I’m writing this specifically for people that tell me they have a desire to “do their own thing” but don’t have the boldness of Elon Musk.  I write this for normal people like me that have the desire to take a chance on themselves but might be a bit scared or are terrified of going into debt. I write this as a reminder of the many good things the corporate world taught me and that if I had appreciated them and looked for them more actively, I might have been able to bet on myself a bit sooner.

A bit of caution before diving in.  This is not your grandfather’s guide to the working world.  Part of the reason people caution against entering the corporate world is that if you just float through the experience you won’t end up in a good spot.  I’m going to nudge you to take a bit more of an unconventional approach…

#1 Full-time employment enables you to develop skills you might not have the discipline to develop

People often say things to me like “don’t you think you are able to be successful in self-employment because you worked at X?”  To someone that has spent time in the corporate world, it seems as if this is the way things work. You often need certain titles or experience to get access to the next job. But working on your own the only thing that really matters are the underlying skills you learn at those jobs.

In my time in consulting, I spent thousands of hours doing research, conducting interviews, learning how to communicate clearly, and working in teams.  In the moment this often seemed pointless but looking back I’m glad I did a specific kind of work for a long stretch of time. The deliberate practice helped me develop a set of foundational skills that has given me the confidence to experiment in new areas like 1-on-1 coaching, online course creation, podcasts and writing online.

Almost every type of job will offer the opportunity to develop these kinds of foundational skills and it’s easier to find something that is enjoyable to do with a skill you already have than trying to develop a skill around an interest.  This is why finding your passion is misleading.  Once you find it you then need to do the hard work of learning a skill to activate it.

In full-time work, there are endless opportunities to learn new things. You just need to look for it. In a large organization, almost everyone will know about something that you don’t know about. It would be impossible not to have people in your organization that could teach you something about marketing, finance, accounting, communication, managing others, or resolving conflict.  Not to mention broader life skills like parenting, dealing with health challenges, or relationships.  You just need to stay curious and keep asking questions. 

Steph Smith, who is a prime example of someone who gets the best out of the corporate world, talks about this in a similar essay,

Working in my “day job” allows me to continuously learn from people who are smarter than me, and get paid for it. I’m also faced with challenges that I simply wouldn’t encounter with my side projects and I often need to learn how to solve these challenges alongside others.

The key to all of this is to make sure that you are in an environment that has a culture of learning and helping people out. If you aren’t in one of those environments you need to make a change as soon as possible.

#2 Figuring out what you like doing is hard but there are more opportunities in a company than you think

Figuring out what you like doing while also trying to build your own business is hard.  The uncertainty and fear of failure will steer you away from things you might enjoy doing over the long run and towards things that can make money or are in fashion. 

Yet people still advise this route because they have created a false comparison between a dull corporate path and a dynamic entrepreneurial path. There are downsides to both paths but with the right amount of ingenuity, you can use your full-time job as a way to explore all different types of work.

The first step to this is to quickly build trust with your core team.  Find out what kinds of behaviors cause everyone to worry and become good at those things.  Even better if you volunteer to become the go-to person for those tasks.  If you take away someone else’s pain and anxiety you will usually end up with a lot of freedom in how you are able to spend your time at the company.

Next make a list of all the things you might want to learn about and make a list of people who can teach you those things.  Curious about facilitating and public speaking? Get coffee with the training manager.  Ever wonder how marketers think?  Reach out to the marketing director.  To do this, literally just email them and ask.  I have given this advice to many young people and they were always surprised that you could just do this.  But think about it.  People that have been in their job for a long time often don’t have a lot of people who are curious to learn about their path or journey unless they are very senior.  Ask people that are senior enough to control workflow but not too senior that people are constantly asking them for favors already.

Next, if you are still curious and might want to try out some of the work make a small offer of help.  Most people in mid-level roles in organizations have too much work to do and can always use some help, especially if you do it without a need for a lot of direction.  While I was working in consulting, I volunteered to create training materials for the learning manager in my office.  This had nothing to do with my job but I had a passion for mentoring others and wanted to learn more about how her team thought about training.  After helping her do an hour of this busy work on top of my “regular” job, she saw I was serious.  This led to me being asked to join the learning faculty to help facilitate trainings around the globe.  The links between this work and some of the things I do with online learning now would be impossible to dismiss.  I just wish I had sought out more of these opportunities.

In some cases, this strategy can even lead to you discovering a job you want to be doing and the desire of doing you “own thing” might fade away.  This is the story of many of the people in full-time jobs that enjoy their lives.  They created their own path.  Its worth finding out if this might work for you too.

#3 You can get a good understanding of how things happen in modern institutions, including how power works

Young people seem to be a bit more clear-eyed than my generation was graduating in the mid-2000s. I naively thought that in a big organization, most people were focused on doing good work and wanted the best for each other.  On the surface, this seems true but as I spent more time in multiple organizations I started to realize that who succeeds in a company is often just as much tied to results as it is political abilities and an understanding of power.  I am terrible at those games but when I became aware that there were different games than just being good I became a bit less frustrated with what was happening around me.

In addition to understanding power, organizations are a great way of understanding how the world works or doesn’t.  People who have been watching the bungled pandemic responses of many countries are often outraged and react with their version of how things “should be.”  It’s great to have ideals and a vision but even better to pair that with an understanding of how things fail, why four-week projects can take years, and how incentives can create all sorts of unintended consequences.  

The key is to observe all of this with a healthy detachment.  This is easier said than done.  Many people end up distraught by unfairness and other shenanigans in the workplace.  Observe the dynamics and learn why people are doing what they are doing but don’t make it your own purpose.  As I’ve written before, learn the game, don’t become the game.

Another situation worth experiencing but escaping as fast as you can is working with a bad manager.  Use this for inspiration for what you hope to avoid.  Think about the incentives at play and try to understand why this person might behave a certain way (there often aren’t that many incentives for people to be better managers) and then make sure you don’t fall into the same traps when you have your own team.

