Free Book Summary : Aha! Performance Author: Douglas Walker (with Stephen Sorkin) Publisher: John Wiley and Sons, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-470-11634-0 Number of Pages: 278 pages

The Big Idea

Let’s face it: what every manager, parent, teacher, spouse, advertiser, customer, coach, politician, business person wants is to get others – meaning our employees, colleagues, bosses, children, spouses, clients, audiences, etc -  to do what we want them to do.  But getting other people to do the right thing, at the right time, with the right attitude, is not easy. In fact, managing people and their behavior can be the most difficult job in the world.
 
“A-ha! Performance” by Douglas Walker offers remarkable insight and advice on how we can motivate other people to deliver better performance and better results. Written with Stephen Sorkin, the book teaches motivation management – how to build, manage and lead a self-motivated workforce.  Outcome?  Greater and faster success in managing the performance of others. Bonus? An improved workplace environment, and improved personal relationships as well.   It works.

Beyond The Carrot and Stick
If ‘location, location, location’ are the three basic rules of real estate, ‘relationship, relationship, relationship’ are the three basic rules of successful managing. Care and credibility are at the core of all meaningful relationships, including business relationships and great working relationships are the key to business success.

To successfully manage a workforce, then, requires that we know how to motivate our workforce. And we can do this by learning the 8 A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Points.

 Understanding Personal Motivation: Needs and Wants
Needs are the hidden fundamentals of motivation and behavior. Everything we do is done in an effort to satisfy or protect one or more of five basic needs. Ask someone to do something that threatens or frustrates his/her needs, and he/she won’t do it. Ask someone to do something we want him/her to do, and that satisfies his/her needs at the same time, and he/she is much more likely to do it.
 
Psychologists identify five basic human needs that are the foundational drivers of all human behavior, and which constitute A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #1 (graphic illustration presented in book):
1. Survival
2. Belonging (Love)
3. Power (Achievement)
4. Fun (Learning)
5. Freedom

But while needs may be the basics that drive all behavior, we don’t satisfy them directly. Instead, we satisfy them through wants – specific preferences that are tied to our needs. Our wants make up A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #2 (graphic illustration presented in book). Wants are:

1. Infinite specific individual preferences, based on one or more of the five basic needs.
2. The particular motivators of our actions, our behavior.
3. Quality, by definition, is that which most thoroughly matches our strongest wants.

We are born with needs, but we develop specific wants by experiencing something, or someone that meets three criteria, summed up as A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #3 (graphic illustration presented in book):

1. It’s clear (Clarity: We have to know/see/experience something to want it)
2. We know it was attainable at least once, so it should be again. (Attainability: To want to do something, you have to believe you can do it)
3. The wow or great feeling was a wonderful payoff. At least one, or probably more, of the needs was satisfied (Payoff: To want something, one must see a need satisfying benefit from it).

Knowing What We’ve Got
In order to know whether or not we’re getting what we want, we must identify what we’ve got. Without knowing what we’ve got, we won’t know whether we’re getting what we want, or not. If we’ve got what we want, life is good.  If what we’ve Got is not what we Want, we’ll be motivated to do something about it.  So knowing what we’ve got is A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #4 (graphic illustration presented in book).

 The Gap and the Zap it Produces
The key is to have optimum sized gaps where we are “whelmed” just right for productive action. The manager’s task then, is to monitor and manage A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #5 (graphic illustration presented in book) - ensuring that gaps between what people have got, and what they want to achieve are just the right size – not too small and not too big, so that people will be moved, GapZapped, to effective action.

 Understanding Behavior Options
A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Points 1-5 tell us what motivates people’s behavior. A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #6 (graphic illustration presented in book) is about viable behavior options. Based on their needs, and perceptions of the difference between specific wants, and what they’ve got, people choose their behavior from a range of viable options for them from 4 categories:

1. Automatic behaviors– habits or comfortable ways of doing things (including fight or flight impulses)
2. a Backup repertoire of things we know but may not be comfortable with or accomplished in, that we turn to when our automatic behaviors are not working to achieve the result we want
3. a Creative zone, which is our ability to come up with something new from behaviors we already have
4. a New Learning capability, which is the ability to learn a new behavior from outside of ourselves

Chosen Behavior
Behavior is what we’ve chosen to do to get from what we’ve got to what we want. Chosen behavior has four components: doing, thinking, emoting (attitude), and physiology. In most cases, all behaviors are chosen by the brain as the best thing it can come up with to deal with a particular gap at a particular time.

But left on automatic, the brain often choose what seems like a good idea at the time but ends up making things worse. Understanding how the brain works gives us the opportunity to take it off automatic and choose better behaviors. This means gaining greater control over our doing, thinking, emoting (attitudes), and physiology. This is A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #7 (graphic illustration presented in book).

 Filters
A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #8 (graphic illustration presented in book) is about filters. We all operate with filters. Input filters help us recognize what we are experiencing and quickly determine whether it’s good, bad or neutral. Output filters help us limit the kinds of behavior we engage in to behavior that meets needs in the short- and long-term.

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By visiting the website www.ahaperformance.com, you can read the introduction to the book in its entirety and review endorsements by leaders in various fields.

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