The core message of Drive is that traditional motivators like rewards and punishments, "extrinsic motivators" are often ineffective and can even be counterproductive, especially for creative and complex tasks. Pink argues that true motivation comes from three intrinsic elements:
Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives
Mastery - the urge to get better at something that matters
Purpose - the yearning to work for something larger than ourselves
Midnyte City is governed by these principles. We regularly encourage the organisations and businesses we work with to restructure around these ideas, moving away from carrot-and-stick approaches to create environments that nurture more intrinsic forms of motivation.
For leaders the method is simple. Invest time with the people you work with to understand what drives them. Often a coffee together outside the office and a genuine interest in them as human beings is all it takes. Logic and reason people are often driven by problem solving, challenge and mastery. Creative thinkers by autonomy with just enough structure to stay on task and feel achievement. “People” people need to feel connected, the wellbeing of the team, group and family is their intrinsic motivation.
Flow shines a light for us to explore the optimal state of consciousness where people are most happy and productive. This “flow” state occurs when we're completely absorbed in a challenging but achievable task, losing track of time and self-consciousness.
The book explains that flow happens when there's a perfect balance between skill level and challenge, clear goals, and immediate feedback. Activities that induce flow can range from sports to art to work. Csikszentmihalyi argues that people are happiest when they structure their lives to experience flow regularly, and that this state is key to achieving both personal growth and life satisfaction.
A series of personal writings by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, documenting his philosophical reflections and principles of Stoicism. Written as private notes to himself, Aurelius emphasises accepting what we cannot control, focusing on what we can control (our reactions and thoughts), and understanding our place in the natural order. He stresses the importance of self-discipline, dealing with adversity gracefully, treating others with justice and kindness, and living according to reason rather than emotion. Key themes include embracing mortality, maintaining perspective in difficulty, practising gratitude, and recognising that true happiness comes from living virtuously rather than from external circumstances.
Cialdini identifies six universal principles of persuasion that guide human behaviour:
Reciprocity - we feel obligated to return favours
Commitment and Consistency - we want to act consistently with our stated positions
Social Proof - we look to others' actions to determine our own
Authority - we defer to experts
Liking - we're more easily influenced by people we like
Scarcity - we value what's rare or time-limited
The book explains how these principles are used in marketing, sales, and everyday interactions, and how to recognise when they're being used to influence us. Each principle is rooted in human psychology and can be used ethically or exploited for manipulation.
New Power contrasts traditional "old power" (held by few, closed, leader-driven) with "new power" (open, participatory, peer-driven). New power functions like a current that channels the energy of people through networks and communities. The authors explain how movements like #MeToo and platforms like Airbnb represent this shift toward new power values of transparency, collaboration, and shared ownership. They argue that future success depends on harnessing both old and new power models - knowing when to control and when to share power. The key is building platforms that enable meaningful participation and turn communities into co-owners of ideas and movements.
Life isn't actually short - we just waste much of it. Seneca argues that many people squander their time on meaningless pursuits, social obligations, and endless busy work, then complain that life is brief. He criticises those who postpone their true pursuits until retirement, noting that many don't live to see that day. The wise person, according to Seneca, lives fully in the present while learning from the past and planning for the future. True wealth lies in how we use our time, not in how many years we live.
The book centers on the idea that tiny changes in behavior, when compounded over time, lead to remarkable results. Clear presents a four-step framework for building better habits:
Cue - Make it obvious
Craving - Make it attractive
Response - Make it easy
Reward - Make it satisfying
He emphasises focusing on your identity rather than goals—becoming the type of person who does something, rather than focusing on the end result. The key is to make good habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying while making bad habits invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying. Small improvements of just 1% each day compound into massive changes over time.
This negotiation guide draws from Voss's experience as a former FBI hostage negotiator. The core message is that successful negotiation is about emotional intelligence and psychology rather than rational arguments. Key techniques include:
Using "tactical empathy" to build trust
Asking calibrated "how" and "what" questions that give the other party the illusion of control while gathering information
Employing "mirroring" by repeating the last few words someone says to encourage them to elaborate
Using "labeling" by naming emotions to diffuse or reinforce them ("It seems like...")
Counter-intuitively, Voss illustrates how to avoid "yes" questions (which can be commitment-averse) in favor of "no" questions that make people feel safe and in control. He also advocates using the power of deadlines, anchoring with extreme offers, and calculating the other party's decision-making process by identifying their losses and gains.
The book's central insight is that negotiation is about uncovering information and understanding human behavior rather than compromising.
This sociopath’s cookbook is a study of power dynamics underpinned by interesting historical examples. At its core, the book teaches that success comes from careful control of one's image, strategic thinking, and understanding human psychology. Key themes include maintaining control over your reputation, mastering your emotions, and being deliberate in your actions.