It’s popular in the corporate world for senior people to praise these experiences as something worth seeking out.  “Everyone should find a job for two years where you can really struggle.”  This is terrible advice and has more to do with this leader’s own confirmation bias than a deep truth about the paths people should take.  Learn from it.  Try to understand it.  But get out of it as fast as possible.

#4 There are a lot of people that live fulfilling lives and have full-time jobs. You might be one of them.

There are many people that are living fulfilling lives and have full-time jobs.  It may be a surprise to some people but many of these people don’t have a secret monetizable side gig nor a dream to start one.  These people typically have a range of activities at work and out of work that bring them meaning.  They may spend some of their day job mentoring people or even acting as someone that others can vent to.  They may focus on things outside of work like spending time with their family, learning things for fun, volunteering in their community, or on a hobby once a week.

One of the best things I did throughout my career (though I wish I did more) was to go up to people that seemed to be thriving.  These are the people that everyone loves working with and that people admire.  They stand out from the others with a certain “aliveness” that is hard to deny. They may not be the actual leaders of your company.  In fact, they may be some of the lowest level people at the company.

Go talk to these people.  Tell them that you admire their positive energy and ask them where it comes from.  Without fail, there is always an interesting story.  These people always have an experience that changed their life, a mentor that helped them approach life with a new perspective or a deeper purpose that drives them in their life.  Try to spend time with these people.  Ask them for book recommendations.  Keep asking questions about their story and surround yourself with these people.  

They are the role models you need no matter which path you take.

#5 Building a life off the default path takes time.  Stable paychecks enable you to build savings so you can buy more time to figure it out

One of the biggest traps of entrepreneurship or self-employment is mistaking the whole purpose of the journey for making money.  Money can be a good motivator but when you are pursuing something on your own you need a lot more motivation than if you were doing the work as a job.  Most people want to do things that they actually like doing. Sometimes it takes entrepreneurs decades of work and eventual burnout to figure this out.  Having some savings from the corporate world can help you experiment for a couple of years without the pressure of needing to make money as soon as possible.

This is the path Kyle Kowalski took as he explored uncertainty and meaning through his writing after leaving the corporate world in 2018. He is grateful that he was able to build some “runway” that has enabled him to explore without the immediate pressure to monetize:

There is no question in my mind that I would not be doing what I’m doing right now if I hadn’t worked in the corporate world for a decade. Saving some money from that time is also buying me “solopreneurial runway” for a few years.

I always tried to be frugal no matter how much I made.  Perhaps this was me knowing deep down that I wanted the option to walk away down the road.  I’m glad I saved a lot of money and invested aggressively in all my jobs.  Many people suggest investing 5-10% of your income in your 401k.  I did 20-30% every year.  I used this as a way to artificially lower my salary so that I could learn to live on less.  

When I did quit my job I was able to commit to at least a year of self-employment because of the savings I had.   This enabled me to experiment with a variety of different types of work not to mention extended breaks of non work.  It sounds crazy but if I spent all my money and only wandered around for a year and read a bunch of books I still would have considered it a success.  To me there is more to life than work.

I’m always grateful for the money I was able to save in the corporate world because I’ve been able to take a slower and more interesting path than if I had to focus on making a lot of money immediately.  Some people think of it as “losing” their savings but I re-frame it as a gift from my past corporate self telling me, “go explore and see where you end up Paul!”

#6 A lot of jobs are not that hard and you can stay energized by limiting the amount of hours you work

There is a famous study run at a consulting firm that looked at the link between hours and promotions.  There were three groups. Those who worked the most, those who negotiated fewer hours, and a third group of people who worked less but never told anyone.

Who got promoted the most?  Predictably the first group but also at similar rates were the people that worked a lot less and didn’t raise attention to this fact.  The moral of this story?  Don’t ever accept that “this is the way things have to be.”  Many in the corporate world are good at conforming and look around for cues for what they are supposed to do.  Instead, you should always start with the question, “what is possible?”

This question drove Diania Merriam to negotiate a two month leave of absence to go on a pilgrimage across Spain instead of a pay raise.  She was a bit scared to ask but surprised when her boss said yes right away.  In 2020, many companies have finally woken up and even formerly stuffy companies like Citigroup are offering 4-weeks paid to work with a non-profit and 3-month sabbaticals after five years.

Working shorter workweeks are also much more possible than people realize, even at some of the most hard-working companies.  I spent long stretches at companies like McKinsey, BCG, and GE working 35-40 hours a week while still doing great work and not dropping the ball.  I was just obsessive about doing the things that mattered and doing them well.

Corporate norms can also drive perverse incentives such as keeping people glued to a desk surfing the web rather than reading a book they might be interested in.  You can make the case that many books will help you at work so never be afraid to pull out a book and read at your desk.  If anyone asks why you’re reading a book just respond, “aren’t we here to learn?”  In my final full-time job, I used to block off a private “freedom hour” meeting each morning to spend on writing before I started my “real” work.

The lesson? Don’t create prisons for yourself that may not exist. Look for ways to do the things you want to be doing. It may be easier than you think.

The Bottom Line: Defend Your Energy & Cultivate Possibility

Blindly following the norms of the corporate world and working long hours every week on something that you’re not excited about is one of the fastest ways to destroy your energy, numb your imagination, and convince yourself that you can not do anything other than stay in your current job or path. 

This is why some people advise against this path. However, with a little creativity on your part, I believe that you can get a lot of good out of your time in the corporate world. 

The key is making sure you stay focused on the right things.

The most useful metric I’ve found is not your title, your career progress, or compensation.  It’s your energy.  Defend your energy at all costs.  It’s good practice to have some regular reflection in which you can assess you energized you are about life.  I recommend setting a calendar reminder once a month and tracking it over time.  If it starts dropping it’s time to change things up.  It’s the only way you will be able to keep experimenting and staying open to the possibilities of life.

