Brave New Work

by Aaron Dignan

  keep temporary workers longer: “The Story of FAVI: The Company That Believes That Man Is Good,” European Workplace Innovation Network, http://uk.ukwon.eu/File%20Storage/5160692_7_The-story-of-favi.pdf.

  almost 1,000 percent since 2004: Google Trends, s.v. “VUCA,” accessed September 1, 2018, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=VUCA.

  1978 has used anything but the flop: 12th IAAF World Championships in Athletics, “IAAF Statistics Handbook, Berlin 2009” (Monte Carlo: IAAF Media & Public Relations Department, 2009), 554–55.

  Studies show you probably won’t: William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making,” Journal of Risk and Uncetainty 1 (1988), 7–59, https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/rzeckhau/status%20quo%20bias.pdf.

  The same is true: James J. Choi, David Laibson, and Brigitte C. Madrian, “Plan Design and 401(k) Savings Outcomes,” working paper 10486 (Cambridge, MA.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2004): www.nber.org/papers/w10486.pdf.

  We prefer to stick with what we’ve got: Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler, “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (1991), doi:10.1257/jep.5.1.193.

  “put a man on the moon”: Astro Teller, “Google X Head on Moonshots: 10x Is Easier Than 10 Percent,” Wired, February 11, 2013, www.wired.com/2013/02/moonshots-matter-heres-how-to-make-them-happen.

  “All models are wrong”: George E. P. Box and Norman R. Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987), 440.

  PART TWO: THE OPERATING SYSTEM

  human-centric design principles: Gary Hamel, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers,” Harvard Business Review, December 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers.

  “business is to increase its profits”: Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970, www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html [inactive].

  result of success is uninspiring: Scott Winship, “What Really Happened to Income Inequality in the 20th Century?” The Atlantic, May 14, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/what-really-happened-to-income-inequality-in-the-20th-century/257156.

  “Saying that the purpose of a company”: Kevin Laws, “Successful Startups Don’t Make Money Their Primary Mission,” Harvard Business Review, July 10, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/07/successful-startups-dont-make-money-their-primary-mission.

  after the publication of the book: “Performance of Firms of Endearment,” Firms of Endearment, accessed September 1, 2018, www.firmsofendearment.com.

  ceases to be a good measure: Marilyn Strathern, “‘Improving Ratings’: Audit in the British University System,” European Review 5, no. 3 (July 1997): 305–321.

  “both meaningful and measurable”: Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 126.

  tighten up your road map: Ben Barry, “Facebook’s Little Red Book,” Office of Ben Barry, accessed September 1, 2018, http://v1.benbarry.com/project/facebooks-little-red-book.

  internet-famous employee handbook: Valve, Handbook for New Employees (Bellevue, WA: Valve Press, 2012), www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf.

  retention, operations, and promotions: “Our Story,” David Marquet, accessed September 1, 2018, www.davidmarquet.com/our-story.

  “Policies are organizational scar tissue”: Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework (New York: Crown Business, 2010), 260.

  authority structures is W. L. Gore: “Our Beliefs & Principles,” Gore, accessed September 1, 2018, www.gore.com/about/our-beliefs-and-principles.

  “leaders and members of their teams”: Bill Fischer, Umberto Lago, and Fang Liu, “The Haier Road to Growth,” strategy+business, April 27, 2015, www.strategy-business.com/article/00323?gko=c8c2a.

  leveraging its unconventional structure: Zhang Ruimin, “Why Haier Is Reorganizing Itself Around the Internet of Things,” strategy+business, February 26, 2018, www.strategy-business.com/article/Why-Haier-Is-Reorganizing-Itself-around-the-Internet-of-Things?gko=895fe.

  speed, learning, and collaboration: Niels Pflaeging, “Org Physics: How a Triad of Structures Allows Companies to Absorb Complexity,” LinkedIn, February 12, 2017, www.linkedin.com/pulse/org-physics-how-triad-structures-allows-companies-absorb-pflaeging.

  4.5 million hours reading content: Ken Yueng, “Medium Grows 140% to 60 Million Monthly Visitors,” Venture Beat, December 14, 2016, https://venturebeat.com/2016/12/14/medium-grows-140-to-60-million-monthly-visitors.

