Company Hierarchy Quotes

Do you want a revolution in science? Do what businesspeople do when they want a technological revolution: Just change the rules a bit. Let in a few revolutionaries. Make the hierarchy a bit flatter, to give the young people more scope and freedom. Create some opportunities for high-risk/high-payoff people, so as to balance the huge investment you made in low-risk, incremental science. The technology companies and investment banks use this strategy. Why not try it in academia? The payoff could be discovering how the universe works.

1. That reason is a gift of God and that we should believe in its ability to comprehend the world. 2. That they have been wrong who undermined confidence in reason by enumerating the forces that want to usurp it: class struggle, libido, will to power. 3. That we should be aware that our being is enclosed within the circle of its perceptions, but not reduce reality to dreams and the phantoms of the mind. 4. That truth is a proof of freedom and that the sign of slavery is the lie. 5. That the proper attitude toward being is respect and that we must, therefore, avoid the company of people who debase being with their sarcasm, and praise nothingness. 6. That, even if we are accused of arrogance, it is the case that in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is necessary. 7. That intellectuals in the twentieth century were afflicted with the habit of baratin, i.e., irresponsible jabber. 8. That in the hierarchy of human activities the arts stand higher than philosophy, and yet bad philosophy can spoil art. 9. That the objective truth exists; namely, out of two contrary assertions, one is true, one false, except in strictly defined cases when maintaining contradiction is legitimate. 10. That quite independently of the fate of religious denominations we should preserve a "philosophical faith," i.e., a belief in transcendence as a measure of humanity. 11. That time excludes and sentences to oblivion only those works of our hands and minds which prove worthless in raising up, century after century, the huge edifice of civilization. 12. That in our lives we should not succumb to despair because of our errors and our sins, for the past is never closed down and receives the meaning we give it by our subsequent acts.

need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls.

THE SPLIT-BRAIN PARADOX One way in which this picture, based on the corporate hierarchy of a company, deviates from the actual structure of the brain can be seen in the curious case of split-brain patients. One unusual feature of the brain is that it has two nearly identical halves, or hemispheres, the left and right. Scientists have long wondered why the brain has this unnecessary redundancy, since the brain can operate even if one entire hemisphere is completely removed. No normal corporate hierarchy has this strange feature. Furthermore, if each hemisphere has consciousness, does this mean that we have two separate centers of consciousness inside one skull?

Every good-to-great company had Level 5 leadership during the pivotal transition years. • “Level 5” refers to a five-level hierarchy of executive capabilities, with Level 5 at the top. Level 5 leaders embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are ambitious, to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not themselves. • Level 5 leaders set up their successors for even greater success in the next generation, whereas egocentric Level 4 leaders often set up their successors for failure. • Level 5 leaders display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company. • Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results. They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or hard the decisions. • Level 5 leaders display a workmanlike diligence—more plow horse than show horse. • Level 5 leaders look out the window to attribute success to factors other than themselves. When things go poorly, however, they look in the mirror and blame themselves, taking full responsibility. The comparison CEOs often did just the opposite—they looked in the mirror to take credit for success, but out the window to assign blame for disappointing results.

Vladimir Putin rose to lead Russia to victory over the Wharton School of Economics’ plan to bleed Russia dry. As we shall see elsewhere, the Sachs model called for selling Russia’s vast State owned industries to private companies at distress prices.

Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At

no one bothered dressing up in priests’ robes, for even in chaos hierarchy rules and their cloth wasn’t rich enough.

Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal. Our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it is not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money. On the contrary—you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently with this philosophy we should be productive and the company should do well financially. There is comparatively little age- and seniority-based hierarchy.

All companies are built as hierarchies, no matter what that holacracy adepts are saying now. It's always a boss on the top and then people who report to him down to the lowest level. Staying on the lowest level is what I always try to avoid. Not only because I have some dignity, but mostly because I am lazy. The lower you are in the hierarchy, the more work you have to do and the less money you get for it. This is how the division of labor works, not only in the software industry.