It may be hard to believe but the biggest barrier to carving a path that works for you is not access to opportunity or money, but your own imagination for what’s possible.

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 Don’t Follow Your Passion, Work In The Corporate World First appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

The post Integrating Chaos: Building Resilient Organizations with Chaos Theory appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Now the handouts are gone and those jobs are off the table. Right? Not according to LinkedIn. In the six months after New York pulled out of the deal, Amazon has hired more than 1,500 people in the greater New York City area:

In other words, they are on pace to meet their target in less than eight years (as opposed to the 15 years they had to do it).

How is it that we are operating in a world in which so many people are unable to find work that matters to them and at the same time, the richest man in the world is getting cities and states to write checks for $1.5 billion for bringing jobs he intended to bring anyway?

This is corporate welfare.

Corporate welfare may have been impactful at some point, but it is no longer serving us now.

In today’s world, corporate welfare often serves the people that need it least, in-demand knowledge workers. The kind of workers Amazon hires are already geographically mobile and actively making the job market work for them.

Why We Glorify The Full-Time Job

In the US, where less than a third of people actually work in full-time jobs, the idea of building economies around large companies and the jobs they offer is an idea from a time when General Motors employ nearly a million people, mostly in a small geographic region. At one point GM employed half of the population of Flint, Michigan.

If you could get GM to relocate to your town, you’d be pretty smart to give them a tax break.

However, over the past 25 years as supply chains and companies have globalized and much of work has become digitized, the kinds of massive companies that operate in one area are a dream of economies past. Now, we have a much more dynamic labor market, which has been great for certain types of geographically mobile and highly-skilled people, but terrible for others.

As the mythical era of steadily increasing salaries, loyalty and pensions is disappearing, we have yet to replace it with a new narrative of how we should think about work.

Many are unemployed or underemployed or even just at jobs where they are resentful and feel trapped. These people don’t just want another “job,” what they want is a shot to reinvent their lives and try something new, without the risk of shame and failure.

Mounds of research shows the health benefits of being employed and show that when people lose their job it is incredibly harmful on their health and mental state.

Have we ever stopped to think a bit deeper here and reflect that there’s something messed up about that?

One one hand almost everyone accepts that companies will lay people off in a second, but on the other hand almost everyone says that staying employed is the more important thing you can do to prove your worth to society.

We need a bit more nuance.

Basic Income As Diagnosis

Andrew Yang is the only current US politician who is speaking honestly about this confusion in the United States. His presidential campaign is founded on a Universal Basic Income of $1,000 a month for every American. When many come across this idea, their gut reaction is something like this:

WE CAN’T JUST GIVE PEOPLE MONEY FOR NOTHING!

Once people work through this outrage, they tend to find the arguments behind Yang’s proposal compelling. He is speaking honestly about jobs disappearing, economic growth stagnating and the fact that modern tech firms don’t need as many people to extract enormous wealth from the world and certainly aren’t hiring any people outside of a few elite cities.

Many people don’t realize this, but when President Obama backed off a single-payer plan for his healthcare overhaul in 2009 one of the biggest drivers was because of jobs:

I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?

This is a shocking statement and not because of the political maneuvering. It’s shocking because Obama was indirectly accepting that many of these jobs are not even needed…but he wanted to keep them anyway.

The foundation of our economy and our work beliefs depends on there being enough good jobs for people that want them.

This is what makes Yang’s policy radical. He is not proposing to give people something for nothing. He is urging us to update our assumptions and map of reality based on how the labor economy actually works.

Human Capital 2.0

We have a model for thinking about investing in people, but we need to decouple it from the circumstances of its time. 

The idea of “human capital” was born in the 1950s and popularized in 1964 by Gary Becker’s book of the same name. His argument was that similar to financial capital, we need to see people as something we can invest in and that we should do much more of it.

When he put forth this idea, his measured success in wages. If $10 is put towards one’s education and that person is able to increase their earnings by $11, that’s a worthwhile investment.

The problem is that humans are not financial instruments. They are influenced by their family situation, existing resources, mental makeup and their environment. Many can also increase their salaries and earning potential by pursuing credentials detached from any underlying learning. 

Becker reflected on this years later:

This sharp fall in the return to investments in human capital put the concept of human capital itself into some disrepute. Among other things it caused doubt about whether education and training really do raise productivity or simply provide signals (“credentials”) about talents and abilities.

Becker’s “human capital” took off in a time when there was enormous faith in higher education and large corporations as the model for learning and working. 

During periods of rapid growth like the 50’s and 60’s incomes were increasing and people were progressing. Someone born in the 1940’s or 50’s had a 90% chance of doing “better” than their parents. This economic engine made investments in public education a no-brainer.

That era is over. 

We’re operating in a much less optimistic and much more expensive time. Although many acknowledge that education is a good thing, its hard to figure out how to translate money into actual outcomes. Even worse, people like Bryan Caplan argue that the whole system is waste of time. 

In his book The Case Against Education, he says:

The heralded social dividends of education are largely illusory: rising education’s main fruit is not broad-based prosperity, but credential inflation

We need an updated model of “human capital” — one that doesn’t think about humans as something that goes through a factory of learning, but instead people who have fears, hopes, aspirations, creative energy and even desires to be a contributing member of society outside of paid employment.

A Thought Experiment

Let’s imagine that you have worked full-time for five years after college. At that time, you are feeling like you need a break and you decide you will take a couple years off from the working world. 

For the next 24 months, you are going to focus on learning, reflecting on life and figuring out what you want to do next. During that time you also plan to meet people from different cultures, travel around the world, volunteer on different projects that interest you and also take time to spend with your family and loved ones. 

