Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices

Summary

In this highly provocative book, two Harvard Business School professors synthesize 200 years of thought from the biological and social sciences to formulate a new theory of human nature. Comparable to Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, Lawrence and Nohria's work examines the four drives that influence the choices people make. These innate and often conflicting drives are the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to learn and the drive to defend. The authors have studied the way people behave in the most fascinating setting of human behavior: the workplace. They have considerable training in all the human behavioral sciences and choose the best each has to offer while avoiding entrenched biases. As a result, they have started to bridge the gap between the latest findings from evolutionary biology and insights about humanity derived from the social sciences. In doing so, they have in essence laid a foundation for a unified understanding of human behavior. Not only does this book illuminate the mystery of human behavior, it also predicts that just as advances in information technology spurred the new economy at the end of the 20th Century, the current advances being made in biology will be the key to understanding humans and organizations in the 21st.