Our imagination about what happens in the business world has become disconnected with reality and it all starts with an accepted narrative about the unstoppable power of Fredrick Taylor’s ideas

The narrative goes like this: Fredrick Taylor introduced managers to analytical methods and tools that helped them to dramatically improve productivity; however these efforts also kick-started a non-stop line of efforts that led to the inevitable over-optimization of human labor.

This over-simplification of Taylor is part of a narrative that has become entrenched and feeds a broad movement that says organizations are broken. The story says that organizations might be efficient, but at enormous cost – they destroy autonomy, stifle creativity and at worst, are systems that enable widespread verbal and physical abuse. All starting with Taylor of course.

Yet, as I’ll show you, this story is wrong, misses the context of Taylor’s time and ignores that a hyper-optimized mindset towards work did not take hold until the emergence of the “career path” in the 1960s. This coincided with the rise of “knowledge work” and this shift turned work into a performance, distracting many from the real mission of any organization: survival.

Instead of seeing organizations as broken, a more accurate starting point is to think of them as complex systems and instead of broken, as fragile. As the scale of business gets bigger, the hidden fragility of many organizations puts employees, customers and society at risk.

To address this fragility, I want to look at organizations as “complex adaptive systems”, an idea that emerged from a field called Chaos Theory in the 1970s and 1980s. I want to push for a broader adoption of these principles and encourage a new generation of “chaos managers” to become interested in the survival and success of our institutions.  

I first learned about chaos theory 13 years ago and have been thinking about it ever since.  During the ten years I spent in the corporate world and as a management consultant, I couldn’t escape the feeling that something was missing.  This is my first attempt to fill that gap and to give many other frustrated managers and leaders an additional lens to help them think about helping their organizations thrive.  

This essay will explore the following:

• What we got wrong about Taylor
• How the idea of the “career path” turned workers into performers
• How organizations subsequently became complicated, not complex
• Why chaos theory does not lead to anarchy
• The implications of chaos theory on leadership
• An actionable five-part guide for the modern “chaos manager”

Taylor’s Promise & How Workers Become Performers

If you dig into Fredrick Taylor, you find a number of surprising things and I’m not talking about his 1881 US Open Doubles Tennis championship.  What I’m talking about is the historical context of his famous contribution, Scientific Management. 

Taylor saw his approach to business not as a set of tools, but as a paradigm shift away from the harsh worker versus manager divisions that were common at the time. His ambitions were quite profound as he felt that his approach would lead to “elimination of almost all causes for dispute and disagreement between them” and unlock “prosperity for the employee, coupled with prosperity for the employer.”

This is overlooked when modern work critics blame Taylor for the hyper-optimization of the modern workplace. They miss the fact that Taylor’s focus was on production workers and the union of workers and management as well as the adoption of his tools did not become widespread until the emergence of the knowledge worker.

These knowledge workers emerged 30 years after Taylors time after World War II and were distinct from production workers. While those who worked in manufacturing had a strong “class consciousness,” the new class of “white collar” workers were not really sure who they were:

White-collar workers rarely knew where they were, whom they should identify with. It was an enduring dilemma, rooted in what might be called a class unconsciousness, that would characterize the world of the office worker until the present day.

Despite attempts throughout the 20th century for labor movements to include these workers, knowledge workers were distinct because of their desire to distance themselves from organized blue-collar workers.  Instead of labor unions, they formed “associations” and increasingly saw themselves as aspiring business people rather than at tension with the owners of capital and leaders of organizations.  

The knowledge worker was not concerned with bargaining for rights.  Instead, they focused on managing a career, developing skills and acquiring achievements or “pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement” as Merriam-Webster puts it. It was only time before they became part of the elite.  

People saw themselves not as a part of an organization but as someone with a first-person account of achievements and contributions that could be carried from employer to employer. 

As the job morphed into a career, the worker shifted from someone merely doing their job to someone that needed to perform. 

Continuous Improvement & The “Theatre Of Work”

In the 1980s, new “schools” of business thinking like Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Lean entered the scene.  The accepted narrative of this shift is that US companies needed new approaches to compete with Japanese companies.  There is some truth to that story, but it ignores the fact that these programs would not have been adopted with such enthusiasm without the fuel of career aspirations.  

Every aspirational leader attached their careers to these programs in the 1980’s, most notably Jack Welch.  In 1989, he gave an interview in which he detailed GE’s newly launched “work out” program:

We want 300,000 people with different career objectives, different family aspirations, different financial goals, to share directly in this company’s vision, the information, the decision-making process, and the rewards

For someone at GE, it was very clear that you would need to get involved in one of these programs if you hoped to progress at the company. By the end of the 1990’s every large company had similar programs and employees had figured out that to get ahead you needed to document your progress.

I got my first taste of this game in my first internship.  I spent the entire summer creating a proposal and then purchasing a foam board which helped our group organize some inventory we kept in a file cabinet.  While it didn’t appear that the parts were too hard to find in the file cabinet in the first place, by the end of the summer the project helped the group earn the next “level” in the company’s continuous improvement program.

Consultant and writer Tom Critchlow would argue that I was operating in the “theatre of work”:

Many people aspire to “silent success” at work – to do work that “speaks for itself”. Unfortunately this is the wrong move in the theatre of work. Instead we should aspire to the opposite – for knowledge work, the performance of the work is the work.

Continuous Improvement programs helped complete the shift of work into a performance and kept workers in a non-stop search for problems that need to be fixed.

The Organization, It’s Complicated

A Taylorist revolution this was not.  Instead of real productivity improvements there was an explosion of paperwork, reports and well-intended initiatives, many of which drove increasing complicatedness.

Today’s business leader sees almost every issue and activity through a complicated lens.  This lens sees all commercial issues and behavior as things that can be understood, measured and then documented or fixed in a process.  

Anyone who has worked in a large company has run into the complicated approach when they have to deal with their expenses.  Typically any expense above a certain amount must be approved and then you need to go through a formal process for reimbursement.  While this approach eliminates the chance that an employee will spend recklessly, it adds additional work for every single person in the company and may unnecessarily limit useful expenses.  However, when this kind of approach is implemented, it will also help the project leader show quantified savings that they can point to at their next performance review.  

