Game Changer

How to Be 10x in the Talent Economy

Michael Solomon, Rishon Blumberg, Daniel Weizmann

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781400218707
• eBook ISBN: 9781400218608
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Highly skilled 10x talent brings at least 10 times the value to your organization. By understanding how to attract, manage, and retain these sought-after individuals, your business will become more agile, innovative, and experience transformational growth.

10xers can tackle a company’s toughest problems, improve their strongest assets, and blaze a path to success. With the rapid digitization of every conceivable product and service, the environment has transformed so fast that every organization must be equipped with these phenomenally gifted employees to keep up.

Game Changer provides proven strategies on how your company can create the right environment for top talent and breakthrough success by upending traditional business practices.

It also reveals how individuals can evolve from good to great to 10x, and enjoy the many perks and rewards this status brings.

In Game Changer, you’ll learn:

• How highly skilled talent is transforming companies of all sizes and industries through real world stories and first-hand testimonies from top executives and entrepreneurs.
• Ways managers can become coaches that empower their team to accomplish amazing results.
• The unconventional business environment 10xers need for massive productivity, including deep flow states, greater autonomy and ownership, and work time flexibility.
• How to see yourself as both talent and management and become comfortable switching these hats.

Game Changer will show you how to make an impact at work, become a highly skilled and phenomenally gifted employee, and experience the rewards and satisfaction of being 10x.

PART ONE

How to Become a 10x Company and Attract 10x Talent

1

UNDERSTANDING THE 10xer

We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

—MARSHALL MCLUHAN, 1967

We’ve told you about how much you need 10xers.

Now we’re going to tell you what they need.

But before we do, it’s important to first understand the terrain. The transformations that 10x tech talent and the new generation of which they are a part have brought to the contemporary workplace are radical and wide-sweeping. They are literally changing the game. We aren’t just talking about a mere aesthetic trend or a lateral shift in work processes. This is, in every sense, a revolution. Whoever you are, whatever your gig, the big changes are going to reach you.

It’s no accident that the 10x revolution got its first sparks as the curtain dropped on one of America’s most tumultuous decades, the 1960s. Upheaval was in the air. In ’69, the Stanford Research Institute became one of the four nodes of ARPANET, the government research project that would grow into what we now think of as the internet. The very next year, Xerox opened a Palo Alto-based lab that would go on to create ethernet computing and the graphical user interface. One year later, journalist Don Hoefler titled a three-part report on the semiconductor industry “Silicon Valley, U.S.A.” and a new state of mind was born.¹

The ten years that followed Hoefler’s essay make up the decade when most Boomers and children of the ’60s got their first taste of grown-up life. In the newly christened Silicon Valley, companies like Atari, Apple, and Oracle all reflected this veer toward the youthful, breeding a unique combo of counterculture ideals, cutting-edge scientific drive, daring technological invention, and strangely enough, the spirit of fun—a mix that nobody could have predicted. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the Bay Area, with its long-standing Bohemian tradition and rich academic culture, became the petri dish in which old work modes could not only be mended, they could be countered, ignored, dismantled, and destroyed. The Silicon Valley pioneers were, on the whole, neither business titans whose main motive was profit, nor were they power-hungry builders, driven to see their names across giant monoliths. They weren’t even cultural movers and shakers in the usual sense. These were computer geeks—and geeks love doing what they do because they love doing it. This key distinction provided the nucleus for a new, interconnected, cooperative, game-loving, data-driven, risk-loving, failure-embracing, fast-minded culture. While nobody was looking, a new breed of talent was born—10xers were coming of age and ready to change everything.

There in the new digital Mecca, far from Port Authority and the traditional pressures of Wall Street, D. C., and the proverbial “home office,” the start-up culture was able to gestate outside the public eye with double-speed, giving birth to Cisco (’84), eBay (’95), PayPal (’98), Google (’98), Tesla (’03), Facebook (’04), Uber (’09), and so many more. What’s important to understand is that this wasn’t just a technological renaissance—it was simultaneously a cataclysmic shift in work style and a total attitudinal reset. The acceleration in invention couldn’t have happened without a robust disregard for old-fashioned bureaucracies, the norms that used to hold businesses in place. As they digitized the world, Silicon Valley visionaries also introduced calculated disruption, evidence-based data testing, efficiency adjustments, and, most of all, a culture of interconnectedness—advances that have quickly seeped into the broader marketplace.

It’s important to acknowledge that technology companies are now taking a beating for everything from fake news to privacy concerns to screen addiction.² However, the advances these companies made in working smarter are not in question.

In the beginning, these new work modes barely hung together in what was then uncharted territory. Today, the Silicon Valley way of doing things is a true culture, with its own set of standards and practices. As Steven John, strategic chief information officer of Workday, recently put it: “Silicon Valley is like Tasmania or Madagascar. It’s developed different life-forms than anywhere else.”³

The changes are as deep as they are widespread. In a recent study conducted by Accenture, a multinational company dedicated to the exploration of what they call “market-shaping AI and self-optimizing systems,” top researchers looked into what really makes Silicon Valley tick.⁴ They identified five unique features of the business culture there that stand apart from its counterparts elsewhere. 1) Silicon Valley is “laid back—but ready for action,” with an accent on getting things done quickly rather than agonizing over minutiae. 2) SV players are “committed yet independent,” as fiercely loyal to their team as to their employer. 3) This deeply ingrained sense of independence and interdependence leads to an atmosphere that is at once competitive and cooperative. It’s a unique balance that people from far flung worlds like cutthroat Wall Street or altruistic nonprofits might have trouble understanding. It’s “all for one and one for all” but it’s also “give me my space.” 4) SV employees tend to be both pragmatic and optimistic. And finally, 5) although they are extrinsically motivated, they are intrinsically fulfilled. In other words, they see intellectual stimulation, innovation, and problem-solving as their greatest sources of, you guessed it, fun.