  “Upon further reflection”: Ev Williams, “Renewing Medium’s Focus,” 3 Min Read (blog), Medium, January 4, 2017, https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be.

  If it succeeds: Rob Reid, “Medium Targets 10 Million Paying Members in 5 Years,” NewCo Shift (blog), Medium, October 13, 2017, https://shift.newco.co/medium-targets-10-million-paying-members-in-5-years-40029cf2bb8f.

  “Don’t buy this jacket”: Patagonia, “Don’t Buy This Jacket, Black Friday and the New York Times,” The Cleanest Line (blog), The Cleanest Line, November 25, 2011, www.patagonia.com/blog/2011/11/dont-buy-this-jacket-black-friday-and-the-new-york-times.

  “People with targets”: Daryl Kulak and Hong Li, The Journey to Enterprise Agility: Systems Thinking and Organizational Legacy (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 172.

  “situations that have already changed”: Adrian Cho, The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation, and Agility, Portable Documents (Boston: Pearson, 2010), 94.

  deployment every second: Wermer Vogels, “The Story of Apollo—Amazon’s Deployment Engine,” All Thing Distributed (blog), November 12, 2014, www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/apollo-amazon-deployment-engine.html.

  “get a good test of an experience”: Andrea Huspeni, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Runs 10,000 Facebook Versions a Day,” Entrepreneur, accessed September 1, 2018, www.entrepreneur.com/article/294242.

  sure the trade-offs are real: Jordan Husney, “Strategic Prioritization Using ‘Even Over’ Statements,” Parabol (blog), Medium, October 22, 2017, https://focus.parabol.co/strategic-prioritization-using-even-over-statements-fb63e78e7b4d.

  And you’re ready to act: Dave Snowden, “Think Anew, Act Anew: Scenario Planning,” Dave Snowden (blog), Cognitive Edge, April 21, 2009, http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/think-anew-act-anew-scenario-planning.

  “case it will be dangerous”: Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser, “Who Needs Budgets?” Harvard Business Review, February 2003, https://hbr.org/2003/02/who-needs-budgets.

  bank over the last ten years: Niels Kroner, A Blueprint for Better Banking: Svenska Handelsbanken and a Proven Model for More Stable and Profitable Banking (Hampshire, UK: Harriman, 2011).

  $1.2 billion a year: Hope and Fraser, “Who Needs Budgets?”

  “Budgets also sub-optimize performance”: Steve Morlidge, The Little Book of Beyond Budgeting (Leicestershire, UK: Matador, 2017), 19.

  “The strength of polycentric governance”: John Tierney, “The Non-Tragedy of the Commons,” TierneyLab (blog), The New York Times, October 15, 2009, https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/the-non-tragedy-of-the-commons.

  budgets that persist year after year: David Kesmodel, “Meet the Father of Zero-Based Budgeting,” The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-father-of-zero-based-budgeting-1427415074.

  whole new level of engagement: Cobudget, accessed September 1, 2018, https://cobudget.co/#; Participatory Budget Project, accessed September 1, 2018, www.participatorybudgeting.org; “Enspiral Handbook,” Enspiral, accessed September 1, 2018, https://handbook.enspiral.com.

  beyond its initial advantage: Wynne Parry, “Exaptation: How Evolution Uses What’s Availabl
e,” Live Science, September 16, 2013, www.livescience.com/39688-exaptation.html.

  cleaning product for wallpaper: Sam Biddle, “Whoops! The 10 Greatest (Accidental) Inventions of All Time,” Gizmodo, August 26, 2010, https://gizmodo.com/5620910/whoops-the-10-greatest-accidental-inventions-of-all-time.

