Here is an excerpt from an article written by Vineet Nayar for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

*     *     *

I was recently having a long conversation with a colleague, who was passionately outlining a new solution to an old problem, when my cell phone died. I was traveling, and to continue our discussion, I had to walk across the airport to a public pay phone. I kept adding coins to keep the call going. The conversation ended once my colleague convinced me that even though existing solutions would work, a novel approach would result in an exponential performance improvement.

The episode triggered an interesting thought. The pay phone represents the archetypal machine; it responds predictably. You insert coins and the line comes alive; you add coins and it continues to work. But that doesn’t quite work with people, does it? My colleague, for instance, was driven by the excitement of trying a new solution, not by persisting with an existing one.

For over two decades, I’ve tried to understand what drives teams. Conventional theories never work; I find that the secret sauce for a successful team has three ingredients. [Here is the first:]

1. A big challenge: The fun is in the chase. That mightn’t be true in the context of courtship, but it’s certainly true of work. When people face big, hairy and audacious goals, searching for solutions becomes exciting, even obsessive. Google’s mission statement is bold but simple: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, and useful.” It has done well by chasing that incredibly bold goal.

*     *     *

To read the complete article, please click here. To watch a video during which Dan Pink explains “The Surprising Truth of What Really Motivates Us,” please click here.

Vineet Nayar is vice chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies Ltd., an India-based global information technology services company. He is the author of Employees First, Customers Second. Follow Vineet at twitter.com/vineetnayar.