You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in "spiritual direction". Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters. If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like "spiritual direction"? Why not just "friend"? Spiritual direction strikes me as pretentious in these circumstances, as if there were some expertise that can be acquired more or less on its own and then dispensed on demand. The other reason for my lack of enthusiasm is my well-founded fear of professionalism in any and all matters of the Christian life. Or maybe the right label for my fear is "functionalism". The moment an aspect of Christian living (human life, for that matter) is defined as a role, it is distorted, debased - and eventually destroyed. We are brothers and sisters with one another, friends and lovers, saints and sinners. The irony here is that the rise of interest in spiritual direction almost certainly comes from the proliferation of role-defined activism in our culture. We are sick and tired of being slotted into a function and then manipulated with Scripture and prayer to do what someone has decided (often with the help of some psychological testing) that we should be doing to bring glory to some religious enterprise or other. And so when people begin to show up who are interested in us just as we are - our souls - we are ready to be paid attention to in this prayerful, listening, non-manipulative, nonfunctional way. Spiritual direction. But then it begins to develop a culture and language and hierarchy all its own. It becomes first a special interest, and then a specialization. That is what seems to be happening in the circles you are frequenting. I seriously doubt that it is a healthy (holy) line to be pursuing. Instead, why don't you look over the congregation on Sundays and pick someone who appears to be mature and congenial. Ask her or him if you can meet together every month or so - you feel the need to talk about your life in the company of someone who believes that Jesus is present and active in everything you are doing. Reassure the person that he or she doesn't have to say anything "wise". You only want them to be there for you to listen and be prayerful in the listening. After three or four such meetings, write to me what has transpired, and we'll discuss it further. I've had a number of men and women who have served me in this way over the years - none carried the title "spiritual director", although that is what they have been. Some had never heard of such a term. When I moved to Canada a few years ago and had to leave a long-term relationship of this sort, I looked around for someone whom I could be with in this way. I picked a man whom I knew to be a person of integrity and prayer, with seasoned Christian wisdom in his bones. I anticipated that he would disqualify himself. So I pre-composed my rebuttal: "All I want you to do is two things: show up and shut up. Can you do that? Meet with me every six weeks or so, and just be there - an honest, prayerful presence with no responsibility to be anything other than what you have become in your obedient lifetime." And it worked. If that is what you mean by "spiritual director," okay. But I still prefer "friend". You can see now from my comments that my gut feeling is that the most mature and reliable Christian guidance and understanding comes out of the most immediate and local of settings. The ordinary way. We have to break this cultural habit of sending out for an expert every time we feel we need some assistance. Wisdom is not a matter of expertise. The peace of the Lord, Eugene

Sonnet of Human Resources There is no blue collar, no white collar, just honor. And honor is defined by character not collar. There is no CEO, no janitor, just people. Person's worth lies, not in background, but behavior. Designation is reference to expertise, not existence. Respect is earned through rightful action, not label. Designation without humanity is resignation of humanity, For all labels without love cause nothing but trouble. The term human resources is a violation of human rights. For it designates people as possession of a company. Computers are resources, staplers are resources, but people, Aren't resources, but the soul of all company and society. I'm not saying, you oughta rephrase it all in a civilized way. But at the very least, it's high time with hierarchy we do away.

To be an effective organisation, the structure of the organisation must be willing to adapt to a network model, leaving the old hierarchy model behind. We see the efficacy of the network model daily in many areas of our lives, and this greatly challenges the old from-top-to-down hierarchical model that many organisations have a hard time letting go of. But I suppose at the end of the day, it is a matter of survival. Simply put, in order to survive, one must adapt and to adapt today, means to take on a more networked approach to doing things in organisations, groups, companies and even in society as a whole (including politics). So in other words, in order for society in all of its forms from big to small, to move forward strongly, it must adapt to a framework that sees itself as a network rather than a hierarchy.

Once people started coming up with ways to maintain larger groups, like armies, cities, and nations, humans started subdividing those groups. Dunbar’s number explains why big groups are made of smaller, more manageable groups like companies, platoons, and squads—or branches, divisions, departments, and committees. No human institution can efficiently function above 150 members without hierarchies, ranks, roles, and divisions.

