PEOPLE WANT AGENCY AND DIGNITY
I asked ten thousand people in ninety countries to describe the conditions at the best job they ever had. Here are the characteristics they chose most often:

The top 4 responses:

Once their basic needs are met, workers are very clear about what they want from work. It’s not more stock options or a fancier office. It’s much more fundamental: agency and dignity.

Agency gives us control over our time, and it encourages us to choose what our contribution looks like. Because it demands responsibility and some authority, agency is antithetical to controlled industrial piecework.

Dignity flows from agency, allowing us to be treated as humans, not cogs. To be respected for our work and treated with as much kindness as the situation allows.

The industrial regime, magnified by pervasive ideas of class warfare and strife, has stripped both agency and dignity away from most of us.

THE MACHINES ARE TAKING OVER REPETITIVE WORK THAT HUMANS WERE USED FOR
As of 2023, those machine-done jobs include robots working in hotels, algorithms doing stock trades, and machine learning systems sketching illustrations and reading X-rays.

CREATIVITY AND HUMANITY IS MORE IN DEMAND
What companies need has shifted, and suddenly. Instead of cheap labor to do the semiautomated tasks that machines can’t do (yet), organizations now seek two apparently scarce resources: creativity and humanity.

Both skills involve dealing with other humans, creating strategies, and finding insights in a fast-moving world.

CHEAPER, FASTER, BETTER WILL ALWAYS BE IN DEMAND
To be fair, industrial capitalism works. It creates leverage and productivity then delivers expected results, all while lowering prices and increasing access to goods and services.

The modern world wouldn’t exist without the progress that industry allowed, and for many, the safety these jobs offer is a lifeline and a useful way to live.

PEOPLE SEEK JOB SECURITY BUT WANT MORE THAN WHAT IT OFFERS
Late-stage industrial capitalism is different. It doesn’t know where to stop. It not only captures those seeking safety, but also shackles those seeking significance.

Generations of societal injustice, entrenched systems of caste and privilege, the indoctrination of prevailing systems—they all amplify our need for stability and safety.

LEADERSHIP CAN BE LEARNT

TRUST REQUIRES CONSISTENCY
Trust comes from consistently keeping our promises.

CURRENT BUSINESSES ARE BUILT AROUND HIERARCHIES
Hierarchical management involves the boss taking the whole project, splitting it into pieces, and giving each direct report a piece.

And then the reports take their piece, split it into smaller tasks, and hand the responsibility all the way down the chain.

When things don’t work, the big boss blames whichever underling touched the part that seemed to not work.

And the blame flows downhill.

ASK "HOW" AND "WHAT" TO FIND WAYS TO MOVE FORWARD
“How do you feel about this client?” or “What led you to want to do it this way?” are great places to begin. Connection comes from the mutual understanding that these conversations can uncover.

Here are some questions we can begin with, every time we set out to do our work together:
- What’s the specific change this team is going to make? What’s my personal role in making that change happen? What do I need to learn to support or lead this change?

- Who needs to help me? Who needs my help? What is the risk—for us, for me, for the people we serve? What’s the timing of this project?

- What’s the budget? What am I afraid of? What is the benefit to each party involved?

And another series of questions we can ask after we’re done:
- Did we ship on time? Did we make big promises (to our customers, sure, but also to our coworkers) and keep them?

- Did we relentlessly make the work better? Did we seek discomfort in the process of stretching to innovate?

- Is our theory of change, process, and creation improving? Did we ask hard questions that led to new insights?

- Have we surfaced useful metrics for how to do better next time?

- Did we build a system that is resilient enough to help us produce even more value? How have we grown as an organization and as individuals? What did we learn?

REVOLUTIONS START OUT SLOW BUT THEY CHANGE EVERYTHING
What each revolution has in common is that it is inconvenient. It was inconvenient for an industrialist to embrace the internet in 1998, for a nonprofit to shift gears and become sustainable, and for a successful corporation to embrace significance.

It’s rare that it happens quickly or easily, which is precisely why these changes are revolutionary.

The revolutions begin at the edges but ultimately end up changing whatever they interact with.

THE SIDE EFFECTS OF "FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS" IS THAT PEOPLE ARE NOT STICKING AROUND AT THEIR JOBS
According to internal documents reported by Engadget, in 2021 Amazon lost more than eight billion dollars to attrition. Only one out of three new hires stayed more than three months.

One of the reasons for the turnover is that the company works hard to avoid promoting the bulk of their workers to management.

Employees without a college degree rarely get promoted to management, because the industrial mindset—“follow the instructions and we’re going to measure your output”—dominates the experience for almost all of their frontline workers.

This systemic approach to industrial management builds a reliable machine, one that is regularly regarded as the most admired brand in America.

Customers respond well to a generic, predictable, and convenient service.