Some fundamental laws advise never outshining your superiors, being selective with trust, and protecting your reputation at all costs. The book emphasises the importance of appearing effortless in your accomplishments while concealing the hard work behind them. Other critical laws focus on strategic thinking: planning thoroughly, concentrating your forces where they'll have the most impact, and timing your actions carefully. The book suggests that true power often comes from being unpredictable and adaptable while making others dependent on you.
Controversial but practical advice includes using others' weaknesses as leverage, appearing less perfect to avoid envy, and being careful with honesty – using it strategically rather than universally. The laws also emphasise the importance of appearance over reality: creating compelling spectacles, playing to people's fantasies, and controlling how you're perceived. While these principles can be effective, they should be approached with ethical consideration. The most sustainable application of these laws involves balancing power with integrity, using these insights to defend against manipulation while maintaining positive relationships.
Holiday applies ancient Stoic philosophy to modern challenges, drawing heavily from Marcus Aurelius's wisdom. The core message is that our obstacles are not barriers but opportunities for growth and advancement. Holiday breaks this approach into three disciplines:
Perception - how we view our problems
Action - how we tackle challenges
Will - how we handle failure and persist
He argues that what blocks our path actually becomes the path itself, and by embracing difficulties rather than avoiding them, we can turn trials into triumphs. Through historical examples, he shows how great figures have used this mindset to overcome seemingly impossible situations.
A book for the technology leaders who want to retrospectively trade their computer science and software development degrees for psychology, sociology or anthropology. For the folks who spend all day wrangling people problems and long for time to ship code.
How minds change by David McRaney is one of the best books the Midnyte City crew have read in the last five years. It is a map of the psychological processes required to change perspectives. With simple execution instructions. More importantly, this book helps the reader to uncover, recognise and foster this process within themselves.
This book is so good we gave a copy to each of the wonderful people who took part in our services/market fit interviews.
To life long learning and continuous improvement.
An examination of what culture is, a framework for conversations we can have to make culture more explicit and tips to shape and evolve culture in our organisations.
The book shares the results of some eye-opening research on how managers see culture. How do they define culture? How do they go about improving it? The results suggested half of people leaders believe that culture cannot be influenced,
it just happens 🤯
Hatton then outlines 5 culture ‘conversations’ (with questions and facilitation advice) to have in teams:
The expectation conversation - make the unspoken spoken
The clarification conversation - make the invisible observable
The communication conversation - make the words a language
The confrontation conversation - make feedback less difficult
The celebration conversation - make recognition more meaningful
This was a quick read, and the questions and conversations suggested are super useful. Recommended for progressive leaders who recognise culture as an asset is attracting and retaining high-caliber knowledge workers.
An examination of the many reasons as to why our attention spans are decreasing, and a call to action as to why this is alarming and the impacts this could have longer term. Hari goes through 12 different reasons, each in its own chapter, as to the causes and possible solutions to our attention problems.
Of particular interest to the techies amongst us were the chapters that focussed on:
How our phone is changing how we use our attention (due to the increase in speed, switching and filtering that happens on your phone and the apps you use)
The rise of technology that can track and manipulate us (i.e. surveillance capitalism), this book references heavily Shoshana Zuboff’s work in this space
Hari provides some tangible advice as to small things we can do to help increase our own attention spans, however the main value of this book lies in it’s identification of the societal and industrial shifts that are causing this problem. For anyone who feels like they are struggling to focus for longer period of time, reading this book will change the way you think about it.
Data is fundamental to the modern world. Economic development, healthcare, education and public policy, rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. Yett o much data fails to take into account gender, treating men as the default and women as atypical, baking bias and discrimination into our systems. Women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.
Midnyte City highly recommends this book. Awareness and action are our roads out of this situation. Women are living in a world that just isn't designed for us...in so many ways. Pérez does an excellent job at wading through the data and creating an eye opening, easy to read book.
An enjoyable collection of interesting studies boiled down to book chapters revealing the wonders of different forms of animal navigation. They use everything from large focal points, the earth's magnetism, the location of the sun in the sky, the moon and the Milky Way, and olfactory senses (smells on both land and water). This book shows us how much we still have to learn about the incredible ways animals navigate this planet. For some of the most interesting animal navigation stories:
A brief and thought-provoking examination of ethics in business from Peter Singer. Is honesty for suckers? Or for those who want to maximise value over the long term?
These questions are at the heart of the disenfranchisement most millennials feel with work. Shareholder value is not a compelling purpose. Effective altruism is the new “Why?”
Read more: After VW: Ethical business and the question of honesty
A big thank you to Rich Durnall for introducing the Midnyte City team to Peter Singer and his incredible work on ethics and effective altruism.
Daniel Kahneman unifies psychology and economics uncovering the science behind judgement and decision making. His understated conclusion is the extent to which human beings are hardwired to make poor decisions.
Fascinating concepts for leaders to explore outside of these pages include framing (and it’s role in regret), choice architecture (essential for governance and management), the focusing illusion, (“nothing is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it”), the extent to which losses are felt as vastly more impactful than gains, the certainty effect and the memory tricks around duration neglect and the peak end rule.