Instead of people giving you a hard time, they praise you. They say you are incredibly smart and what you are doing is very impressive. Many people even suggest to you that you may may a much higher income when you return to the working world.

Sound too good to be true?

What I just described was the full-time MBA. Every year tens of thousands of people leave their jobs around the world and begin a full-time MBA program. 

Everyone in their community praises them for this decision despite the fact that many go into upwards of $200,000 of debt and give up multiple years of salary. 

Yet when I quit my job and decided to start my own business, I was criticized by many people. Why would I take such a risky path and give up my guaranteed salary?

This response has puzzled me. When did the myth of the pull yourself up by the bootstraps American entrepreneur turn into the ideal of the American office worker with a stable salary?

This glorification of the safe full-time job has been great for the kind of high-wage tech workers who skillfully jump from good job to good job and it does wonders for the successful firms like Amazon who are able to make governments beg for them to take free money.

Our system has left behind the average worker. It pretends that there are plentiful good jobs available when there are not.

An example of an alternative approach is Alex Hillman’s 10k independents project, which aims to help 10,000 people build small independent businesses. He believes that by empowering creative individuals, you will inevitably build larger, more successful businesses and also create networks of individuals in local communities that can leverage each other’s skills.

In other words, Alex wants to create jobs, but he wants to do it by investing in people.

Because healthy economies, healthy cities, and healthy business ecosystems are interdependent, fueled by entities who are individually resilient and networked, depending on each other.

Creating 10,000 jobs makes for good PR, but rarely ever leads to the kinds of activities that help dynamic ecosystems emerge. It’s top-down PR politics. These corporate welfare programs help the most successful companies offer 20% pay bumps to the knowledge workers who already have the most opportunities and leverage.

People like Alex want to invest in people and enable them to build the lives they want while also developing new and unexpected skills.

He wants to build the foundations of a new economy. This is the hard, but meaningful work that we need.

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 Amazon, Corporate Welfare & The Illusion Of Jobs appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Richard Sheridan founded a company to end human suffering in the workplace.  That sounds grand, but he’s actually walking the walk and has been for over twenty years.  Coding became a passion for him at a young age but as he got older it became a “just” a job.  Throughout his 30’s he slowly lost interest in his work and instead of driving into the office would take joy rides around Ann Arbor.  Deep down, he knew that there must be a better way.

During this time, he was offered a promotion by a new leader at his company.  He didn’t really have a plan decided he would use this as an opportunity to quit.  When he delivered this news, his manager challenged him that it wasn’t the right decision.  That night he decided he would just put all his dreams on the table. He walked into the office the next day and told the CEO he would take the promotion on one condition.

I’m going to build the best damn software team Ann Arbor has ever seen, and I need your help.

He took the promotion and over the next four years, questioned everything he knew about building software.  Over time he started to find things that worked and contributed towards the kind of company he was proud to be building.  One of the things he questioned early on was the individual contributor model. Taking a page from Kent Beck’s book Extreme Programming, he implemented a pair-coding model, where two people work together on one computer.  His company has since expanded this to every function in the company and it is the kind of thinking that is still rare in today’s corporate world. However, decisions like this help him escape the traps that a lot of companies face with internal politics and power as they scale.  Hear about his own journey and the principles he uses to build a company centered around joy.

To find out more about Menlo Innovations, click here.

Books Mentioned

• Extreme Programming, Beck
• The Fifth Discipline, Senge
• Chief Joy Officer, Sheridan
• Joy, Inc. Sheridan
• Toyota Kata, Rother

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 Richard Sheridan On Building A Life And Company Filled With Joy appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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.

I had a conversation with the amazing Chelsea Seid, co-founder of Marlow – a coaching platform for companies, about what is happening in organizations.  We get pretty nerdy and talk about passion versus purpose (and why passion is overrated), how to pursue mastery (but not too much), how to find meaning at work (hint: avoid managers) and how we are limited by default definitions of success.

Resources Mentioned:

• Passion, Purpose & Play, Vega Factor
• Self-Determination Theory, Deci & Ryan
• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Drive (TED Talk) by Dan Pink
• Future of Work Mindset, Paul Millerd
• Crisis at Work, Paul Millerd
• The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler
• Passion & Purpose, Thrive Global Article
• What Make Work Meaningful, MIT Sloan Review

Check out Marlow: 

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 Conversation With Chelsea Seid of Marlow About Passion, Purpose & Meaning At Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I had been brainstorming ways to evade paying it back.  Would they really come after me in small claims court?  Most people asked me “why not wait six more months?”  I don’t have a good answer other than the psychic costs of staying and not getting started on my freelance journey being too high.  I felt a deeper pull towards this journey that I could not explain.  That and I figured if my life came down to having $24k on hand, I had enough friends to go begging to.

Mounds of research have shown that bonuses are a bad idea.  Save for routine tasks, bonuses decrease performance on average.  Yet we keep offering them over and over.  In a conversation with a senior executive at a previous company, I shared some of the damning research.  She assured me that I was wrong.  “My personal experience has shown that bonuses make a difference…How else would you motivate people?” I decided not to show her the research on confirmation bias and moved on.

However, is the research open and shut? Nassim Taleb has opened my mind to questioning even the acceptance of my own confirming research that bonuses are a bad idea.  Taleb argues that the types of behavioral economics experiments that show money is a de-motivator are too simple – results at the individual level often do not scale at the group level.  Which got me thinking.

What might be the sensible reason for a bonus program to exist at the organizational level? 

The Intended Function Of a Bonus Is To Signal Fairness – If you Work Hard, You Will Be Rewarded

Most companies fail the tests of fairness.  In my experience, most organizations pay a bonus to all employees and only slightly more to top performers compared to bottom performers.  Research has shown that human performance matches a power distribution, which means that top performers should be paid dramatically more than average performers.  Google has tried to implement this at the company – but most companies are not google.