A Culture of Discipline. All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology

William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off from Boston, heading west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of the Winthrop machine, convinced he could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn’t been officially ordained. The ramparts of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not William. He just started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans in. After they settled in Berkshire, he and his son John got a pig operation going—used to drive hogs right back down the great escarpment, back over the long pike to Boston, drive them just like sheep or cows. By the time they got to market those hogs were so skinny it was hardly worth it, but William wasn’t really in it so much for the money as just for the trip itself. He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance encounters of the day—Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people—and most of all just being with those pigs. They were good company. Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day—pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn’t, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must’ve been like for William. Of course he took it as a parable—knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in crosscountry movement. It was a little early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the air. William must’ve been waiting for the one pig that wouldn’t die, that would validate all the ones who’d had to, all his Gadarene swine who’d rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying . . . possessed by innocence they couldn’t lose . . . by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life. . . .

For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra Del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. "Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men." Dunbar writes. "This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications technology since the first world war. Rather, it is as thought the planners have discovered, by trial and error over the centuries, that it is hard to get more than this number of men sufficiently familiar with each other so that they can work together as a functional unit." It is still possible, ofcourse, to run an army with larger groups. But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to try to command loyalty and cohesion. But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally: "At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups this becomes impossible.

It is almost impossible for a building contractor to win a project on which the FLDS is also bidding, because the church membership has such a vast pool of free labor, using their own young kids to bypass minimum wage and tax laws. The companies and the contracts are privately held but are secretly consecrated to the church to support its massive legal fees and the extravagant lifestyle of the church hierarchy. Even the wages of the boys are donated to the church. Legitimate business and government entities are unwittingly helping maintain the FLDS leaders’ lavish lifestyles, supporting illegal underage marriage, and participating in the abandonment and neglect of young boys by doing business with a criminal organization that openly thumbs its nose at the laws which the rest of us live by.

performed or the companies that performed them. Dickens, however, spoke in a new voice, in a new form, to a new audience, of a new world, about several old ideas reconsidered for the new system of capitalism—that care and respect are owed to the weakest and meekest in society, rather than to the strongest; that the ways in which class and money divide humans from one another are artificial and dangerous; that pleasure and physical comfort are positive goods; that the spiritual lives of the powerful have social and economic ramifications. We might today call this an ecological perspective, an intuitive understanding of the social world as a web rather than a hierarchy—the quintessential modern mode of seeing the world. Dickens grasped this idea from the earliest stages of his career and demonstrated his increasingly sophisticated grasp of it in the plots, characterizations, themes, and style of every single novel he wrote. This is the root source of his greatness. That

The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other’s projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies. You find it in the writings of utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer11 (who value justice and rights only to the extent that they increase human welfare), and you find it in the writings of deontologists such as Kant and Kohlberg (who prize justice and rights even in cases where doing so may reduce overall welfare). But as soon as you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking in two additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends. The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts.13

To show just how all pervasive the Committee of 300 is, a few words about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a Club of Rome creation and the test it ran against a nuclear power station at Three Mile Island (TMI) Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, seems in order. Termed “an accident” by a hysterical media, this was not an accident, but a deliberately designed plot to reverse favorable public opinion to nuclear power generated electricity. TMI was a crisis test for FEMA. An additional benefit was the fear and hysteria provoked by the news media, which had people fleeing the area, when in fact they were never in any danger. Bear in mind that nobody died as a result of the TMI “accident,” nor were any serious injuries reported. The stage-managed incident bore all the hall marks of a similar incident when Orson Wells scared New York and New Jersey half to death with claims that the world was being invaded by alien beings from Mars. Actually, the radio play was an adaptation of H.G. Wells “War of Worlds.” TMI was considered a success and gained favor with the anti-nuclear forces, as it provided the rallying point for the so-called “environmentalists,” well financed by Atlantic Richfield and other major oil companies and

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

We all have our own constraints to deal with—rules and social norms we’re required to observe that we’d rather not. Dress codes, protocols, procedures, legal obligations, and company hierarchies that are all telling us how we have to behave. Think about it too much and it can start to feel oppressive, even suffocating. If we’re not careful, this is likely to throw us off our game.

