Business depends on the profit motive. And in my view, the profit motive is good – both in the sense that it’s moral and that it’s efficient. It has created enormous wealth and raised the living standards of millions of people. But more and more, we are learning that the profit motive, potent though it is, can be an insufficient impetus for both individuals and organisations. An equally powerful source of energy, one that we’ve often neglected or dismissed as unrealistic, is what we might call the purpose motive. What motivates Wikipedians, as well as high-performing organisations of all kinds, is a sense of purpose. Businesses with a transcendent purpose – whether it’s Google’s aim to organise the world’s information and make it accessible or Apple’s desire to ‘put a dent in the universe’ – will, over the long haul, outperform those driven only by profit.

Indeed, when the profit motive comes unmoored from the purpose motive, good can turn to bad. And by bad, I mean not only unethical, but bad in the sense of mediocre. Raising quarterly earnings by two pennies a share is not the sort of clarion call that will get people leaping out of bed in the morning and racing to work to do amazing things.

This is one of the many aspects of our nature that separate us from donkeys. Yes, we do respond well to carrots and sticks in many circumstances. Yes, those second drive motivators are effective for certain tasks. But in the end, human beings are not simply smaller, slower, better-smelling donkeys. We have a third drive – the need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. That’s what makes us human. And increasingly, it is our humanity that makes us effective.

Dan Pink on how employment can be at loggerheads with the human desire to seek purpose