When you ride up to the location, you are greeted by a family who runs a small farm on the village.  Upon arrival, they immediately started to offer their homemade Roselle juice, but we declined and entered the “split.”

This split is not the Grand Canyon but is still quite fascinating.  You can walk through and be amazed at how our seemingly stable land can split open it two.

Walking through the whole thing takes about 10 minutes.  When you exit, you are again greeted by the lovely family and with a sign offering the chance to give a donation.

Walking out, I offered a donation of 100 Baht (which is a little less than $3 USD) and walked away.  We were planning on heading out so I gave the donation and walked away.

Immediately, the owner runs over and insists that we sit.  He immediately brings over two drinks of Roselle (which taste slight less bitter than Cranberry juice).  We were pretty flattered, but he was not done.

More food came, including fresh sweet potato, banans, nuts, homemade jelly, plantain chips and nuts.  Wow!

While eating I noticed this book sitting next to us and I couldn’t agree more with its takeaway.  While a cynic could easily read this as asking for more money, it was obvious that this family just wanted to share what they had and create a deep bond (and memories) with the people that they served.

Having received this incredible gift and seeing this notebook, I asked myself “what more can I give?” and decided to leave an additional gift for him and his family. As we were walking away, I put a larger gift in the donation box and went to board the motorbike.  This wasn’t a life-changing gift for either  of us, but it was something I was drawn to do.

As we were about to ride away, he comes over again with more gifts!  This time he had two bags of stuff for us to take away.  In one bad was a can of homemade jelly, some plantain chips, and some nuts.  In another, a massive fresh Papaya.  Wow.

As I’ve embraced experiments in giving over the last year, I have continued to be blow away with the kindness and generosity of strangers.  In sharing this, I hope more people find out about this incredible man and his family who now have a place people come to because of a minor earthquake in 2008.

Isn’t life grand?

The post Receiving Incredible Gifts in Pai, Thailand at “The Split” 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.

The BLS recently released data on “electronically mediated employment” which covers both in-person works like Uber, Consulting and TaskRabbit as well as online-only work such as remote consulting, and online workplaces like Mechanical Turk and Clickworker.

The takeaway from the data: The platform gig economy doesn’t match the buzz

When  I group the workers in the professional, finance, information industries, I found that only 770,000 people are doing work in the gig economy via talent platforms.  This is less than 1% of the workforce.  This is likely a good estimate of the number of freelance consultants doing work via talent platforms.

Uber & Airbnb Have Created Opportunities, But Not That Many

Within the data, you also find that the number of people operating via platforms like Uber and Airbnb is surprisingly small  These workers make up an even smaller proportion of the workforce, less than 0.3% of the employed population.

The gig economy makes for great headlines and the talent platforms may be a great idea, but they are doing a better job of creating international labor arbitrage opportunities and enormous wealth for anyone with equity.  In the US at least, most of the work in our economy is still being done via traditional work arrangements.

The post How many freelance consultants are using talent platforms? appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

• Identity: We define ourselves as workers, as someone that “doesn’t quit,” as someone that works hard
• Relationships: We are scared that people will not accept us if we step into an unknown path and don’t have answers for where we are headed
• Belonging: We don’t feel part of anything except our company or work community
• Biological: We mistake comfort for safety and try to avoid the feeling of discomfort
• Inertia: It is easier to do what we did yesterday than to imagine a different possibility
• Emotional Pressure: We want to please the people we work with and our broader network
• Financial Realities: We literally will run out of money if we don’t work for a month
• Future potential money Fears: We cannot overcome the feeling that we will always need “more” and spend a lot of time imagining the worst case scenario (“what if I get sick?” etc…)
• Time-based economic pressure: “If I stay only six more months I’ll get my next bonus”
• Meaning: We find a lot of meaning at work and are not sure what could replace it

What else would you add?

The post The list of reasons we are scared to quit our jobs appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The future of work is about unleashing our minds from the role of victim.

I spent ten years working for large organizations.  If you spend significant time in a large organization, it is a guarantee that you will be a victim of some injustice big or small.  In fact, I believe that large modern organizations will destroy your motivation and hold you back as a default.  So if your lens is “who is to blame?” – you will find plenty of people to fill that role.

While some people truly are victims, most are lured by the ease and comfort of the mindset.

If you survive childhood and go to college, it is impossible for your parents or teachers to give you every piece of vital information you need to navigate the world. Our world is too complex, complicated and changing.

Instead of blaming our parents, our university, our managers or our friends for failing to tell us what we needed to know, we have another choice. While the internet has thrown some people into a modern mania of shame and blame, it also gives us access to better ideas, great people, and positive communities.

There are millions of teachers ready to show you a new way of thinking or doing something on YouTube.  I took a course called “Learning How To Learn” on Coursera and it blew my mind and changed how I thought about teaching and my own habits.  It is one of the most interesting courses I’ve taken in my academic career, but I didn’t have to pay any tuition for it.  It was free.