In contrast, a complex lens would admit that cause and effect is not easily understood, there may be many solutions to a problem, and that even if you “fix” something, the process and related human behavior will continue to evolve and adapt. 

A good example of a complex lens is how Trader Joe’s thinks about customer service.  If you walk into a Trader Joe’s and ask an employee if you can try one of the items, they will take a box, open it, and let you try some, no questions asked.  This creates complexity and uncertain outcomes, but the employees also get a lot of interesting feedback that they can pass along to the people that buy products for the company.  

The best assessment of the creeping complicatedness in organizations is from Boston Consulting Group who studied the internal operations of more than 100 companies.  They found that the “amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals within organizations had increased by anywhere from 50% to 350% over a 15-year period.”  And in the top 20% most complicated organizations?  The managers in those organizations “spend 40% of their time writing reports and 30% to 60% of it in coordination meetings.”

The experience of sitting in “coordination” meetings is one of the most painful experiences for the modern worker and as many come to realize, is the stage of the theatre of work, where the most powerful people battle it out for having the most compelling narrative of what is really happening, complicatedness be damned.

The Early Excitement Of Chaos Theory

But what if this creeping complicatedness of our organizations increases the fragility of the organization? 

That is the conclusion of researchers who think organizations should be understood as “complex adaptive systems.”

In the 1970’s and 80’s a new field of research began to emerge called Chaos Theory. Scientists were looking at complex dynamic systems and trying to understand how they emerge and evolve. They drew inspiration from the natural world, looking at phenomena like how organisms grow in the wild, and how weather evolves. Eventually, they began applying the lessons to fields such as finance, biology, economics and eventually, organizations.

One of the fundamental implications of chaos theory is that small changes have the potential to have big effects within the system, whereas large changes are less likely to shift the underlying order of the system. This is because the organization is seen as a complex system rather than a fixed body. The individual behaviors and reactions of people within a complex system are unpredictable, but they are linked to one another. The feedback from each of those unpredictable actions will give feedback to others in the organizations and influence their subsequent decisions and reactions.

In the 1990s there was a lot of excitement around these ideas.  In 1999, Richard Pascale, a former management consultant and author, wrote about chaos theory in the MIT Sloan Management review, predicting that “the next point of inflection is about to unfold”.

However, Chaos Theory Has No Star

Alas, a new era did not unfold. The increased use of computers and connectivity coincided with globalization and growth of large businesses that paired well with change management frameworks like John Kotter’s 8-step “change management” approach. 

I first stumbled upon Pascale’s writing on chaos theory while leading research at BCG where I helped revamp their thinking on organizational change in the mid 2010s.  I thought that the Partners I was working with would share my excitement.

However, I quickly realized the problem.  Kotter’s approach puts the senior executive at the center of the story and the leader’s task is to force a change on a resistant organization.  To him, the business leader “defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles”

Chaos theory, in contrast, removes the senior executive from the center of the story and puts the system at the center.  That is exciting for people who enjoy thinking about complex systems, but isn’t likely to be profitable to a consulting firm which sells projects to senior executives.

I don’t deny that many of the people at senior levels of organizations do have useful experience and are probably better than most at figuring out the direction of the company.  However, it is worth considering why that seems to be the only way we believe modern organizations can be run.

Former CEO Luke Kanies gives us a rare glimpse into the awkward implications of large organizations.  He had the experience of growing up on a commune and then building a 500+ person company and really struggled with the tension between the belief in a free market and the reality of running a company as a top-down operation.  

We still live in a free market economy, but it’s not one Adam Smith would recognize. Instead of individual or small operators, ours is composed almost entirely of corporations. Really big corporations. And these companies use the same kind of central planning that we so despise in communist systems.

…We could see no way to have a system where the people doing the work built a plan for the organization. Even thinking about it now, my reaction is, “How would they know what my goals are?” That’s the kind of question you can only ask in an authoritarian state, not in a free market economy.

My goals became my company’s goals, and the only real way to ensure people worked toward them was for me to provide a plan.

We have no other playbooks for running large companies.  Top-down and complicated is the only way we know how to do it and this fact is worth acknowledging more openly.  Many corporations engage in culture PR, telling employees that they will be given the Dan Pink sandwich of autonomy, mastery, and purpose when the day-to-day reality is far from it. 

A first step towards adding new models to the toolbox like Chaos Theory has to be an admission that creating dynamic large organizations remains elusive, and the very few examples we have means that there is very little expertise on how to behave in new ways.  

Chaos Theory Is A New Lens On Business

It’s an open secret in modern organizations that most change efforts fail.  Kotter estimated in his book that upwards of 70% of change efforts fail and this has become one of the most repeated facts from consulting firms who unironically share this in the front of pitch decks which then go on to sell another top-down change program.

The best argument to immediately increase awareness of Chaos Theory is that it gives managers a way of understanding the reasons why these change programs fail.  

With a deeper understanding, managers can then use it as a lens to re-frame many of the activities which are traditionally seen as bad practices such as redundant activities and lack of processes.  While many of the implications of chaos theory are counterintuitive, Pascale offers four basic principles of “complex adaptive systems”:

1. They consist of many agents acting in parallel and are not hierarchically controlled
2. They continuously shuffle these building blocks and generate multiple levels of organization and structure 
3. They are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, exhibiting entropy and winding down over time unless replenished with energy. In this sense, complex adaptive systems are vulnerable to death. 
4. They have a capacity for pattern recognition and employ this to anticipate the future and learn to recognize the anticipation of seasonal change

Chaos theory posits that this is a natural state that emerges without central control.  Instead of letting things emerge, we do the exact opposite, we try to control organizations as much as possible.

This approach makes a lot of sense because organizations are run by humans who have a natural desire for control.  But consider the implications of operating in an organization which is a truly complex adaptive system, suggested by Professor Gary Grobman:

Complexity theory suggests that organizational managers promote bringing their organizations to the “edge of chaos” rather than troubleshooting, to trust workers to self-organize to solve problems, to encourage rather than banish informal communication networks, to “go with the flow” rather than script procedures, to build in some redundancy and slack resources and to induce a healthy level of tension and anxiety in the organization to promote creativity and maximize organizational effectiveness

This is terrifying for most managers and helping them grapple with inevitable insecurity and emotional challenges of embracing these methods is just as important as an understanding of the principles themselves.

