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Why We Work (TED Books) Kindle Edition

by Barry Schwartz (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 442 ratings
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An eye-opening, groundbreaking tour of the purpose of work in our lives, showing how work operates in our culture and how you can find your own path to happiness in the workplace.

Why do we work? The question seems so simple. But Professor Barry Schwartz proves that the answer is surprising, complex, and urgent.

We’ve long been taught that the reason we work is primarily for a paycheck. In fact, we’ve shaped much of the infrastructure of our society to accommodate this belief. Then why are so many people dissatisfied with their work, despite healthy compensation? And why do so many people find immense fulfillment and satisfaction through “menial” jobs? Schwartz explores why so many believe that the goal for working should be to earn money, how we arrived to believe that paying workers more leads to better work, and why this has made our society confused, unhappy, and has established a dangerously misguided system.

Through fascinating studies and compelling anecdotes, this book dispels this myth. Schwartz takes us through hospitals and hair salons, auto plants and boardrooms, showing workers in all walks of life, showcasing the trends and patterns that lead to happiness in the workplace. Ultimately, Schwartz proves that the root of what drives us to do good work can rarely be incentivized, and that the cause of bad work is often an attempt to do just that.

How did we get to this tangled place? How do we change the way we work? With great insight and wisdom, Schwartz shows us how to take our first steps toward understanding, and empowering us all to find great work.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Invoking plenty of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and even a bit of Bruce Springsteen, Schwartz’s inspiring manifesto forces us to question the very nature of modern-day work… Via fascinating anecdote and plenty of data, the book forcefully claims that how we work isn’t working.” (HuffPost Books)

“A concise 90-page treatise on work that should be required reading for every boss and manager.” (Chicago Tribune)

"Barry Schwartz has long been one of the most astute — and compassionate — observers of American life. In Why We Work, he makes a compelling case for building organizations that run with the grain of human nature rather than against it. If you want to make work more meaningful, for yourself or for your team, you need to read this wise and powerful book.” (Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive )

"In a masterful book that delivers a deep understanding why we work, Schwartz makes a convincing case that getting the answer wrong bears profound costs for employees and managers in any organization. A highly recommended, thought-provoking read.” (Amy Wrsesniewski, Professor of Organizational Behavior, Yale University )

“A meaningful look at why we’ve lost meaning at work, and where we can find it.” (Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take )

“A delightful, accessible book that glides across centuries of business and industry to reveal the underpinning moral foundations of how and why we work. If you have a job, or hope to have one, read Why We Work” (Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google and author of Work Rules! )

"A call, in a few pointed words, for an expanded, genuine work ethic." (Kirkus)

“Over the next very few years, computerization and automation will rapidly displace millions of white-collar workers…Why We Work outlines how profoundly disruptive these developments will be for a culture based, as ours is, on the work ethic as a central source of our personal worth. Fortunately, Schwartz also shows us how we can restore a sense of intrinsic value to whatever we choose to do with our time when the machines take over.” (Elle)

“This is a wonderfully lucid and compelling book that should be required reading for those who want to take up the challenge of creating organizations that allow for the richer and more meaningful aspects of human nature to flourish. It’s also a useful tool to introspect on why you work and how, in everything you do, you might take steps towards cultivating a more meaningful and fulling life…anyone wishing to make their lives and the world a better place would do well to take this Labor Day to consider Why We Work.” (The Psych Report)

“Packed into 100 pages, that’s a lot to digest and it made my thoughts race as I was reading. Yes, there are surprises in this book, along with practicality presented freshly. I don’t necessarily think this is a top-down book; workers in the trenches might find some inspiration here, too. If that’s what you need to make work better, then grab “Why We Work” and check it out.” (PBG Lifestyle)

“A terse and engaging book…[a] fine book.” (Forbes.com)

About the Author

Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of Why We Work, The Paradox of Choice, and Practical Wisdom. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Parade Magazine, USA TODAY, Advertising Age, Slate, Scientific American, The New Republic, Harvard Business Review, and The Guardian, and he has appeared on dozens of radio shows, including Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, Anderson Cooper 360, and CBS Sunday Morning.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00NZWJE3O
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster/ TED (September 1, 2015)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 1, 2015
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2262 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 113 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 442 ratings

About the author

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz

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Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action in the psychology department at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where he has taught for thirty years. He is the author of several leading textbooks on the psychology of learning and memory, as well as a penetrating look at contemporary life, The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality, and Modern Life. Dr. Schwartz is married and has two children.

