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DRIVEN: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices
Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria Jossey-Bass
San Francisco
2002
pp. 289
$28.00
Keywords Motivation, Personality, Individual behaviour
What drives people as human beings? This is the basic question that Lawrence and Nohria seek to answer in their book Driven. The answer, according to these two Harvard business school professors, can only be found in combining the traditionally separate scientific disciplines of biology, sociology, psychology and anthropology with economics. Inspired by E.O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which recommended a unification of knowledge, and intrigued by the failure of capitalism in post-communist Russia, Lawrence and Nohria became convinced that humans are not rational maximizers of selfinterest as traditional economics has always taught. Humans are far more complex but, fortunately, their motivations can be distilled into four basic groups or drives: the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to learn and the drive to defend. These four drives are rooted in evolutionary biology.
The human mind, and more basically the biology of the brain, provides the initiation of the drive analysis. A quick overview of the division of brain function and some anecdotal and fascinating stories around the resulting personality impacts of brain injury establishes some data for the theory that personality is centred in certain biological areas of the brain and therefore has evolved along with the rest of the human being over time. Lawrence and Nohria hypothesize that the four drives have evolved to act as a set of decision guides. These guides partially steer human reasoning and decision making as well as perceiving and remembering. The theory...