The Actual Function Of a Bonus Program Eventually Defaults To Signaling That the company is a “serious” company (skepticism mine)

I will argue then that in the absence of serving a fairness function, the bonus defaults to a signaling mechanism of showing that the company takes itself seriously.  If a senior executive wanted to get rid of a bonus program, they would have a lot of explaining to do, not to mention be undermining the very beliefs in which they have raked in massive bonus payments throughout their career.  It would be personal narrative suicide.  Just look at the flack the CEO of Gravity Payments got when he made the minimum salary at his company $70,000 – people still call him crazy to this day.

It takes courage to not follow the script.

The Unintended Consequences of Bonus Programs Ends Up Being Manipulation, Destruction of Trust & Personal Annihilation

It felt painful to write that $24,000 check because it made me realize that I was just a cog in the wheel.  I was given a sign-on bonus so that I would be scared to leave.  Nothing more, nothing less.

The unintended consequence of a bonus program is that it incentivizes de-motivated employees to stay in their job.  Take Sarah, who hates her job.  She has her performance review in December and is told how much she will be paid as a bonus, to be paid in April.  Many companies make it unclear whether Sarah can still get her bonus if she leaves within those four months and Sarah would be crazy to bring it up.  So Sarah stays until April when the money finally hits her bank account.   Yet at this point, she is wondering whether it is worth it to stick it out another eight months to find out her next bonus.  This is crazy for both the employer and employee – yet I hear about this dynamic all the time from friends and clients.

Everyone has worked with Ralph.  He is the guy at the company that is able to game the system.  No one really likes working with him, yet he is politically savvy and knows how to maximize his bonus.  Its not a secret either.  “Ralph knows how to game the system.”  As soon as Ralph gets paid, as a certain amount of trust is forever destroyed within the company.  Once people acknowledge the system is rigged, everyone thinks they are getting screwed.

Finally, bonuses encourage all-out personal destruction.  In many companies, performance is still relatively hard to measure – so we default to the easiest proxy: time at work.  Investment banking is the extreme example.  If an alien landed on this planet and observed investment bankers giving up sleep and ruining their human relationships they might assume they are working on the most important mission on Earth.  In investment banking you don’t even have to worry about who is working the most – they are all maximizing the number of hours they are working and sitting tight until the next annual bonus. I would be surprised to find an investment banker that is not burned out (and have yet to find one in my personal network)

How can this be good for anyone?

The post Paying back $24,000 to my previous employer and the absurdity of bonuses appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Jennifer isn’t happy. She started her career in strategy consulting, got her MBA from a top business school, went back into consulting for a few years, and is about to be promoted from director to senior manager in a Fortune 500 company. While Jennifer has achieved what she had set from the start as her ultimate career goal, deep down she isn’t satisfied with her work situation, and she isn’t exactly sure why.

Derek works in corporate finance. He took the traditional path, starting at a big bank after landing what he thought was his “dream job.” Since then, he has moved laterally to be an analyst at three different hedge funds. Each time he gets the feeling that something is “off,” he reaches out to a recruiter who finds him a similar job with a nice pay bump. Yet despite making more money than he could have imagined, a feeling of restlessness returns faster every time that he changes positions. His family is proud of him and tells him he is doing the right thing, but deep down he feels doubt and dissatisfaction about his career choices.

The stories of Derek and Jennifer reflect themes that I have heard over and over throughout my career as a strategy consultant, coach and someone generally fascinated with organizations. Some stories are not as subtle, such as the young woman who told me she is verbally assaulted almost weekly at a hedge fund, or the acquaintance who is terrified of taking a pay cut and so endures a dysfunctional workplace culture. One friend got so fed up with office politics in his company that he just said “screw it” and left the corporate world for good.

We are leaving a huge amount of untapped human potential on the table. Gallup found that only 21% of employees strongly agree that “their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.” Yet, when looking for a new job, the same report found that the number one thing people are prioritizing is a place that enables them to “do what they do best.” It’s no wonder that a majority of the workforce is actively looking or open to a new opportunity.

Why are so many people feeling stuck and miserable where they work, and why are our organizations failing to capture the hearts, minds, and enormous human potential among their ranks? While the answer is complex, I’ve spent the last 10 years of my career trying to unravel this mystery. Here are six reasons why thriving in today’s organizations is so hard:

We’re Defaulting to the Wrong Goals

Peter Drucker’s quote “what gets measured, gets improved” looms over every aspect of the business world. People seek to measure their progress, especially where work is concerned. Yet it’s not always easy to track your own success, whether personal or professional. In our personal lives there are few tangible metrics we can rely on to determine whether one individual is “successful” compared with another. Even if we do identify areas to measure — such as seeing our children attend college, it may take years to see the results of your efforts.

In the corporate world, many of us have a hard time connecting our short-term actions to long-term career success. If we don’t take the time to figure out a definition of success for our career up front, it’s easy to default to goals such as ‘make more money’ or ‘get a promotion’. While few people will admit that their main career objective is to maximize their salary potential, many people are defaulting to exactly that.

More profit, more growth. Default assumptions like these are where we land when there is no deeper purpose or set values in place. In the corporate world, we have defaulted to a paradigm centered on shareholder value — a concept many believe is deeply flawed — that is forcing everyone to keep their attention riveted on profit and power without figuring out what type of system actually increases both engagement and productivity. This is taken for granted: a majority of Millennials (who now make up the largest generation of the workforce) feel that businesses “have no ambition beyond wanting to make money.”

Millennials (and all workers) may be surprised to learn that shareholder value was not always the accepted ideology of the firm. In the 1900’s, there was a debate in the legal world on the purpose of the firm. In one corner was Adolph Berle, who championed the “shareholder primacy” view and in the other was Merrick Dodd who supported a “managerialist” stance. The managerialist view said that firms should serve not only shareholders, but multiple stakeholders including employees and the public good. In multiple court decisions, the courts made it clear that corporations did not have to prioritize shareholder above all other stakeholders.