Photo by Bill Holsinger-Robinson (Flickr: IMG_2638) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
442 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Tom Sales
5.0 out of 5 stars An elegant argument for work that works for employers, for the employees themselves and for society as a whole
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2015
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“Why We Work” is an elegant book that confronts a collection of some of the seemingly unsolvable and unrelated problems of our time, including:
• Why a majority of employees are not engaged in their work
• Why children are pre-destined to learning based on the perceptions and expectations of their teachers
• Why doctors and lawyers are forced to become unethical
• Why products and services are sold aggressively to customers regardless of whether they will benefit them
• Why unskilled workers don’t have the leeway to have interesting work

The author Barry Schwartz presents a balanced discussion of how these and other issues have resulted from a mis-read of Adam Smith’s belief set forth in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations” that people hate to work and do so only for money. This—followed by the scientific movement led by Frederick Turner and the research of B.F. Skinner—has relegated us to the ideology that work by its very nature is not and cannot be fulfilling. He then describes how a variety of theories, inventions, scripts, rules, management controls, work incentives, data-driven schemes, etc. have been used in negative ways to make companies successful because of their efficiency vs. in positive ways to increase the motivation of their employees.

This view of history and progress—that ideas and technologies that at the time seem correct but are eventually discredited and replaced by new ideas that may also be later discredited—is presented by Schwartz in a straightforward and disarming way that is completely different from most of the political and social science books we read today, where conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans draw themselves into opposing camps—each arguing and baiting the others until nothing is accomplished. Schwartz frames our opportunity differently with this powerful dichotomy—“… we are what society expects us to be. If society asks little of us, it gets little. It is clear that, under these circumstances, we must be sure that we have arranged rules and incentives in a way that induces people to act in ways that serve the objectives of the rule makers and the incentive setters. If society asks more of us, and arranges its social institutions appropriately, it will get more.”

With only four reviews posted so far, this book is destined to generate some interesting and opposing reviews—based on the diverse work experiences and philosophies of its reviewers. I, for one, am an optimist about this. I’ve spent my career working for a string of organizations that were either already or about to be recognized for their powerful and successful business models. Although they typically already had strong training & development programs, I was hired to open up dialogue that would make their employees even better, more motivated and more self-directed. We built new leadership programs, simulations, job descriptions and social media that got incumbents talking about and improving their best practices and customer experiences to make them ever better. Most of those companies were motivated to get their employees thinking like the workers Schwartz describes who had the flexibility to make their jobs better.

I highly recommend “Why We Work.” It not only gets you thinking but offers some structure for making things better. It is an elegant book.
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4.0 out of 5 stars The core information was great and is will be a starting point for improving ...
Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2015
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The core information was great and is will be a starting point for improving my approach to our business. It was a bit dry and most of the points could have been presented in a well written article.
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Bea Boccalandro
5.0 out of 5 stars Good if you want fulfilling work for those you manage, and for yourself
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2015
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I recommend this book to anyone seeking to improve their management or to make their own career more fulfilling. It makes a critical correction to the widely accepted, and flawed, view of worker motivation. When trying to explain why the book was powerful to a friend, a fatty-foods analogy (really) generated an “aha!” from her. So I’ll use that explanation hoping it wasn’t the wine she was drinking that made me make sense.

