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Driven - Paul R. Lawrence & Nitin Nohria

By Josh Kaufman

Motivation is a critically important topic to understand if you want to improve your business skills. Driven is an examination of the four core emotional drives that underlie all human behavior: acquisition, bonding, learning, and defending.

Lawrence and Nohria are business professors at Harvard University – an institution that has typically advanced the idea of “homo economicus” humans as rational maximizers of their own well-being. Driven departs from this idea by explaining why people often behave irrationally – they are responding to a deeply-rooted drive that is part of our human biological inheritance.

In Driven, you’ll learn why humans work to acquire possessions and status, develop close relationships with others, constantly seek information and new ideas, and aggressively protect what they perceive to be “theirs.” With this knowledge, you’ll have a firm understanding of the root causes of human behavior, as well as strategies to work with yourself – and other people – more effectively.

(Special thanks to Todd Sattersten and Jack Covert for bringing my attention to this book.)

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