As the legal debate subsided, Dodd’s managerialist view became the accepted view of how a firm should be run and it stayed that way for over forty years. However, in 1976 economists William Meckling and Mike Jensen helped re-ignite the debate, publishing a paper with the view that ‘maximizing shareholder value’ was the best way to maximize wealth because the managerialist approach made it more confusing to manage, imposed increased costs and lowered the overall wealth created by a firm. By the end of the century, Berle’s “shareholder primacy” had emerged from the dead and in the words of Columbia Law Professor Jeffrey Gordon, “the triumph of the shareholder value criterion was nearly complete.”

While an increased focus on shareholder value could be plausibly credited with increases in efficiency and optimization in firms, it has also increased a focus on short-term results. The pressure on short-term performance is so high that eight out of ten financial officers would be willing to sacrifice long-term value to avoid the headaches of missing short-term targets. Given the fact that executives now see more than 75% of their compensation coming from stock, it is also in their own best interest to act this way.

All things being equal, a move to a corporate model that revolves around maximizing shareholder value increases the attention on financial goals and rewards. The problem is that most employees don’t see the massive economic benefits that the senior leaders are raking in. Research has repeatedly shown that many people are not that motivated by money. In fact, offering money as a reward tends to decrease intrinsic motivation and decrease increased individual performance. As a result, our strong embrace of shareholder value over the last 40 years has likely demotivated and frustrated employees and may have led to worse firm performance.

We’re Mistaking Authority For Performance

Imagine after Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl in 2001, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft sat Brady down and told him, “Tom, you had a fantastic season. We want to see you keep growing with the organization. We are going to promote you to General Manager.” 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 deviation 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 Laszlo Bock, Google’s former Chief People Officer 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 greater impact, and a compensation system that recognizes that impact.” Google tells their MVPs to stay on the field.

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 men and women. They found that only 40 percent of women and 56 percent of men had any 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 that are good at checking the boxes (as well as narcissists and psychopaths). Getting more diversity among senior leaders likely has more to do with changing the way we are doing business than focusing on pushing people up a broken ladder. Without a new way of thinking about what success means in the business world, we are not poised to disrupt this cycle anytime soon.

We Aren’t Providing a Connection to Purpose

People crave purpose. For ages, many people got that sense of purpose from social structures such as religion, family, and local community. In today’s world, though, the only thing we seem to have shared alignment on is consumerism , symbolized by the fact that more than twice as many people have Amazon Prime subscriptions than volunteer – this is a problem.

Lacking a clear route to purpose in our personal lives, we often turn to organizations to provide a sense of meaning and mission. Yet instead of finding purpose at work, employees often find themselves lost in complex organizations with lots of noise and frustration but little in the way of a purpose to which they can feel genuinely connected. This disconnect leads some employees to develop personal mission statements, but this can cause an even greater sense of dissatisfaction when there is dissonance between their mission and that of the company.

Let’s take a look at two companies and their mission statements:

• Mission 1: “The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.”
• Mission #2: “…to be a leader in the distribution and merchandising of food, pharmacy, health and personal care items, seasonal merchandise, and related products and services.”

Based on research from Edwin Locke, I would predict that you aren’t that excited about committing to Mission #2 (hint: #1 is SpaceX and #2 is Kroger). Locke’s research found a link between challenging goals and higher performance. He also found that one of the foundational elements that determines the level of employee motivation was something called “goal-commitment” — that one’s commitment and their motivation was directly related to how important or significant they felt the goal was. I’m guessing most people at Kroger are not all that personally inspired to be distribution and merchandising leaders, whereas SpaceX is successfully self-selecting new hires based on a bold mission. The types of people they attract and hired are more likely to be aligned with the mission as well as motivated and engaged at work.

We Don’t Understand How Organizations Operate

Everyone that takes a basic business class likely learns about Fredrick Taylor and his influence on management thinking. He looked at organizations as inefficient and filled with waste and bureaucracy. This meant business leaders should spend their time standardizing processes, removing waste and fine-tuning plans for the organization. This point of view often goes hand in hand with a “Theory X” view of the worker as one that is not internally motivated and one that needs to be controlled and told what to do.

Modern business thinkers rarely accept these harsh tenets of Taylorism, but many of the new business paradigms such as “paying for performance”, “six sigma” and “process re-engineering” still operate on the same fundamental assumptions. The goals remain the same — remove waste, increase efficiency and improve planning. But what if an increase in control of the organization increases the chances that the organization will fail? 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 started in nature, looking at natural phenomena like how organisms grow in nature and how weather evolves, and began applying the lessons to many fields such as finance, biology, economics and eventually, organizations.

One of the fundamental beliefs 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.

If we assume a certain unpredictability in individual actions, it makes a lot of modern management practices look feeble. In a paper on complexity in organizations, Professor Gary Grobman summarized the implication for organizations and managers quite simply:

“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”

Can you imagine a business school class titled “Going With The Flow: How To Relax and Trust Your People”? I didn’t think so. Our leadership pipelines are filled with people getting hired and promoted based on the assumption that they do something. What does this mean for managers and leaders? One could argue that they have an even more important role, but the frame of their role shifts. From a manager and planner who makes top-down decisions to an enabler of experiments, cultivator of healthy competition and supporter of emergent ideas that gain momentum.

Instead of shame and blame, complexity theory says that today’s leaders should accept that fine-tuning and organization is a never-ending and shift their focus to the true power of the organization — the people. We can create plan after plan, but all we are doing is driving our people crazy and as chaos theory researchers say — fighting against the fundamental laws of nature.