“Eyes On, Hands-Off”: Chaos Does Not Mean Anarchy

“You can’t just let people do whatever they want.”  This is the most common pushback to the idea of chaos theory.  People mistake chaos theory as the first step on the road to anarchy.  Yet in the highest stakes arena, the military, they openly embrace many of the principles of chaos theory.  

A publication from the US Marine Corps published in 1996 titled “Command and Control” offers a view of a seemingly traditional view of leadership through a complex lens: “command and control is not the exclusive province of senior commanders and staff: effective command and control is the responsibility of all Marines.”  It goes on to detail command and control as “a complex system characterized by reciprocal action and feedback” that “provides the means to adapt to changing conditions.”

Here is General Stanley Mchrystal writing in his book “Team of Teams” which details how the military had to come up with a better approach to counteract the more “chaotic” and emergent activity of the terrorists they were fighting in the early 2000s:

The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.

Notice how similar this is to Grobman’s conception of a chaos theory manager and how antithetical this is to Kotter’s definition of a leader.  This goes against the caricature of military organizations as top-down rigid hierarchies.  Unlike many companies today, military organizations have people who plan to have much longer tenures within the organization and are personally at risk if the organization becomes too fragile and complicated.

The Five Roles Of The Chaos Manager

A good way to think about chaos theory would be by thinking about how Jazz relates to most other music.  As Louis Armstrong said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”  Chaos Theory is similar.  It can’t be easily boiled down to easily understood scientific laws, great business book narratives, credentials or 8-step plans.  Similar to jazz, it is improvisational in nature.

Many people in the business world are hungry for a different way of thinking about change in modern organizations but don’t buy into the idea that organizations are “broken.”  They also don’t think that the solution to these problems is another complicated continuous improvement program or consulting firm transformation program.

Chaos theory can be the improvisational permission that leaders need to explore ways of leading and managing beyond simply what has been done for the last fifty years.  This can help to inspire a new generation of “chaos managers” that want to treat organizations as they are: living, dynamic systems.  

Fundamentally, the chaos manager thinks about five roles:

1. Emergence Architect: Increase the opportunity for changes that have large positive effects by engaging in more small experiments
2. Authority Aligner: Increasing the credibility of top-down leadership by focusing on personal authority in addition to positional authority.
3. Reality Sensemaker: Shift from the illusion of top-down control to better control though improved sensemaking, better feedback & making appropriate decisions at lower levels of the organization
4. Chaos Injector: Ensures that the organization is not stagnant and looks for ways to inject “energy” throughout the company
5. Survival Guide: Can increase the perceived credibility among employees, customers, society and shareholders by shifting organization’s mission to survival 

Role #1: Emergence Architect

The canonical example of chaos theory is the Butterfly effect. Far away in China, a butterfly flaps its wings. The tiny change in pressure it causes has cascading effects, causing whorls of wind, which in turn cause pressure disturbances of their own. These spirals of wind feedback further on themselves in a relentless positive cycle. Far away, a hurricane forms. The butterfly, oblivious, flies on.

The Butterfly effect occurs in all systems of sufficient complexity. It is characterised by two features:

1. Nonlinearity. Small changes in input (flap of wings in China) have big effects on outcomes (wind in the US)
2. Unpredictability. Because we can never know the precise nature of all inputs, and small changes in inputs lead to big changes in outcomes, we cannot forecast outcomes.

Both of these things are the enemy of the modern manager.  The modern manager spends their time convincing others that the future is both predictable and can be dictated by well-designed programs and initiatives. Yet over time this desire for predictability only ends in the inevitable path of stagnation.  

Yet not every company operates like this.  Amazon is a company both obsessed with long-term survival and a deep understanding that survival requires designing for complexity.  Here are three lesser known ways they design this:

#1 Designing for emergence of skills. From Bezos 2009 shareholder letter:

“Working backwards”  from customer needs can be contrasted with a “skills-forward” approach where existing skills and competencies are used to drive business opportunities. The skills-forward approach says, “We are really good at X. What else can we do with X?” That’s a useful and rewarding business approach. However, if used exclusively, the company employing it will never be driven to develop fresh skills.

#2 Accepting a stance of not knowing: From Bezos 2016 shareholder letter:

One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.

#3 Making reversible decisions at the lowest level:

Amazon pushes teams to escalate one-way door decisions – those that can’t be reversed and may have long-term consequences.  However, with “two-way” decisions, managers are coached to make these decisions themselves.  Here is how one manager at Amazon describes it:

Decision-making processes are evaluated for speed more than control. It’s not an excuse for poor decisions, but rather a reflection that the search for perfect information is normally fruitless and slow. Delegation of these decisions enables better rigor and time to be spent on fewer, more critical decisions…If teams escalate two-way door decisions due to a perceived lack of empowerment, use the escalations as opportunities to coach the teams

Bezos has noted that most large organizations default to seeing every decision as a one-way door that results in “slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.”  Making quick decisions increases the chances of mistakes, but it also helps the company continue to operate as a complex “invention machine,” as he calls it, rather than another fragile, large company.

Role #2: Authority Aligner

Done well, command and control adds to our strength. Done poorly, it invites disaster, even against a weaker enemy – US Marines, “Command and Control”

Many organizations are not in fact the command and control hierarchies that they are portrayed to be. While there may be a clear formal hierarchy and a well-designed org chart of the people in the organization, anyone with more than a week’s experience in a modern organization knows that informal networks control how things actually get done and that improvisational behavior is part of most work.

The chaos manager is concerned with the credibility of the organization and ensures that positional authority is aligned with personal authority.  That the people in leadership are the ones people want to follow.  While the Marine Corps has a clear position hierarchy, they have a deep understanding of this idea. 

Companies undermine their credibility in two ways: 

1. Official authority doesn’t have associated responsibility for its actions
2. Personal authority doesn’t get recognized and integrated over time

The first condition results when there is a lack of “skin in the game.”  When people within the organization see that senior leaders pay no costs for mistakes and carry no responsibility for their decisions, the organization fills with a creeping nihilism rather than ideas and creativity.

The second condition exists in most companies because positional authority is so salient and easy to understand.  Personal authority is the credibility that people carry within the organization regardless of their rank within the company.  While these people often command the respect of their peers, they often grow disgruntled because their skills are not a perfect fit for climbing the corporate ladder or are overlooked by senior leaders.