We like Big Macs and Prime shipping. Fast service and low prices come at a cost, though.

In 2022, annual productivity dropped by the largest amount since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began measuring it seventy years ago. Industrialists care a great deal about this metric, since it calculates the amount of output for every hour spent by employees.

STOP TRYING TO MEASURE PRODUCTIVITY
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella is having none of this. His team coined the term “productivity paranoia” to remind themselves that pushing creators for short-term metrics almost always backfires.

“Ultimately, for the business, these tools are about really helping their employees thrive,” Nadella said.

“The only way a business is successful and productive is if employees feel that sense of empowerment, that sense of energy and connection for the company’s mission and are doing meaningful work.”

The truth is simple: Widget production is fairly straightforward to measure and increase. But those metrics (and methods) don’t work for human interactions, insight, or innovation.

Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Or that it matters.

THE 4 KINDS OF WORK
When we consider the four kinds of work, we can lay them out in a two-by-two grid with stakes and trust as the two axes.

BECOME AWARE OF INCENTIVES SO THAT YOU DON'T GET BRAINWASHED. (IF YOU ARE A PARENT, READ THIS!)
“I stood quietly on the dot and so I got some tickets. And if I stand on the dot quietly tomorrow, I can get some more prizes!”

First grade. Stand quietly and get a toy. That’s one way to indoctrinate kids in both obedience and consumption.

This is precisely what industrialism seeks. Corporations have discovered that there’s a profit to be made in giving away points and turning behavior into a game.

Frequent-flyer miles, Peloton standings, and Duolingo streaks all exist to make us feel as though we’re doing something significant.

Is standing on a dot the thing we need to train kids to do? Hasn’t each of us spent too much time standing on dots already?

He quotes one parent: “My daughter is a straight-A student, good behavior and the teachers have only great things to say about her. Just in two days, I have seen a negative impact on her, she came home worried about her points, asking what can she do to get points, and just this morning she asked if she could not go to school because she was afraid she would make a mistake and lose points. This is a six-year-old.”

We’re now being manipulated by lazy point overlords. It’s a shortcut for profits, for control, and, most of all, for avoiding actual human connection.

Work and school and our leisure time are becoming an endless hamster wheel, with small treats doled out for behaviors that feed corporations, not our souls.

Plato argued that the State should be sure to indoctrinate children early, and never let them develop imagination.

“Being different, they’ll demand a different kind of life, and that will then make them want new institutions.”

How many followers do you have online? How much can you fit in? Here’s today’s dot, go stand on it.

WHAT GOT YOU HERE, IS NOT GOING TO SUSTAIN YOU FOREVER
A company like U.S. Steel or IBM could expect to be great for decades. They figured out an innovation, then industrialized it and optimized it for years.

As the world gets faster, though, the half-life from cutting-edge technology to fading commodity continues to get shorter.

What got us here isn’t going to get us there.

HUMANS HAVE BEEN USED AS TRANSACTIONS RESOURCES
The people you hire to follow instructions are rarely the people who will help you build something of innovation and substance.

It’s easy to find parity with your competitors when you’re all outsourcing to the same producers.

The goal of the industrial manager is to win the transaction. They pay us for our time, extract the maximum amount possible, and then walk away, even steven. This is what the market will bear.

No connection, no loyalty, no humanity. Simply extraction. Humans as resources.

ADD EMOTIONS TO YOUR TRANSACTIONS
Work is the expression of our energy and our dreams. We owe those along for the journey the same dignity and connection we would like to receive in return.

ASK TWO QUESTIONS FROM YOUR TEAM - WHAT'S WORKING & WHAT'S WRONG
When Paul Orfalea was building Kinko’s (which he sold to FedEx for more than two billion dollars), he said that his best technique for growing the business was simple: he would walk into one of their stores and ask someone there to tell him about an innovation they’d implemented that was working (and then he’d tell all the other stores about it).

When Harry Acker was building Sleepy’s (which his son sold to Mattress Firm for nearly a billion dollars), his best technique for growing the business was to call every store every day and ask, “What’s wrong?” and then fix the problem. The store manager who told me this story made it clear that if you didn’t have a problem to share, you were in trouble.

Two sides of the same coin. It’s possible your team knows what’s up.

GIVE PEOPLE AUTHORITY AND AUTONOMY AND THEY WILL GIVE YOU SOMETHING THAT WILL BE A SUCCESS
STORY-1: Consider Automattic, a profitable private company that is part of the WordPress ecosystem. Automattic has more than two thousand full-time employees, but each of them can work from wherever they like, whenever they like.

This distributed, semiautonomous workforce has created some of the most highly regarded and well-functioning software in the world, and they’ve done it without many of the trappings of typical industrial management.

If we care enough to build the best job you ever had, the team notices.

And if people who care build something that they’re proud of, the market notices.