  “easily distinguishable operationally”: Justin Fox, “Amazon, the Biggest R&D Spender, Does Not Believe in R&D,” Bloomberg, April 12, 2018, www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-12/amazon-doesn-t-believe-in-research-and-development-spending.

  look for the next big thing: Andrew J. Smart, “Why Organizations Should Embrace Randomness Like Ant Colonies,” Harvard Business Review, September 13, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/09/why-organizations-should-embra.

  how might we validate that: “The Lean Startup Methodology,” The Lean Startup, accessed September 1, 2018, http://theleanstartup.com/principles.

  two hours and thirty minutes: “Dec 01: 1913: Ford’s Assembly Line Starts Rolling,” This Day in History, History.com, December 1, 2009, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fords-assembly-line-starts-rolling.

  1,500 different companies around the world: Sumesh Krishnan and Dr. Mukul Shukla, Concepts in Engineering Design (Chennai, India: Notion Press, 2016), 6.

  May we all be so intentional: Henrik Kniberg, “Spotify Engineering Culture (Part 1),” Spotify Labs (blog), March 27, 2014, https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1.

  “think we can ship by Friday”: John Zeratsky, “Sprints Are the Secret to Getting More Done,” Harvard Business Review, March 15, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/03/sprints-are-the-secret-to-getting-more-done.

  $37 billion for U.S. businesses: Michael Mankins, Chris Brahm, and Greg Caimi, “Your Scarcest Resource,” Harvard Business Review, May 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/05/your-scarcest-resource; “You Waste a Lot of Time at Work,” Atlassian, accessed September 1, 2018, www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic.

  “20 people and no one notices”: Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar), “You likely have to get management approval for a $500 expense . . . but you can call a 1 hour meeting with 20 people and no one notices,” Twitter, July 8, 2015, 9:59 A.M., https://twitter.com/valaafshar/status/618826783799025664?lang=en.

  unnecessary in the future of work: Eugene Kim, “Slack, the $2.8 Billion Startup That Wants to Kill Email, Really Is Reducing Work Email,” Business Insider, October 29, 2015, www.businessinsider.com/slack-survey-shows-it-reduces-work-email-2015-10.

  “The film—not the filmmaker”: Ed Catmull, “Inside The Pixar Braintrust,” Fast Company, March 12, 2014, www.fastcompany.com/3027135/inside-the-pixar-braintrust.

  unearth the greatness within: Ed Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2008, https://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity; “Pixar,” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=pixar.htm.

  gatherings of their global membership: Oliver Staley, “The Creator of WordPress Shares His Secret to Running the Ultimate Remote Workplace,” Quartz at Work, May 29, 2018, https://work.qz.com/1289444/automattics-secret-to-successful-remote-work-is-having-everyone-meet-in-person.

  instructions for how to facilitate them: Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash a Culture of Innovation (Seattle, WA: Liberating Structures Press, 2014); “Liberating Structures,” accessed September 1, 2018, www.liberatingstructures.com.

  the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq: Stanley McChrystal, “The Military Case for Sharing Knowledge,” TED video, 6:44, March 2014, www.ted.com/talks/stanley_mcchrystal_the_military_case_for_sharing_knowledge/transcript#t-218264.

  “a system in which large networks”: Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13.

  individual and organizational learning: Harold Jarche, “Organize for Complexity,” Harold Jarche (blog), May 1, 2014, http://jarche.com/2014/05/organize-for-complexity.

  gigabytes of information every day: Harris Andrea, “The Human Brain Is Loaded Daily with 34 GB of Information,” Tech 21 Century (blog), accessed September 1, 2018, www.tech21century.com/the-human-brain-is-loaded-daily-with-34-gb-of-information.

  304 emails per week: The Radicati Group, Inc., “Email Statistics Report, 2017–2021,” February 2017, www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2017-2021-Executive-Summary.pdf; “You Waste a Lot of Time at Work,” Atlassian, accessed September 1, 2018, www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic.

  213 percent ROI over three years: Kate Borger, “The Total Economic Impact™ of G Suite,” Google, February 2016, https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/office-cloud-comparison.html.

  interrogated by the masses: Rob Walker, “How Reddit’s Ask Me Anything Became Part of the Mainstream Media Circuit,” Yahoo! News, March 13, 2013, www.yahoo.com/news/how-reddit-s-ask-me-anything-became-part-of-the-mainstream-media-circuit--130755591.html.

