Quotes from Daniel H. Pink

Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.

Management isn't about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices," he told me. It's about creating conditions for people to do their best work.

Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but the latter will get you through the night.

For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation—the drive do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing—is essential for high levels of creativity.

Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangles of our days. Across many domains, the trough represents a danger zone for productivity, ethics, and health.

Empathy is an essential part of living a life of meaning.

We leave lucrative jobs to take low-paying ones that provide a clearer sense of purpose.

I think that designers and architects need to educate the people who don't quite know what they do and make a strong case for why it's valuable and why it changes the game. I think waiting for people to come around to it just won't do.

Especially for fostering creative, conceptual work, the best way to use money as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table so people concentrate on the work.

In economic terms, we've always thought of work as a disutility - as something you do to get something else. Now it's increasingly a utility - something that's valuable and worthy in its own right.

Never argue. To win an argument is to lose a sale.

Studying design has made me a much, much more astute observer of this aspect of business. And I'm working mightily to improve my empathic skills. I've dramatically improved my ability to read facial expressions - and I'm trying to be a better, more attentive listener.

It's a question we all ask ourselves. What have we done lately? It rattles us each birthday.

Most of what we know about sales comes from a world of information asymmetry, where for a very long time sellers had more information than buyers. That meant sellers could hoodwink buyers, especially if buyers did not have a lot of choices or a way to talk back.

Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it's pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.

The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word - and doesn't go any further.

Why reach for something you can never fully attain? But it's also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.

In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask.

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing." —PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art

Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.

Being a professional," Julius Erving once said, "is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.

Psychological detachment from work, in addition to physical detachment, is crucial

decisions and negotiations, should be conducted earlier in the day

elite performers have something in common: They're really good at taking breaks