![]()
Chapter 1
This Thing We Call Work
Once upon a time, long, long ago, we humans made our living working the land. We labored for ourselves, and the effort we put into our work was clearly tied to what we got out of it. If we planted seeds, weâd harvest a crop. But life then was tough, often grueling. When things went well, we could see our hard work pay offâthough, too often it didnât; droughts and storms and unrelenting cold weather would come along more often than we could bear, wreaking havoc on our crops and destroying all weâd worked so hard to create.
As we evolved, we became more sophisticated. We designed massive production assembly lines to manufacture everything under the sun. By now, more often than not, we worked for someone else, earning wages by the hour, which dramatically improved our economic outlook and offered security and consistency. And we took pride in our work; we could see that the wheels we built or the chassis we helped to assemble produced a beautiful car down the line. It wasnât a rich life, but we were no longer impoverished.
But, alas, we evolved again. Rather than working with our hands, we started working with our minds. Our minds dreamed up a grand new reality, one in which the world was connected as never before. We built robots to assemble our cars, developed methods to modify the crops to become more weather resistant, and invented countless ways to automate our lives and make things profoundly easier. We organized the worldâs information, to make it accessible simply by typing a few words into a search box, or taking a picture of an object to learn more about it. Our economic lives tilted toward the prosperous, with ever more promise of abundance. And we began to live happily ever after.
Oh wait: No, we didnât.
What Is the Problem?
Youâd think weâd be happy working with our minds. We get to sit around and think for a living! Create ideas! Bring them to life! We have almost reached the promised land of perpetual contentment and happinessâexcept that we are still relegated to a dreary corporate world erected in the vast wasteland of the status quo, as so aptly illustrated and mocked in Dilbert cartoons, movies like Office Space, and the TV show The Office. Consequently, most of us now feel:
- Overwhelmed: We have far too much to do, too much information to process, and too many people to coordinate with. We canât keep up with it all, and we are drowning. Too-long to-do lists and overflowing e-mail inboxes are the causes of self-defeating guilt for many of us.
- âAnonymizedâ: The people who put in just enough effort to keep from getting fired are treated the same way as those who go all-outâthose who truly care and want to succeed, and genuinely want to create value. But their efforts are rarely recognized, so whatâs the point? The result? Those of us who do care tend to get buried among the masses of the mediocre.
- Disconnected: Ironically, the very inventions that have given us such a profound sense of connectedness are incredibly complex, and thus require unimaginably esoteric work to make them happen. The work we do now is highly specialized, buried deep within the layers of our products, and the link between our contributions and the actual use of these products is too abstract for most of us to derive any strong sense of meaning from our work.
- Mistrusted: We work in companies fraught with rules and policies and dress codes and scheduled hours. It feels no different from when we were in high school, except the clothes we wear now are not nearly as fun, and food fights donât break out nearly as often.
We hear a lot about employee engagement and how it is abysmally lacking in todayâs workforce. For example, the 2011 Employee Engagement Report from BlessingWhite (representing 11,000 respondents globally) found that only 31 percent of employees are fully engaged in their work, and 39 percent of all respondents plan to leave their current organization within the next year.1 Business leaders wring their hands in despair, wishing they could find the answers to solve this problem. They roll out new strategies, hire new leaders. They search for reasonsâitâs the gen-Y age! The economy is terrible!âso they can conveniently shift the blame when they fail to figure it out.
Meanwhile, employees have no sense of empowerment; they feel like victims in a gigantic, tragically unmovable system. I was chatting recently with my dad just before he retired (or, more accurately, was laid off, which he took as a great reason to retire). He was relaying his frustrations about showing up to do garage-door repairs (my dad has always been adept at fixing things), only to discover once again that he didnât have the right parts. He knew exactly why: The person who ordered the parts was disconnected from the people who were taking the service calls, who were disconnected from the people who were ordering different equipment for original installationâyou get the picture. He could trace the entire issue from one end of the organization to the other, and back again, with astounding details and insight. When I asked him, âDad, why donât you just tell them how to fix it?â he quietly chuckled and shook his head. His wisdom was trapped in the tiny box representing his perceived influence on the organization. I realized at that moment how lucky I was to be working at Google at the time. Not because of The Perks (free lunches, massage program, parties, etc.), but because Google knows how to operate a sustainable, positive workplace in the new knowledge economy. As an employee of Google, I could have just gone and fixed a problem like the one my dad faced.