  “each person in the Lattice”: W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., “The Lattice Organization,” https://folk.uio.no/terjegro/materials/Gore_lattice.pdf.

  Organizational psychologist Adam Grant: Stanford eCorner, “Adam Grant: Hire for Culture Fit or Add?” YouTube video, 4:19, February 16, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLHp25mUd40.

  In fact, a recent McKinsey study: Vivian Hunt, Dennis Layton, and Sara Prince, “Why diversity matters,” McKinsey & Company, January 2015, www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters.

  think: soldier or firefighter: Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton, “Why Rituals Work,” Scientific American, May 14, 2013, www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-rituals-work.

  Amazon, which acquired Zappos: Ruth Umoh, “Why Amazon pays employees $5,000 to quit,” CNBC, May 21, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/why-amazon-pays-employees-5000-to-quit.html.

  what makes you tick: Adam Bryant, “Want to Know Me? Just Read My User Manual,” Corner Office, The New York Times, March 30, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/business/questbacks-lead-strategist-on-his-user-manual.html; David Politis, “This Is How You Revolutionize the Way Your Team Works Together . . . and All It Takes Is 15 Minutes,” LinkedIn, March 29, 2016, www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-you-revolutionize-way-your-team-works-together-all-david-politis.

  avoid it because it’s uncomfortable: Ayla Lewis, “Gratitude in the Workplace: Research-Based Tools to Increase Happiness and Engagement,” Happy Brain Science, accessed September 1, 2018, www.happybrainscience.com/blog/5-workplace-gratitude-tools.

  “hiding their limitations”: Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016), 1.

  “continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision”: Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (New York: Currency, 1990), 7.

  “embrace reality and deal with it”: Robert Kegan et al., “Making Business Personal,” Harvard Business Review, April 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/04/making-business-personal.

  satisfaction and job performance: Timothy A. Judge, Edwin A. Locke, Cathy C. Durham, Avraham N. Kluger, “Dispositional effects on job and life satisfaction: The role of core evaluations,” Journal of Applied Psychology 83, no.1 (February 1998): 17–34, doi:10.1037/0021-9010.83.1.17, PMID 9494439.

  other people shape their lives: Julian B. Rotter, “Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 80, no. 1 (1966): 1–28, doi:10.1037/h0092976.

  Carol Dweck later expanded this concept: Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2006).

  say more than we can write down: Dave Snowden, “Rendering Knowledge, Dave Snowden (blog), Cognitive Edge, October 11, 2008, http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/rendering-knowle
dge.

  grow in- and outside of work: Michelle Traub, “About Us: Etsy School,” Etsy News (blog), August 23, 2013, https://blog.etsy.com/news/2013/about-us-etsy-school.

  doing appraisals annually: Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis, “The Performance Management Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, October 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-performance-management-revolution.

  Latin word for salt: Peter Gainsford, “Salt and Salary: Were Roman Soldiers Paid in Salt?” Kiwi Hellenist (blog), January 11, 2017, http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.html.

  correlation between pay and results: Alfie Kohn, “Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 1993, https://hbr.org/1993/09/why-incentive-plans-cannot-work.

  any meaningful or lasting way: Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner, Barbara B. Snyderman, The Motivation to Work, 3rd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959), 42.

  income were correlated with happiness: Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 107, no. 38 (September 2010), doi: 10.1073/pnas.1011492107.

  “money buys you misery”: Phyllis Korkki, “Job Satisfaction vs. a Big Paycheck,” The New York Times, September 11, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/jobs/12search.html.

  privilege than with pay scale: Claire Cain Miller, “Children Hurt Women’s Earnings, but Not Men’s (Even in Scandinavia),” The New York Times, February 5, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/upshot/even-in-family-friendly-scandinavia-mothers-are-paid-less.html; Sarah Kliff, “A Stunning Chart Shows the True Cause of the Gender Wage Gap,” Vox, February 19, 2018, www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-gap-childcare-penalty; Judith Warner and Danielle Corley, “The Women’s Leadership Gap,” Center for American Progress, May 21, 2017, www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2017/05/21/432758/womens-leadership-gap.