Most leaders today talk about motivation as if it were obvious: you set targets, attach rewards, maybe add pressure, and magically people perform. But the idea that humans do great work because they want to, not because they’re pushed or paid, is surprisingly new. And it didn’t come from management theory. It came from a series of weird psychological experiments that almost didn’t happen. The story of intrinsic motivation starts long before anyone had a name for it – and its lessons hit...