We Aren’t Giving People Autonomy

For most employees, working in a large organization means being on the receiving end of a continuous barrage of new initiatives, decisions, and processes. Middle managers experience the result of these changes, but often play little or no role in making these decisions — nor are those decisions likely to connect with their personal values. It’s not a surprise, then, that according to Gallup, front-line managers responsible for carrying out the wishes of senior executives are 16 percent less engaged than those executives.

The cost of this disconnect is a breakdown of trust — the fundamental currency on which someone is willing to do something for someone else. Edelman’s “Trust Barometer” measures the level of trust in different institutions globally. Looking at different levels of the organization, Edelman found that trust in a firm increased the higher you went in the organization, with most senior-level executives showing the highest levels of trust.

Daniel Pink has done extensive research on why we continue to run our organizations blind to decades of research on human motivation. One of the gaps he’s highlighted is autonomy, or the sense of control over one’s own work. Higher rates of autonomy are correlated to higher engagement and productivity. Employers like Costco, Trader Joe’s, Zappos.com and Atlassian are famous for their efforts to give more autonomy to their workers, but for most people in today’s organizations there is a lack of trust in their ability to solve problems on their own. Instead we spend time creating processes and demanding people follow them.

Trust is often hidden, but can have a powerful impact on people. A friend put this into words talking about a perk at his company, “My favorite thing at this company is what the beer kegs represent. It’s not that we have free beer in the kitchen-that’s secondary. It’s the implication that management trusts us to be able to handle ourselves like adults.”

When there is a lack of trust, people can spend weeks spinning their wheels trying to convince leaders to take action. As a leader it can take courage to break this cycle. At Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos talked about how he embraces the principle of “disagree and commit” in his 2016 letter to shareholders,

“I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities.” Looking back, he reflected: “given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I’m just glad they let me in the room at all!”

More companies are putting trust back in the hands of all employees. Basecamp is a company that offers a “no-red-tape expense account.” That’s right, no red tape: “No pre-approval needed, and no limits — just be reasonable.” Organizations like this place value on autonomy over authority and trust over rules. In addition to the savings from the accountants that would need to monitor a more formal policy, companies that put trust in their people are unlocking enormous human potential.

We’re Choosing Comfort Over Growth

The American system of employment is unique in that it ties having a job to the security of many social benefits such as healthcare and life insurance. these pressures increase the anxiety around job security and contribute to the tendency of employees to stay in jobs they hate. In 2016, Aon found that 8% of the workforce disliked their job but had no intention of doing anything about it. And despite conventional wisdom, todays millennials are “job hopping” less than previous generations.

Business author Seth Godin has been fascinated with what keeps people in sub-optimal jobs has challenged people to separate the concepts of safety and comfort. We have an inherent drive towards safety in the sense of not being harmed. But when we default to a comfort zone, we may feel unsafe any time we step outside of it, when really we’re safe, just uncomfortable. Making decisions that keep us in our comfort zone can hurt our career more than taking risks. As Godin says, “the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.”

Jim Koch would have never started the Boston Beer Company if he wasn’t able to overcome this comfort. He had been working at Boston Consulting Group for six years in what he described as “a great job.” However, he reflected and “I asked myself do I want to do this for the rest of my life? The answer was no. If I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, I don’t want to do it tomorrow.” He re-framed risk in his mind to help him make the decision. He said “The risk of it was continuing to do something that didn’t make me happy and getting to 65 and looking back and go oh my god, I wasted my life. That is risk, that is danger.”

Americans are quite complacent and comfortable with their current job. A report by the American Psychological Association found that 69 percent of people either agree or strongly agree with the statement “All in all, I am satisfied with my job.” However, if you dig deeper, you find that people still lack is a sense of opportunity. Only 44 percent of employees agreed that the growth and development opportunities at their company were sufficient.

Organizational change researcher and consultant Jacob Morgan challenges people to think about staying in a job you hate like this: if you were given a pill that had the side effects of “weight gain, hair loss, stress, arguments with our spouse…and in some cases death” would you take that pill? Most will say no, yet those are the possible side effects of working in a dysfunctional organization or a joyless job. Our jobs are not giving us what we want, but we keep coming back for more.

Hope for the future

I’ve painted a rather bleak picture of today’s organizations, yet there are signs of hope. The emergence of new business models in the tech sector, the elevation of people operations as a function and increased experimentation with new organizational models are all tailwinds for the companies that want to work in new ways. However, building the organization of the future is not going to be easy. We must change the way we think about our default metrics for success, cultivate leaders who inspire and trust people, root our businesses in big and challenging goals and push people to take more risks and choose uncertainty over comfort in their careers. Organizations don’t have a choice. As noted author on workplace dynamics Dan Pink has said, “talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.”

Special thanks to Jake Stone for the help with this piece

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 Crisis at Work: Why Today’s Organizations Are Failing To Unleash Human Potential appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The magic of this book is that it can be read through many lenses. Creativity is at the center of almost all work in today’s world. After reading this, it is now probably in the top 3 “must read” books for anyone serious about being a great leader/manager in an organization (Drive and Work Rules! are the other two).

1. Creative People Produce a Lot of Crap

Grant talks about the sheer volume of content that some of the most innovative people create such as Edison’s 1,093 patents, Mozart’s 600 pieces and Beethoven’s 37 plays. He notes:

“…when it comes to ideas generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original Thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas — especially novel ideas”

2. Expertise Can Lead to Better Intuition But Hold Back Your Ability to Adapt

If you have deep expertise in an area, you likely have developed an intuition for identifying patterns in that domain. A study with people who owned many designer handbags found that when asked to determine if bags were real or fake:

“Experienced handbag owners were 22 percent more accurate when they had just five seconds than when they had thirty seconds”

If you are an expert in your field save some time and trust your gut.

Expertise turns out to be domain-specific, which is limiting when it comes to identifying new ideas. People are limited by the models which carried them to success. He talks about how experts deal with change:

“…expert bridge players struggled more than novices to adapt when the rules were changed and that expert accountants were worse than novices at applying a new tax law.”