It is much more comfortable to blame others or create stories why others can do things and you cannot.

“She had the right experience”

“He graduated from the right university”

“They had well-off parents”

Those statements admit defeat. Some people are victims, but in this world, you can also be a victim and take action.

Those people that look like they have the advantages?  Perhaps they chose love over blame.

The post Beyond Victimhood appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I asked the next question.  “…and then what?”

a pause.

“well then I could do whatever the heck I wanted”

“You just got a year of severance. Can’t you do that now?”

“damn you”

There is always more to do.  We are never fully done.  The choice to live can be made at any time.  You have higher odds of making it happen today.  You can never be sure if you’ll even make it to that magical endpoint.

The post …and then what? appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

How do you differentiate your firm and the scope of services you offer?

or

What business #metrics do you use to measure the growth and performance of your consulting business?

Some freelancers are building consulting practices with a mix of contractors and employees, but most I know are just working on their own.  They work alone for the simplicity and control of their time and life.  Yet, I have been asked over and over again the same questions: Are you going to hire people?  What are your business goals?  How big do you want to get?

Perhaps because of the popularity of startups that most people assume two things: more money and bigger.  In fact, because of this many first time freelancers assume they should aim to do these things.  I will often send them an article from Seth Godin with this helpful framing:

“The goal of a freelancer is to have a steady job with no boss, to do great work, to gradually increase demand so that the hourly wage goes up and the quality of gigs goes up too.

The goal of the entrepreneur is to sell out for a lot of money, or to build a long-term profit machine that is steady, stable and not particularly risky to run. The entrepreneur builds an organization that creates change.”

Our conception of self-employment and the gig economy is still in its infant stage.  People can conceive of the uber driver, but have a hard time understanding the perspective of the self-employed consultant or coach.  In a full-time job, the focus is on “building a career” and managing a trajectory of growth while the freelancer is really trying to figure out basic questions like what the hell am I going to get paid for after next month? how do I stay energized? and what kind of life do I want to live?

I don’t have metrics, a brand and marketing team or an easy to understand business strategy, but when people ask me I say that my business goal is to live a good life and my strategy is creativity and generosity.  If I can do great work and help people, I should be able to hack a good life.

The post Turning People Into Businesses appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

• Should work even be meaningful or does pursuit of this crowd out meaning in other aspects of our life?
• Does this undermine the millions of people that may have no chance of “meaningful work”?

I don’t have good answers to the two questions but have stumbled across research from Adrian Madden and Catherine Bailey from the University of Sussex (which I’ve called out before) that helped to make sense of what meaning is.  They found it was described by five characteristics: It is self-transcendence, poignant, episodic, reflective and personal.

In simple terms, meaning relates to your personal values, has an impact on others, is powerful, may happen sporadically and is realized when you reflect on it and name it.

I received a text from a friend who mentioned he just took a job at a new company where I had introduced him to a connection over two years ago.  I had no idea he was looking.  That initial connection turned into an ongoing relation and helped him make a move he was excited about.  That text made my day.

Our moments of meaning are not constant bliss and happiness, but the episodic moments that we can’t predict.  It can be as simple as an unexpected text from a friend.

The post Meaningful 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.

As we shift to an economy in which creativity, compassion, and dare I say, humanity, are the way in which people and companies will win the hearts and mind of people – many of our beliefs about how a manager should behave will be challenged if not destroyed.

Professors Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden recently published an incredible piece of research that looked at what drove meaning in people’s work. The fascinating finding was what they didn’t find:

“Instead, our research showed that quality of leadership received virtually no mention when people described meaningful moments at work, but poor management was the top destroyer of meaningfulness.”

I loved working in strategy consulting. However, after several years of focusing on “organizational change” and researching what leads to performance in our modern businesses – I came to some questions that came to undermine everything I had learned and my own role in it:

1. What if by designing organizational change in a top-down manner, this undermines any semblance of hope that any improvements will ever be realized?

2. What if 95% of managers and leaders only end up destroying human motivation and that the 5% of inspiring leaders are only doing so by some miracle or act of courage tied to their own personal motivations?

My personal beliefs from conversations with hundreds of people over the years are that both are true in more cases than not. Taking this to its logical conclusion – that my work was largely meaningless and that I was solely enriching myself is part of what drove me to go out on my own to dive deeper into what we can do about it.

So perhaps you are sitting there reading this as a people manager or other leader in a company and saying well, shucks Paul what the hell am I supposed to do?

I do believe that the purpose of a manager and leader is more important than ever. However, we need to shift away from even thinking about it as management and we need to unlearn the way we think we are supposed to “manage.”

I believe the sole purpose of leadership in today’s working world is to create environments where people can thrive.

This means understanding human motivation, understanding your employees as people and what drives them, it means helping them create more sanity in their lives (yes, maybe coming to work late to get more sleep) and it means yes, supporting them to leave their company if they can thrive elsewhere.

What do you think?

The post Is “management” already dead? appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.