Bridgewater Associates is one company that takes finding the people with personal authority seriously.  As Ray Dalio says,

In typical organizations, most decisions are made either autocratically, by a top-down leader, or democratically, where everyone shares their opinions and those opinions that have the most support are implemented. Both systems produce inferior decision making. That’s because the best decisions are made by an idea meritocracy

To cultivate an idea meritocracy, they developed an app called a “dot collector” which enables all employees to rate each other along many different dimensions, ranging from “knowledgeability” to communication style. Over time, the app builds up a picture of each employee’s “believability” on different issues. This enables Bridgewater to understand where expertise lies within the company in addition to the hierarchical authority easily understood on an org chart.

Role #3: Reality Sensemaker

In a complex system, what is the role of the leader? General McChrystal says leaders become “gardeners” and Professor Grobman suggests leaders learn how to “go with the flow.”  We might have a general sense of what they mean, but what should a leader do on a day to day basis?

The chaos manager engages in a continuous search for truth about the reality within the organization and sees the organization not as a stable system, but an adaptive network with dynamic relationships, interactions and rules.  Today’s reality is not tomorrow’s.

Edgar Schein helped popularize the idea of assessing corporate culture in the 1980’s.  While many people gravitate to his three-tiered culture framework, he saw the understanding of culture not as a top-down reality shaping initiative but as a deep inquiry into the “nature of humanity, human relationships, time, space, and the nature of reality and truth itself.”  

The chaos manager takes this search for truth seriously and knows that the fine balance of command and control can only be reached if they have an accurate map of reality.  The chaos manager does not have authority because of their position, but because of their ability to learn, listen and integrate.  The best leaders have the best map of reality.  

One of the best accounts we have of embracing this model is from Steve Miller, who became a “chaos manager” later in his career at Shell:

The scariest part is letting go. You don’t have the same kind of control that traditional leadership is used to. What you don’t realize until you do it is that you may, in fact, have more controls but in a different fashion. You get more feedback than before, you learn more than before, you know more through your own people about what’s going on in the marketplace and with customers than before. But you still have to let go of the old sense of control.

Role #4: Chaos Injector

In the forestry world, a “controlled burn” is an accepted practice of lowering the risk of fragility.  A “controlled burn” is a fire purposefully set with the goal of lowering the risk of more uncontrolled wildfires that put people and communities at risk.

The chaos manager knows that organizations are at risk if they become stagnant and similarly look for ways to unleash controlled burns within their organization.  These are often small and subtle design decisions that may lead to unexpected positive outcomes.  Three simple examples include:

1. Unplanned Interactions: Steve Jobs had this in mind when he designed Apple’s headquarters: their corridors were deliberately small so you had to bump into colleagues you didn’t directly work with. Increasing connectivity between key nodes in the organizational network allows for both ideas and people to collide.
2. Human Judgement Over Rules: At Ritz Carlton, where employees are given a budget to spend on making customers happy, no questions asked. This is inherently unpredictable — each guest is different, so management may not know what money is being spent on. But as customer demands change, the company does not have to develop 
3. Aligning Career Incentives: Many individuals do not have any incentive to think about the health of an entire organization.  One way to do this is to increase the connections between groups, such as making an engineering team responsible for the customer service demands for their product after launch.  This can shift teams out of their default modes of approaching and solving problems and work in new ways.

The chaos manager is always listening and looking for teams that are stuck within rigid rules and individuals with limited autonomy.  The chaos manager knows that they need to inject chaos to ignite the literal creative energy of individuals throughout the organization.

Role #5: Survival Guide

In Chaos Theory, the mission is clear: survival.

Right now many organizations have operated for decades in a simulated reality that is itself fragile and where plans don’t have to make sense, competition doesn’t matter and second-order effects can be safely ignored.  Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the US and UK were rated the top two countries in preparedness.  Why? Because they had done extensive planning and even run simulations.  They had plans.

But their plans were overly optimistic and focused on keeping morale high and the economy running.  Anchored to these plans, people were more interested in trying to make them happen rather than taking a more adaptive response.  The deeper problem is the absolute faith in plans in the first place.  If you think everything can be modeled on a spreadsheet, you start to lose touch with reality and stop orienting towards survival. In this case, human survival was at stake too.

Many people have given up on institutions.  Chaos theory is a lens that can help us escape this nihilistic view.  Yuval Levin has chronicled the role of institutions in our lives and believes “We lose faith in an institution when we no longer believe that it plays this ethical or formative role of teaching the people within it to be trustworthy.” 

As I have outlined, almost every incentive within modern organizations is conspiring to shift people’s attention away from the organization’s credibility and survival.  Company starts struggling? Just get another job.  Your initiative doesn’t really matter? So what, it looks good on a resume.  Employees suffer under the current paradigm?  Sorry buddy, it’s always been that way.

Levin suggests that we need to start asking “Given my role here, how should I behave?”  This is a nice sentiment, but I’m not sure most people are there yet.

Instead, Chaos Theory can integrate with the current paradigm and give current leaders the feeling that they are still doing something while we discover what works.  To the many business leaders and managers who are frustrated with the accepted reality of organizations, it gives them a framework to play and experiment to potentially find a way out.

I might be a bit crazy, but similar to Taylor’s belief that Scientific Management could help transcend the divide between workers and owners, I believe that an earnest attempt at applying the lessons of Chaos Theory can help to soften some of the broad disillusionment across the corporate world that any real change is possible and help people take pride in their roles, institutions and our systems.

Special thanks to Thomas Hollands who partnered with me on the many initial drafts and helped me shape the overall theme of this essay and Jeremy Finch, who created the illustrations. Also to Vinay Debrou, Michael Kueker, Greg Doctor, Mike Tannenbaum, and Tom Critchlow for reading drafts and helping to make it a lot better.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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Millenials and Gen Xers are hitting a wall at work. 

Thirty years ago they would have been promoted, perhaps even before they were ready. But now they are told that they need to wait their time. 

They were raised with the belief that if they worked hard, found a good job and put in their time, it would pay off. Not just financially, but with the status of having senior level roles and responsibilities. 