Why havenât other organizations figured this out? Why arenât they all clamoring to make big changes? The short answer is that we are too fixated on the symptoms of problems, rather than the problems themselves. For example, productivity gurus make a very good living teaching people how to manage their inboxes and task lists. One of the most popular productivity books, in print for 10 years, is selling as strongly as ever today. I would never argue that personal productivity isnât an important skill, but it will not solve the problem of information overload! Our ability to create and access data and information will continue to multiply exponentially, and no matter how many devices we carry and how religious we are about Inbox Zero (the philosophy and approach to processing e-mails each day to maintain an empty inbox),2 we will never be able to keep up with the relevant (and not-so-relevant) flows of information. This is our new reality and we havenât yet figured out how to sustainably adjust to it.
Likewise, we hire young employees into our organizations and are shockedâshocked!!âat their level of dissatisfaction. How dare they insist on jobs that have âmeaningâ! We had to work hard to get where we are, and they act as if they should get it all on day one. Again, this is a symptom of the disconnect between our new global, always-on reality (which gen-Y folks know as their only reality) and our outdated work models. This clash isnât about gen Yers versus baby boomers and the lack of understanding in either direction; itâs about the fact that we are blind to the deeper problems, and all too eager to deflect the blame.
Management fad after management fad is paraded throughout our organizations, promising the next-best fix for employee engagement and organizational productivity (though, most often, these fads can rarely be integrated into one solution). Everyone gets trained, processes are redesigned, and, then, about a year later, we revisit our problems only to realize that absolutely nothing has changed.
Starting a Work Revolution
I am an optimist at heart, so I believe that we can fix this. Here is my Work Revolution Manifesto:
- I believe that it is possible to love your work, your workplace, and those you work with.
- I believe that it is possible to find your dream job and to excel at it, no matter how well (or badly) you did in school.
- I believe that every organization can thrive, generate more value for their customers and shareholders, and become wildly successful by sticking to the things they do the best and hiring people who belong.
- I believe the workplace isnât a zero-sum game, in which either the employees win or the organization wins, but not both; I believe that what is in the best interest of the employee is also in the best interest of the organization, and that getting this right is what leads to a thriving, profitable business.
In sum, I believe that freedom in the workplace is worth fighting for, and that every person and every organization can be excellent. When we unleash human potential, great things happen. But itâs going to require loosening our death grip on control; we have to let go just a bit.
I posit that we can start the Work Revolution by implementing two, seemingly counterintuitive, strategies:
Strategy 1: Donât aim to change one organization. Change them all.
Strategy 2: Follow the easy path.
Strategy 1: Change All the Organizations
Starting a Work Revolution sounds daunting, even lofty, requiring a lucky confluence of factors. Changing any one organization, to swing it around from declining to thriving, is a wildly improbable prospect (as evidenced by the consultancy profession, which is booming and promises to be prosperous for a very long time). So far, few organizations have revolutionized the way they work. We have been regaled with stories of Google (which I will add to here), W.L. Gore, and IDEO, companies that have been so idealized it seems utterly impossible to replicate their successes.3 But the fact is, these organizations started out with savvy and innovative management practices. They didnât have to turn around hundred-year-old legacies. That is why we see so many shining examples of start-ups that are able to launch with thriving, healthy, organizational cultures.
Consequently, what Iâm proposing is not that we change at a rate of one organization at a time. It may seem counterintuitive, but if we aim big, if we try to change every organization, we just might be successful. How is that possible?
Jonni Kanerva is a software engineering manager at Google. He also happens to be one of the best managers Iâve ever worked for. He took me under his wing when I joined the Engineering Education (engEDU) team. During his tenure there, he carefully crafted a brilliant teaching methodology to delve deep into the core of this mysterious thing we call innovation. His innovation learning series, Ideas to Innovation (i2i), became wildly popular at Google. One of the concepts, in particular, stood out for me: It was a brainstorming exercise he facilitated with teams. He would start by having teams think about a big goal they were working toward. Articulating this goal was sometimes quite hard to do; but, he explained, it was important to boil it down to a simple problem statement. He would then ask the team to multiply the problem by 100. In other words, if they thought about solving the ...