STORY-2: They were going to rebuild the entire operation to climb the mountain of sustainability, and remain profitable as they did.

He told them he had no idea how to do that. He challenged his team: “We will achieve sustainability by the year _____. You must fill in the year.”

And then he gave them the power and the authority to address the problem, along with the responsibility to do something about it. He stood up and left the room.

It turned jobs into careers. They learned new skills and developed into leaders.

Ray’s challenge had transformed the profit-focused grind of factory work into a life filled with significance—one narrated by meaning, not only a paycheck.

MANAGEMENT IS ABOUT GETTING THE WORK DONE BY OTHERS. LEADERSHIP IS ABOUT GETTING THE WORK DONE BY OTHERS IN A WAY THAT THEY ACTUALLY WANT TO DO THE WORK.
Management is the practice of using power and authority to get what we want. To get the burgers flipped, the packages delivered, the phones answered.

Leadership is the art of creating something significant.

THE RESPONSIBILITY ALWAYS LIES WITH YOU
There’s plenty of blame to go around, but sooner or later, it comes down to how we will respond to our opportunity to create.

HAVE THE COURAGE TO PURSUE SIGNIFICANT WORK DESPITE THE FEAR
When we embrace the mutual commitments of significance, we create the conditions for a shared understanding that our work, our actual work, is to dance with the fear. And dancing with fear requires significance, tension, and the belief that we’re doing something that matters.

Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s a willingness to do things that are so important they’re worth doing even (especially) when we’re feeling the fear.

REALLY REALLY CARE FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WORK FOR YOU BECAUSE IF YOU DO THE ONES THEY SERVE NOTICE AND KEEP COMING BACK FOR MORE
The business is built on four principles: 

Rising Tide doesn’t exist to wash cars. Washing cars is merely an opportunity to make a difference for their employees and their customers.

Rising Tide spends far more time and energy on training, on customer service, and on their employees than any other car wash I know of. And as a result, the customers return and the business thrives.

Their retention is five times the industry average, and each location washes more cars and makes more money than most of its (industrial) competitors.

If all a car wash does is wash your car, you’ll pick the closest, cheapest, easiest one. That’s a race to the bottom.

It’s almost impossible to invest too much time and energy in your frontline workers.

They are your marketing team and your R&D experts. Giving them freedom, authority, and flexibility creates exactly what your customers want from you, and the loyalty of those customers pays for the commitment to your employees many times over.

The people on the front lines are people. They are your brand. And they are the point.

MAKE YOUR PEOPLE FEEL SAFE ENOUGH TO TRY
The song of safety comes first. It’s not a compromise; it’s a foundation for the rest of it.

Before we can trust, iterate, or innovate, we need to know that we’re going to be okay, regardless.

SERVE THE OUTLIERS FIRST
Find the nerds, the motivated, and the overlooked, and figure out what they need to thrive. That exploration will reveal what others have needed as well but didn’t care enough to speak up about.

When Rising Tide optimizes the workflow for autistic employees, they help their neurotypical employees thrive as well.

When d.light builds a product for some of the poorest families in the world, they get better at serving people who are more privileged.

When By the Way Bakery focuses on people who don’t eat wheat or dairy, they end up building a kitchen and production operation that is more accessible and appealing to all of their customers.

KEEP COMMITMENTS
Significant work requires us to make commitments and to keep them. To create change. To explore the liminal space on our way from here to there. This is difficult, and when the song of safety is hard to hear, it can be challenging to move forward.

AVOID THESE TRAPS SO THAT YOU CAN BUILD RESILIENT COMPANIES
In 2022, Maurice Mitchell published a brilliant essay on building resilient organizations. Some of the traps he describes are widely applicable to any team that seeks to move forward.

MAXIMALISM: “If it’s not a perfect solution to the problem, it’s a betrayal of everything we stand for.”

ANTI-LEADERSHIP ATTITUDES: “Because industrial managers have harmed workers in the past, we need to avoid all leadership, all management, and the constraints they bring.”

ANTI-INSTITUTIONAL SENTIMENT: “Because some institutions seek to marginalize others and have surveilled their workers, all institutions are to be avoided and undermined. Don’t believe any of their promises.”

GLASS HOUSES: “If our organization does anything that doesn’t completely fit the humanist model of creation and problem-solving, then we have no business doing anything.”

THE SMALL WAR: “We can’t possibly take on big issues in the outside world because right here there are arguments to be settled.”

UNANCHORED CARE: “I came for significance and the feelings of possibility, joy, and connection it brings, and that means the organization has to take care of all of my needs.”

DISPROPORTIONALITY: “The minor discomfort the team feels right now is the most important issue to be addressed.”

SHINY OBJECTS: “Getting distracted by individual and personal inclinations is more exciting and ultimately more satisfying than the more arduous journey we signed up for in the first place.”