Instead, many are stuck in an endless lateral career loop, moving from position to position, clinging to a fictional story of a “career trajectory” and hoping to find an opening. All while trying to convince the people who have the coveted senior positions that they are not in fact “job hoppers.” Many are able to negotiate good raises with their new jobs, but find that the work they do today is eerily similar to the work they were doing a few years after they graduated. 

This stagnation is leading many to put off buying houses, committing to long-term partners, or investing in their communities. References to “burnout” are skyrocketing as people are feeling disconnected from their work at a time when work is more central to life than it was for previous generations.

Our modern institutions and the jobs and career paths associated with them are the central pillar of a narrative about what success was and should be in modern society.

However, people have lost faith in this narrative. The erosion of trust in company loyalty is certainty to blame, but I believe there is a deeper and more convincing explanation which I am tentatively calling the “boomer blockade.”

This explanation is the combination of three trends which together have had a profound effect on the modern workforce: 

1. A baby boomer demographic that emerge into a healthy and growing workforce in the 1980’s and 1990’s and were able to succeed through high rates of growth and limited competition from older members of the workforce for good jobs
2. A baby-boomer demographic that is choosing to stay in the workforce longer than previous generations
3. A resulting emergence of bad jobs and pseudo career paths due to lower rates of organic growth throughout the economy and boomers deciding to work later in their careers

This blockade is both a literal blockade, stopping people from reaching the senior-most levels of organizations and institutions, and a figurative blockade, holding people back from finding meaning from new narratives and myths of success in life and at work.

Trend #1 —Boomers reshape the working world

Before we dive in, this is not a hit piece on the baby boomer generation. I’m not here to go “okay, boomer,” but instead I’m genuinely curious about how a single generation was able to succeed so remarkably while following generations, most notably Gen X and Millennials, have failed to follow in their footsteps.

Let’s first start with the demographics. The story starts with a literal “baby boom” that coincided with the end of World War II.

Using cohort data from the BLS, we can see how the baby boomer generation has continually reshaped the workforce. By1980 we see their effect in full force, leading to a large influx of workers under 34 years old. 

We can see this more clearly if we roughly code each of the generations by color. As they move through the workforce, we see the slope of the age demographics shift. 

For the first time in the last 60 years, the 55+ cohort is bigger than any other ten year age cohort. 

For millennials and gen X workers in today’s workforce, it is common to have colleagues, managers and executives who are much older than you. When the baby boomers were at the height of their early working career it was less common and from 1979 to 1999 when the median baby boomer was 24 to 44 years old, the percentage of workers under 45 never dipped below 60% of the workforce

In addition to this massive opportunity to progress in the workforce, the boomer generation was backed by the tailwind of economic growth, which in the 1980’s and 1990s were consistently above 3% annualized growth, something that has not happened since.

While this may not seem to be a big deal, lets look at an example of how a small shift in a growth rate can lead to a dramatic increase, using a $100,000 investment over a twenty year period with those same growth rates.

Except instead of money, the thing being created were jobs.

To recap: The boomers entered the workforce during the last consistent period of 3%+ economic growth and had limited competition for jobs during the prime working years of their career. 

Trend #2 —The boomers reached power at younger ages and then have stayed in power

A fascinating study was done by Professors Cappelli and Hamori comparing executives of the Fortune 100 in 1980 to their peers in 2001 which they shared in an article in “The New Road to the Top” in HBR.

They found that from 1980 to 2001, the average age of executives dropped four years from 56 years old to 52 years old. In addition, they found that these executives were reaching the top faster than in 1980:

The journey from first job to executive suite is shorter — by four years, on average — than it was a generation ago, and it involves fewer stops along the way. Though executives stay on each rung nearly as long as they used to, today’s career ladder seems to have fewer rungs, and they’re spaced farther apart. That is, the average promotion entails a greater leap in responsibility. This trend is consistent with the widespread perception that corporate hierarchies are flattening.

Moving into the 2000’s the average of of F100 corporate executuve was 52, meaning a baby boomer born in 1949. They reached the top faster than previous generations and with less jobs to get there. 

So did the trend of younger company leaders continue?

Short answer? No. 

Crist Kolder recently shared this incredible chart:

This is a profound trend. The average age of incoming CEOs for S&P 500 companies has increased about 14 years over the last 14 years.

From 1980 to 2001 the average age of a CEO dropped four years and then from 2005 to 2019 the averare incoming age of new CEOs increased 14 years!

This means that the average birth year of a CEO has not budged since 2005. The best predictor of becoming a CEO of our most successful modern institutions? 

Being a baby boomer.

Let’s reconfigure the graph to make this clear. Using the raw data, we can graph instead the average birth year of an incoming CEO:

In Academia, there has been a similar dramatic jump in age of senior leaders. The American Council of Education shows that the share of 60+ University Presidents increased from 30% to almost 60% in 15 years

The baby boomer generation not only reached the executive levels earlier than other generations, they have also added another entire chapter to their careers. 

To recap: In addition to entering the workforce during a very advantageous time, they have also redefined what it means to work, pushing their tenures well beyond previous generations, staying in power and holding back the following generations from reaching senior roles at the ages they did in their own careers.

Trend #3— Atomization of work and increase of pseudo career paths

In 1967, HBR shared a reflection on middle managers and their career paths:

…most men, attainment of executive rank coincides with the onset of middle age, that vast gulf which begins about 35 and endures until a man has come to terms with himself and his human fate (for no man matures until he has done so).

Putting aside the awkward sexism and enlightenment musings, its shocking to realize that in the late 1960s 35 years old was once considered “middle age” and a reasonable time to be promoted executive of a company.

As we saw earlier, the baby boomers didn’t reach executive positions until their early fifties, but they had already chipped a few years away from their predecessors. 

However, as they became the executives, they were overseeing organizations that were about to dip below 2% annual growth and because they were just kicking off another chapter of their career, the positions that were available to them were not available to Generation X and more recently, millennials.

However, the underlying work beliefs, that working hard, putting in your time and then becoming successful was still deeply tied to many of our modern institutions. 

This is where the story gets interesting and I think might resonate with people trying to find a good path for themselves at work.

Over the past thirty years, there has been a consistent atomization of the workforce, turning many good jobs into bad jobs along with a proliferation of pseudo career paths for good jobs that hide the fact that there just aren’t that many leadership and other jobs that one might paid with having “made it” to go around.