Pondering this strange mix, one key stat jumped out at us: 41.6 percent of Silicon Valley engineers contribute to open source code that can be used by anyone for free. If you are not familiar with this concept, open source languages, frameworks, and libraries are ways that software engineers share their work, so that elements can be used over and over by anyone with access to a computer, at absolutely no cost. At the core of this idea is camaraderie and efficiency over money. These mavens would rather donate work for the benefit of saving one another time than get paid for that time. Imagine people in any other industry being willing to share at that level! Even for computer programmers, this figure is more than twice the national average. It’s as if Silicon Valley has created a practice of forward-motion cooperation that can be likened to a football team coordinating efforts to get down the field—but all without ever formally defining themselves as a team.

Like we said, they do it because they love the doing of it—it’s the most important thing you can know about 10xers.

REVOLUTION COAST TO COAST

Today, everyone is feeling the heat from fires those first tech entrepreneurs started. Faster than anyone thought possible, new ways of working have begun to seep into corporate America, with adjustments large and small, ranging from perks like free lunch and snacks to amenities, gyms, coaches, ping pong tables, nap pods, equity, 360 feedback, company retreats, input from everyone, team-building events, meditation rooms, lean start-ups, “move fast or die,” the four-hour workweek, acqui-hires, innovator’s dilemmas, failing fast, iterating, pivoting, being mission-driven, being data-driven, and much more.

The old-style work culture is toast.

In a May 31, 2019, Forbes piece titled “Why Corporate America Finally Embraced Silicon Valley,”⁵ Nish Acharya writes that “the realization that start-ups, university researchers, and crowd-sourced solutions can solve certain problems more quickly and cheaply than in-house experts has . . . led a growing number of corporations to adopt open innovation principles.” In other words, the very principles that were once exclusive to Silicon Valley. Even behemoths like GM are realizing that the implementation of new technologies cannot only be realized by partnerships with outside start-ups. They’re also going to have to deploy new Silicon Valley-style skills training for their staple in-house employees. It’s as if David is teaching Goliath how to use the slingshot.

From the outside, some of the aforementioned inventions of the Silicon Valley workplace may look like a soft facade—niceties to make a day at the office seem less grueling. But, in fact, most of these inventions are the byproducts of hard data. Placing a nap pod in an office space isn’t a lark to grab headlines—it’s a move made by smart management who read the extensive research that correlates rest and productivity. Science and those who apply it are driving the game change.

The big companies are taking notes. Some have been plundering the Silicon Valley innovative style by any or all of the following means:

1. Internal Venture Arms, staffed and modeled after independent Venture Capital firms (VC’s.)

2. Lab or innovation departments mandated with innovating for the future.

3. Acqui-hiring (also known as Acq-hiring), whereby a company is purchased primarily to recruit its employees rather than its products or services.

4. Partnering with start-ups to foster innovation.

5. Partnering with incubators and accelerators to do the same.

In that same Forbes article, John Sculley, infamous former CEO of Apple, emphasizes what he believes are the two basic gifts of Silicon Valley culture: the emphasis on engineering tools, in other words, objects that are designed to improve living, and the importance of small teams to achieve “rapid, breakthrough results.” Make no mistake, the teams he’s talking about are populated with 10xers, and the way they work hard is directly counter to the way many of us think of hard work. What used to be the very image of the serious employee—showing up, putting in long hours, submission to an entrenched hierarchy—is in the process of being utterly revamped.

And the real reason it’s being revamped?

So that the 10xers can do what they do best.

SMART FLOW

The first thing 10xers need for you to know is that they are not your everyday employee.

By definition, the 10xer is that rare person with outsized skills, an abnormally positive attitude, and lots of vision, balanced with enough humility to pivot when great advice comes along. When great advice doesn’t come organically, the 10xer solicits it, knowing where and how to look for feedback that will help most. Deep curiosity and enthusiasm are always part of the 10xer’s game-changing makeup. 10xers often work harder and smarter than everyone else in the room. From their perspective, inefficiency is just a bug they’d love to squash. They see a world filled with opportunities and can move on to the next available one when things don’t go their way. They are fundamentally reasonable and willing to accept responsibility for their role in outcomes. In essence, the 10xer alone has the raw materials to go from very good to great to excellent to sublime and beyond.

But they may not operate the way you think they should.

Aaron Sylvan, a CTO-level 10xer who has overseen the creation of many start-ups and raised millions of dollars in funding, says, “Real jobs don’t work like homework; the boss can’t always control the difficulty.” To properly manage a 10x talent, the key is creating a space for them to work smart, on their terms. The real 10xers will solve your problems. Your job is to make the problems cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Intro: What We Mean When We Say “10x”
• Part One: How to Become a 10x Company and Attract 10x Talent
• Part Two: How You Can Become 10x
• Outro: The Win-Win of this Double-Hat World
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Authors