Remember partially hydrogenated oils? Several generations considered them a positive human invention. By the 1990’s, however, scientists had shown that their manufacturing produced trans fats that damaged our hearts and killed tens of thousands of people a year. The FDA finally banned them this year. A century after we started using them and two decades after we knew they were killing us, we finally rid ourselves of this poison.

Human progress is replete with damaging forays, like partially hydrogenated oils, that we eventually expose as such and, at the slow tempo of societal progress, reverse our way out of them.

Today we are deep into a destructive foray regarding our conception of worker motivation. We created an idea two centuries ago that people hate work and do it only for money and other extrinsic rewards. This human invention (which is what an idea is) is not a widespread food ingredient but a ubiquitous workplace element. It doesn’t cause heart attacks (directly, anyway), but it does cause heartache, disgruntlement, disengagement and low productivity. As a result, if your workplace is like most, four out of five of your workers would rather not be working today. The science is in: It’s not human nature to hate work and treating workers as if they do causes damage to them and to business.

It's unlikely my explanation of the key point of Why We Work has convinced you to rethink what you've been taught about worker motivation. The book, however, will.

My enthusiasm for this book is not based only on reading it, but also on living it. My job is to help corporate managers bring purpose into the jobs of the employees they manage. Every week I see, and measure, the boost in worker engagement, productivity and wellbeing that results from, essentially, heeding the advice in Why We Work.

My only issue with the book is that it never fully clears Adam Smith’s name. The father of economics never meant to say that people work out of self-interest alone. The man we think sent us down the wrong path never pointed us down that path. Schwartz acknowledges this late in the book, but only in passing. I would have liked to see a fuller treatment of Smith’s work. This is probably my own side issue stemming from a geeky interest in economic thinkers. In fact, Schwartz’ restrained correction of Smith’s legacy is probably a good thing. It’s the quality that allowed him to keep his book to a 100-page fast and easy read, appropriate for busy managers.

If trans fats are any indication, it might take another 20 years for Schwartz’ well-documented theory on worker motivation, and where we went wrong, to become widely adopted. You don’t have to wait, however. Invest a couple of hours now reading Why We Work. It will help you pull out of a damaging foray you didn’t know you were down in. It will likely and brighten your work life.
26 people found this helpful
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Doug
3.0 out of 5 stars Schwartz is great - his book is average
Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2015
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I have read two other books by Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice and Practical Wisdom) - I consider both of them to be two of my favorites. He is a true scientist who brings clear thinking to things like why too many choices can hurt us, psychologically. Why We Work did not meet my expectations. I was excited to read it because of my feelings about his earlier books but this one let me down. There does not seem to be anything new beyond what Edward Deci (popularized by Daniel Pink) has written. It feels like a ploy to capitalize on a really good Ted Talk.
7 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Robert
5.0 out of 5 stars Food for thought
Reviewed in the Netherlands on November 24, 2020
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A great speaker and thinker. Schwartz brings a different perspective to agile management than management scholars active in this area. A powerful argument that some social theories about people are as responsible for creating a reality as they are describing the facts of reality.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Consigliato
Reviewed in Italy on November 2, 2019
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Consigliato
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for work mentality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 25, 2019
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You can ask am I getting pay enough? Or you can ask how do I make work not work (engagement, meaning, fairness ). This opens so much opportunities to explore and improve work - let your curiosity take over.

Ideology is more important than technology and poverty of spirit is worse than material poverty. Don’t let others tell you how you should do it, be careful of pervasive ideology.

A fine is a price. When people are given bad incentives the point of working is defeated
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dore
5.0 out of 5 stars A good summary of work at our time
Reviewed in Japan on October 31, 2020
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Very few of the concepts are new, but joined together they create a strong argument for more meaningful work. If you are a manager or a CEO you should take a read and do a reflection of your workplace.
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BIBAUD
5.0 out of 5 stars Le titre est attractif
Reviewed in France on February 9, 2017
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Le contenu du livre est facile à lire et très synthétique. Un très bon ouvrage qui se lit rapidement. A lire de toute urgence !!!
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