The atomization of work

In Academia, the atomization of work has been extensively covered as a shift from tenure-track roles to adjunct positions. Starting in 1975, tenure and tenure track roles shrunk from 45% to about a quarter of jobs today

While Academia is an example of this happening in the professional world, it is also happening across the economy, especially with blue-collar work. 

Last year, the BLS quietly launched that they call the “Job Quality Index” which measures the ratio of good jobs to bad jobs. This is a simple ration of the percentage of jobs that pay above the average wage to the percentage of jobs that pay below the average wage.

In 1990, the proportion of good jobs to bad jobs was about 1:1. Another way to think about this is that there were about 90 “bad” jobs for every good job. Since 1990, for every 100 new jobs, 63 of them were of the low-wage,low-quality variety.

What’s behind this trend? 

A big driver is the shift away from goods-producing work and a shift towards lower-wage service jobs with less predictable hours such as cashiers, home-health workers and retail workers.

These are not only lower-wage jobs, but often are contract or part-time jobs with less hours. Many want to work more hours, but can’t.

Emergence Of pseudo career paths

Many people in the working world buy into the idea of a career. This is an idea built around the belief that you should always be progressing, learning and growing.

Not able to deliver on some of the opportunities for literal growth, many institutions have created pseudo career paths.

These are paths that don’t give you a real opportunity to move into a leadership role in your firm, but give you the appearance of progress. 

In law firms we see this with the emergence of the non-equity partner track or even the staff attorney path. 

As the odds of being promoted to a real equity partner have diminished, it has coincided with added levels to the pyramid.

This has also happened in consulting firms. If you read the history of consulting firms, you realize that fifty years ago you were a consultant for a few years before being promoted to partner. Now the formal track looks like this:

In addition to this elongated standard path, consulting firms also have alternative paths in research and as “experts” that roughly look like this:

Although rare, neither end in partnership and many people in these roles stay at a certain level for years. In one of my non-consulting roles at a top consulting firms I was told that in my role I couldn’t get a raise or promotion for four years. And this was at a firm growing more than 10% per year. 

I left to another firm after two years. Keep moving or give up.

The proliferation of levels is a necessary step for organizations to keep talented gen Xers and millennials who be able to land senior positions as early in their career but were raised with the belief that they need to have a steady career trajectory nonetheless. 

We could be more honest about the fact that growth has slowed, boomers are staying at work longer, and the myth of the American dream, the one that says anyone who works hard would be taken care of is probably not something that works for most people anymore.

But that would be hard.

Wealth is not shifting to the next generation

The boomers were able to rise to senior-level positions at the peak of their careers and were able to succeed in prosperous times. They’ve continued to lead these organizations well into their sixties. This has enabled them to continue to built wealth well into old age.

If you compare the boomers to the silent generations, the silent generation’s share of wealth shrunk 26% from a median cohort age of 54 to 63 years old. During the same comparable period, the baby boomers increased their share of wealth by 5%. The baby boomers are growing their share of the pie into their sixties.

I’m not against anyone amassing wealth, but something has clearly changed. If boomers are increasing their share of wealth, it is clearly at the expense of the following generations. If they aren’t going to give up their positions in the workplace, I’m not sure when this shift will finally happen.

I’ve stumbled on this explanation because I’ve been mystified by a paradox in the workplace, especially within the “creative class” as Richard Florida calls them. Many knowledge workers are making good money, but are frustrated and burning out at increasing rates. At the same time, most people would agree that the modern workplace is a much better place to spend time than it was thirty years ago. I plot the paradox like this:

I believe that the “boomer blockade” might be the best explanation of the frustration and disconnection that people are experiencing. 

They don’t just want to get paid. They also want the associated status and responsibility that comes with a leading position in our modern institutions.

We can turn to Congress to see proof of this hunger bubbling beneath the surface. With Trump being elected in 2016, peoples beliefs in any sort of career path for a politician have evaporated. 

In the 2019 congressional elections, the average age of Congress dropped 10 years due to a wave of elected Millennials. 

People want to lead if given the chance.

For many of our modern institutions, it might be a good thing that older leaders are staying in the workforce longer. Companies are more complex than ever and their experience probably does matter.

But if we are going to adjust to this new paradigm, we’ll need new narratives of what success means for the generations held back by the boomer blockade. 

Surely its not going to be muddling along as a senior manager for 15 years.

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41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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Years ago, Ben wrote that his personal mission statement was “to help people reach their full potential” and our conversation touches on this theme in many different ways.  Ben is a former car rental pro turned consultant turned HR executive. His work in HR landed him on the cover of Human Resource Executive. It’s pretty cool, so I wanted to share it here:

He then decided to leave the corporate world and has been on an entrepreneurial journey for the last six years as an executive coach and startup founder.  In our conversation about coaching, Ben mentioned a fact from an HBR article on coaching that I thought was fascinating.

“It’s rare that companies hire business coaches to address non-work issues (only 3% of coaches said they were hired primarily to attend to such matters), yet more than three-quarters of coaches report having gotten into personal territory at some time.”

This disparity really gets to the core of what people like Ben are about – being more human at work.  Ben joked in our conversation that everyone’s real issue is with their parents. While certainly funny, this gets to a deeper point that many people are waking up that we can’t just show up as robots to work anymore.  There has been a wider embrace of being our full selves at work, led by people like Ben who started the first LGBT group at his consulting firm more than 10 years ago.

Our conversation touches on a number of issues including coaching, entrepreneurship, how his relationship with work has evolves, management versus leadership and what he wants written on his tombstone.  Some other topics we touch on:

• Ben’s motivation to work at Enterprise Rent-a-Car after college and what he learned
• His early entrepreneurial “ventures” starting at 12 years old
• How his mindset about work shifted as he became successful in the corporate world
• His experience hiring working with an executive coach in his late 20s
• His experience coaching and favorite exercises
• Why companies are scared of trusting their people
• Why being a manager is actually an incredible opportunity for people
• The learning and ownership upside of carving your own path
• The value of having advisors, friends of confidants to celebrate “wins”
• Balancing life & work and his personal sustainability
• Deciding to give himself a raise as an entrepreneur

Links Mentioned:

• What coaches can do for you (HBR)
• Pilot: Executive Coaching For Organizations
• Ben Brooks Coaching
• Connect with Ben: LinkedIn, Instagram & Twitter

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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Tash Walker is the founder of a firm and spends her Fridays making marmalade.

