the border of personal growth and career development because we spend over half of our waking hours at work. So, if you want to have a good life, you can’t say, ‘Oh, there’s over half of my waking hours that I don’t care about.’ You want some integration between those two things.”
“If you want to have a good life, you can’t say, ‘Oh, there’s over half of my waking hours that I don’t care about.’”— Daniel Pink
On Employee Engagement
Pink said employees thrive when they have a sense of agency at work, which is why too much organizational control is detrimental.
“What we want is a chance to chart our own way, to operate under our own steam, to do things the way we want to do it. People are responsible. People want to be accountable. What they don’t want to be is controlled. The big problem in workplaces is control, because when managers or organizations try to control people — when any human being tries to control another human being — there are only two responses. The person complies, or they defy. We don’t want to be compliant totally at work, and we don’t want to be defiant. We want to be engaged.”
On Hybrid Work
Pink believes all work will become hybrid once organizations figure out how to do it with intention. That means each employee has what they need to perform at their best in each scenario.
“I’ll give you an analogy. The most important conversation I have in my household every day with my wife occurs around 6 o’clock, which is what are we going to have for dinner? Sometimes she cooks, sometimes I cook, sometimes we walk down the street to Taco Bamba, sometimes we order in. It’s hybrid eating, right? We figure it out based on our needs at that moment, and I think that’s where the workplace is going to go.”