Given the speed of change in today’s world, it is no wonder that we have seen failures of experts across many domains.

3. Voicing New Ideas and Concerns Without Status Will Cost you $$

As many people have encountered in organizations, voicing constructive ideas to improve things may be counter-productive:

“In one study across manufacturing, service, retail and nonprofit settings, the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two year period”

4. Focusing on Negatives Can Strengthen Your Message

If you are pitching an idea, consider highlighting the flaws or downsides of your opportunity. It will help disarm the audience and get them on your side. If you present something too positively, people naturally look to poke holes in the idea.

Sharing the negatives can also make the audience think more highly of the person delivering the message. In a study comparing book reviews with identical content but positive or negative adjectives:

“…people rated the critical reviewer 14% more intelligent”

Grant details this message more in the following TED talk

5. The More We Are Exposed to Something The More We Like It

Grant has a nifty little trick of introducing a fake word in his book and referencing it five times over a number of pages. He then asks the reader to choose between that word and another made up word for which one you like better. I found myself inevitably drawn to the word I had been exposed to.

He backs this up by pointing to studies that show we prefer photos of ourselves when they are inverted (like in a mirror) as opposed to normal photos of our friends (as we typically see them).

6. The “Middle” Is Risk Averse and Will Try to Kill Your Ideas

Grant discussed a concept calls “middle-status conservatism” which accounts for the anxiety that people in the “middle” feel about the risk of falling to the bottom. Think middle managers that are more worried about being fired or demoted than taking risks.

He points to the research of two MIT professors:

…security analysts were significantly less likely to issue negative stock ratings when they or the banks that employed them had middle status. Making a recommendation to sell a stock can anger corporate executives and investors who value the stock. Analysts with poor track records at minor banks have nowhere to fall by taking this risk, and star analysts at elite banks have a safety net.”

This is not very promising for innovation, creativity and new ideas in modern organizations as they get more complex and larger — with most people falling into the “middle status” category.

Grant notes a practical step to counter this is to look to junior colleagues who may be more open to supporting a new or novel idea. Building a following at the lowest levels can be more important over the long run.

7. Delaying tasks can increase creativity

Grant details the Zeigarnik Effect, which shows that unfinished tasks “stay active in our minds.” He talked about how Martin Luther King delayed writing and finishing his famous “I had a dream speech” until the day before the march.

To make this practical — you can take a break in the middle of a task and go for a walk or even “sleep on it.” It may help you generate better ideas.

8. First movers are not as successful

It is conventional wisdom that the “First mover” is often the one that captures success, but this happens not to be true. Grant details a study from Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis comparing the success of “pioneers” (first movers) and “settlers” (followers):

…they found a staggering different in the failure rates: 47 percent for pioneers, compared with just 8 percent for settlers. Even when the pioneers did survive, they only captured an average of 10 percent of the market, compared with 28 percent for the settlers”

A reason he offers for this is that the first mover often has to define what to offer, whereas the followers just have to decide how to do that better. Hence, the first movers are prone to making mistakes — either offering too much or the wrong things altogether.

9. Groups are judged externally by the most extreme views

Looking at the women’s suffrage movement, Grant highlights research by Blake Ashforth and Peter Reingen showing that internally groups identify with the people who are “most central and connected in the group.” At the same time, outsiders judge groups through the person with “the most extreme views.”

For any group trying to drive change, balancing these two competing identities can be a challenge. If the group associates with views that are deemed too extreme by the public or broader audience, the group may not accomplish what it sets out to.

This has played out in politics over and over. As the Republicans emerged from the primary to the general election and to Trumps victory, many politicians tried to distance themselves the “alt-right” as those views are not widely embraced by the broader public.

10. “The Oldest” in your family is less likely to be creative or a rule-breaker

Grant found that prior to Darwin publishing his theory of evolution, first born scientists were much less likely to support evolution and “laterborns” were more open to supporting the idea — even though it did not have broad consensus.

He showed that this trend is more important than age. He quotes historian Frank Sulloway:

“An 80 year old laterborn was as open to evolutionary theory as a 25 year old firstborn,” Sulloway writes, arguing that evolutionary theory “only became a hitorical reality because laterborns outnumbered firstborns 2.6 to 1”

He also looked at major league baseball and found a similar patter with regards to stealing bases:

“Younger brothers were 10.6 times more likely than their older siblings to attempt to steal a base”

11. “Commitment-driven cultures” become more homogenous, resistant to dissenting views and less able to adapt over time

Grant profiles the famous research around organizational cultures from James Baron and Michael Hannen

Grant highlights these “commitment cultures” in Originals or as Baron and Hannan put it, ones “which strong emotional bonds are the basis of employee attachment.” These companies will often prioritize “culture fit” over everything else.

While these cultures can be great to be part of during the startup stage,the challenge with these types of companies is two-fold:

First, they have a harder time cultivating a diverse workforce.

Second, they become homogeneous over time and less able to adapt and evolve, especially in more dynamic industries.

The danger of this is the fact that minority viewpoints disappear. Grant highlights Charlan Nemeth’s research showing that minority opinions are valuable even if they are incorrect. She conducted a study where participants had to choose between three candidates. Most candidates start out choosing an inferior candidate but only are willing to change their pick when they are challenged with an argument for a clearly wrong choice.

One of the most successful companies, McKinsey & Company, incidentally has a value that holds people accountable for “uphold the obligation to dissent.”

Looking for dissenting view can be tough. Research by Michael McDonald and James Westphal showed that in companies that were facing challenges, “CEOs sought advice from friends and colleagues who shared their perspective.”

12. The messages needed to change behaviors depend on how risky the new behavior is perceived

Grant highlights Peter Salovey’s research on how people perceive change:

If they think the behavior is safe we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it…But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work…Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t

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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