Before instituting a four-day workweek at her firm, The Mix, she barely had time for her relationships.  She decided to start doing research about different ways of working.  There had to be a better way than the default options of “Summer Fridays” and “flexible work,” that never seem to make less anxiety or stress-ridden.

In her research, she discovered many examples of Swedish companies embracing 4-day workweeks and also found that when they instituted it, they often helped improve productivity.  After bringing the option to her team at The Mix, they decided to do a three-month trial.  They didn’t even tell their clients.

The funny thing?  The clients didn’t even notice.  Even better, when they shared it with their clients – they weren’t offended.  They were curious to learn more and impressed that they had prioritized their people.  While many quickly reflex to “well that can’t work here,” Tash and her team went forward anyway and have shown that a 4-day work week can work and it can work in professional services – an industry where many take for granted the fact that you should always be available for your clients.

Beyond improving the lives of the people at the firm, they achieved some incredible results:

• Revenues up 57%
• Absenteeism down 75%
• Productivity stayed the same
• Doubled the number of clients
• Client referrals up 50%

Want to learn how to make this happen at your company?  You can download their “4-day week“ report which is one of the best reports I’ve seen on the future of work.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Tash Walker On Why Companies Should Adopt A 4-Day Workweek appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

In sports, we would quickly question Kraft’s sanity. Yet, in the corporate world, we call this talent management.

Google indirectly addressed this issue after trying to figure out how to keep its high performers after the IPO in 2004. They stumbled upon research from Ernest O’Boyle and Herman Aguinis showing that across a wide range of fields, human performance followed the power law: high performers are not only one or two standard deviations above the average — they have dramatically higher levels of impact than average performers. This led to changes in the way google rewarded its people.

As google’s former Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock wrote in his book Work Rules! “we have many cases where people at more “junior” levels make far more than average performers at more “senior” levels. It’s a natural result of having a greater impact, and a compensation system that recognizes that impact.”

Google tells their MVPs to stay on the field.

Do people even want to climb the ladder?

Despite the clear signals from organizations that success and climbing the ladder go hand in hand, most people are unconvinced. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2016 laid out this lack of desire for both women AND men.

They found that only 40% of women and 56% of men had the ambition to become a top executive in a company. If we are basing our metrics of success on obtaining powerful positions, why don’t more people actually want that power?

It could be because the climb is exhausting. As companies have become more complex, the range of functional expertise and skills has expanded. What this means for selecting today’s leaders is that they need to meet an almost impossible set of requirements.

At the CEO level, the demands are even more extreme, with them having to be highly skilled in investor relations, operations, strategy, community relations, politics and on top of that, being cheerleader in chief for the organization.

We are requiring today’s leaders to be the best player on the team, the coach, general manager and CEO. Instead of attracting people that want to lead and inspire, we end up attracting those the types of people who are motivated by money, power and status – many of which happen to be narcissists and psychopaths.

Creating paths for coaches

Bill Belichick is seen as an incredible leader. However, in sports, that is exactly what you are looking for in a coach. In organizations, there is no coach. You have to throw 50 touchdowns before you even have the chance of leading others.

If we want more diversity, more vibrant organizations and more fulfilling work, we need to change our assumptions that being ranked higher in a company should be the goal for everyone. Authority does not equal performance and being promoted is not always the best way to unlock creativity and innovation.

We need more organizations that want to let their star quarterbacks stay on the field and create paths for the people that are driven to lead and inspire those stars.

The post The Tom Brady Principle: Don’t Promote Your Best People appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Dr. Laura Gallaher joins me from Serbia, where she is part of Remote Year, a community that travels to twelve locations within a year with a cohort of people working remotely.  Laura is an organizational psychologist who studied humor and communication in the workplace and notably completed a dissertation with “that’s what she said” in the title (office fans, anyone?).  With a title like that it was probably clear that Academia would be too limiting for her.

We talk a bit about humor and how it can be helpful or destructive in an organization.  She first points out that “aggressive” humor – even if you mean well is rarely a way to strengthen bonds.  We then talk about how leaders can embrace humor, especially to show their vulnerability, and give their teams more freedom to make mistakes, be open and be themselves.

After getting her Ph.D., she worked with NASA after the Columbia explosion and worked on some of the toughest “they fell victim to the same thing that could happen in any organization.”  She notes that these factors are prevalent across many organizations, but the stakes are often not life or death.  Her work with a small tech company found that two key elements can help companies transcend hierarchy.  First, the leader is willing to be vulnerable and second, the leader demonstrates both through words and actions that they care deeply about all the people in the organization.

“We hire people for what they think….what we care about is your ability to learn, your ability to think, your ability to grow…creating an environment where the employees opinion and input has value and you ask for it and you seek it out and you actually listen to it, this is where really, really engaged organizations are born and powerful cultures are created”

Links:

• Check out Laura’s Free 3-Part Culture Course
• Gallaher Edge
• Remote Year

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Dr. Laura Gallaher on humor at work, leadership at NASA after crisis, and building a business traveling the world appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Romy is an employee engagement consultant turned coach. She built her career consulting for and working in Fortune 100 companies on all challenges employee-related. Her mission is to drive meaningful and behavior-based change for mid-level leaders that helps them operate in a more productive and human way in the workplace. There are a lot of coaches out there, but what makes Romy stand out is that she has a lot of experience working with senior executives in her consulting career and she has deeply studied what works and what doesn’t. Hear more in our conversation…

Romy Rost – Website

Empower Your Conversations – Work With Romy

Podcast Information: #BoundlessPod

Support: Support The Podcast For $1 a Month

Join the conversation: #boundless VIP facebook group

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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The post Boundless Podcast: Romy Rost on leadership, freelancing & coaching as a skill (Episode 13) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

In this episode, Cody Royle and I discuss what sets high-performing NFL organizations like the Patriots and the Giants (and others apart from the rest). Cody is the author of Where Other’s Won’t: Taking People Innovation from the Locker Room into the Boardroom.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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Chris is the founder of uncommonly and an avid fan of the long-running CBS television show Survivor. A former teacher, marketer, and management consultant, Chris has an eclectic mix of skills and professional experience. Chris has worked with over a dozen Fortune 500 clients spanning multiple industries including Media & Entertainment, Publishing, Insurance, Pharmaceuticals, and Corporate Social Responsibility. He is obsessed with inspiring great leadership and creating incredible learning experiences that change the way people think and operate.

Download & Subscribe: Itunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Overcast

An early influence of family entrepreneurs

He always knew he wasn’t cut out for the default path. He had been inspired by an entrepreneurial thread that has run through his family. His grandmother would go through people’s garbage to find treasures to fix up and sell at the local flea market. While he wasn’t sure how it would play out for him, being surrounded by so many people that were self-employed gave him confidence that he could do the same.

Collecting skills as a “two-year career hopper”

When he was in the corporate world, he saw himself as a two-year career hopper, mostly driven by the fact that he never felt he had the freedom to truly have ownership or create. Now, on his own, he sees things differently and is energized by a feeling of “limitless creation.” Now he can “build whatever he wants…create whatever he wants.”

A lot of the skills that have enabled him to take this leap have come from his various experiences in the corporate world. In consulting, he was at a point where he was selling work, managing relationships, managing projects and doing the work. He also credits his work experience in consulting and working with a wide range of companies for enabling him to build an ability to adapt to change and be resilient.

But at a point, he had a moment of realization:

“if I literally just keep doing what I’m doing, but stop doing it for you guys but start doing it for myself, I’m going to be wildly successful”

So for him, it wasn’t as much a leap as a continuation of what he was good at but on his own terms.

Putting his story into the world

He started “vlogging” after working with a life coach who kept asking “what do you want?” After reflecting, he realized “he wanted to be an influencer, he wanted to have a voice…” He started posting once or twice a week and started learning how to shape his voice and put it into the world. This helped him build confidence that in addition to the solid foundation of skills, enabled him to take the leap to build his own company.

Struggled with finding role models in the corporate world

Chris has been puzzled by the lack of inspiring role models in the corporate world. Religion, arts and athletics — sees a lot of mentors and people stepping up, but saw such a lack of leadership and mentorship in corporate America.

To him, however, there is hope. He sees the leader of the future as someone who is “obsessed with who they show up as.” Instead of obsessing about revenue or metrics, they are worried about showing up as love, joy and passion instead of fear, doubt and loneliness. He believes raising awareness about who we are showing up as increases the awareness of who we are and how we are making decisions.

Instead of role models in the corporate world, he is inspired by people like Tyra Banks, who have been able to continuously reinvent herself and succeed across many domains.

Advice for someone who is worried about making a change in their career

Chris is not one to wait around and has similar advice for others. He would say to someone early in their career: “as soon as someone has an idea they want to do something else, they should go…” They can ask themselves the simple question

“Is this my future?”

If it’s not, he believes you need to start laying the foundation for a move as soon as possible. He also dispels the idea that you should fear what people think if your resume has a bunch of one or two year stints.

“Anyone who calls into question your resume because you jumped every two-years, does not understand the direction the workforce is headed and does not understand what the future of work looks like.”

Powerful idea: Competing for the middle

I loved Chris’ thoughts on how many people are inclined to settle for the average. Which means that more people are actually competing at a mediocre level of talent than someone who aspires to do great work. Chris challenges people with the question: If you could create anything, what would you create?

He applies this to his own consulting company he is trying to build. He likes to set big goals for himself, with a target of building a $1 million consulting business with 5 team members this year. This may sound crazy but to him it’s actually easier than competing with the twenty colleagues for one promotion spot at his old company.

Links:

• Idea Meritocracy
• Un-Commonly
• Chris’s Youtube Channel

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Chris Donohoe on Quitting The Corporate World & Founding His Own Firm appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

When I go to twitter, I typically only look at NBA associated twitter accounts, so I didn’t expect to find what I found — a short, but powerful video that unlocks the secret of leadership in 12 seconds.

When I first saw the video, I started cracking up. This is perfect.

The teacher of the lesson on leadership? Not surprising for people that know him — Steve Kerr. Kerr is a man of wisdom and also someone who has gone through tremendous hardship early in his life and had some incredible mentors.

▶ ️Now take 12 seconds and watch the video:

So let’s break this down line by line…

“you know what’s exciting for me?” — Kerr likely already has a good relationship with Bell, but he establishes the fact that he loves what he does — he genuinely cares about being a coach. Great leaders often make you feel the same — wow they are really putting a lot of energy and commitment into continuing to be a great leader.

“you’re already really good” — After establishing that he is excited, he lays a foundation of respect, saying that Bell is already a really good player, but he is hinting that there is some potential for improvement…

“…and you can be so much better” — Kerr is direct, after establishing his level of excitement about the feedback he is going to give he gets to the point — you have room to improve.

“So many little things” — He gets to the point. There are many things to work on, but he does not make a big deal of it — he calls them “little things.” Bell is likely thinking That’s all? Only little things? When do we get started on working on them?

“You’re doing so much great stuff. Man you’re killin’ it, killin’ it” — Again Kerr is so excited about the good things that Bell is doing and reinforces this again. Who isn’t ready to go work hard for Kerr at this point?

“That’s awesome…you’re gonna get better” — Again, Kerr points out that there is still room for improvement, but shows confidence that he will definitely get better. Notice the parallels with earlier where he said, “you can be so much better” and then he closes it out with confidence about where he is headed — you will get better.

Kerr clearly understands the secret of leadership

It often takes great leaders a little while to stumble upon the fact that “managing” people is the wrong frame. People can only be led. Some people never realize this and spend decades trying to control and micromanage — making people miserable in the process.

Kerr likely learned this lesson early on from his father and great coaches like Lute Olson, Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich.

But luckily, we can break down this 12-second video and learn some of the lessons that Kerr absorbed throughout his career:

I present:

Steve Kerr’s 5 Secrets of Leadership

1. Be passionate about the development of others
2. Show excitement about the art of being a leader
3. Point people in the direction of their potential and believe in them
4. Help identify opportunities for improvement but downplay their significance relative to their strengths and potential
5. Keep focusing on the future — pointing people towards their growth and show deep belief in their ability to keep improving

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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The post Steve Kerr Teaches You The Secret Of Leadership — In 12 Seconds appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.