This manifesto was issued back in 1995, in Fast Company’ s first issue. Bill Clinton was still a first-term president and Taylor Swift was in kindergarten. Mobile phones were still analog devices. Social media didn’t exist. The past two decades have seen tremendous transformation socially, technologically, and globally. Business and culture have become inextricably linked. The lines between work life and home life have blurred. Old hierarchies are crumbling, inside organizations and across

Outsourcing requires a tight integration of suppliers, making sure that all pieces arrive just in time. Therefore, when some suppliers were unable to deliver certain basic components like capacitors and flash memory, Compaq's network was paralyzed. The company was looking at 600,000 to 700,000 unfilled orders in handheld devices. The $499 Pocket PCs were selling for $700 to $800 at auctions on eBay and Amazon.com. Cisco experienced a different but equally damaging problem: When orders dried up, Cisco neglected to turn off its supply chain, resulting in a 300 percent ballooning of its raw materials inventory. The final numbers are frightening: The aggregate market value loss between March 2000 and March 2001 of the twelve major companies that adopted outsourcing-Cisco, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Apple, IBM, Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, and Nortel-exceeded $1.2 trillion. The painful experience of these companies and their investors is a vivid demonstration of the consequences of ignoring network effects. A me attitude, where the company's immediate financial balance is the only factor, limits network thinking. Not understanding how the actions of one node affect other nodes easily cripples whole segments of the network. Experts agree that such rippling losses are not an inevitable downside of the network economy. Rather, these companies failed because they outsourced their manufacturing without fully understanding the changes required in their business models. Hierarchical thinking does not fit a network economy. In traditional organizations, rapid shifts can be made within the organization, with any resulting losses being offset by gains in other parts of the hierarchy. In a network economy each node must be profitable. Failing to understand this, the big players of the network game exposed themselves to the risks of connectedness without benefiting from its advantages. When problems arose, they failed to make the right, tough decisions, such as shutting down the supply line in Cisco's case, and got into even bigger trouble. At both the macro- and the microeconomic level, the network economy is here to stay. Despite some high-profile losses, outsourcing will be increasingly common. Financial interdependencies, ignoring national and continental boundaries, will only be strengthened with globalization. A revolution in management is in the making. It will take a new, network-oriented view of the economy and an understanding of the consequences of interconnectedness to smooth the way.

Trust Beats Control and Open Beats Closed As we saw with Valve software, autonomy can be a powerful motivator in the age of the Exponential Organization. The Millennial generation is naturally independent, digitally native and resistant to top-down control and hierarchies. To take full advantage of this new workforce and hang on to top talent, companies must embrace an open environment. Google has done just that. As we outlined in Chapter Four, its Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system is fully transparent across the company. Any Googler can look up the OKRs of other colleagues and teams to see what they’re trying to achieve and how successful they’ve been in the past. Such transparency takes a considerable amount of cultural and organizational courage, but Google has found that the openness it engenders is worth any discomfort.

Each man’s place in the company hierarchy, perhaps painfully won over many years, became meaningless if his new super boss, the conglomerator, didn’t see things his way. Robert Metz told in The New York Times about an executive of an acquired company who observed that he and his colleagues had been given what he called the “mushroom treatment”: “Right after the acquisition, we were kept in the dark. Then they covered us with manure. Later they cultivated us. After that, they let us stew for a while. And, finally, they canned us.

the 10 Desires of Team Members: Make sure that people feel competent at what they are doing. Give them work that challenges their abilities but that is still within their grasp. Try to let people feel accepted by you and the group. Compliment them on their achievements (but only if you mean it). Make sure that their curiosity is addressed. Even though some activities can be boring, there should always be something new for them to investigate. Give people a chance at satisfying their honor. You must allow teams to make their own rules, which team members will follow happily (or sometimes grudgingly). Infuse the business with some idealism (purpose). You’re not just there to make money. You’re also making a (small) contribution to make the world a better place. (Note: Be careful with this one. It is often abused by top management in an attempt to obfuscate its real purpose, which is simply to make money.) Foster people’s independence (autonomy). Allow them to be different from other people, with their own tasks and responsibilities. And compliment them on their original and interesting hair style. Make sure that some level of order is maintained in the organization. People work better when they can rely on some (minimal) company rules and policies. Make sure that people have some power or influence over what’s happening around them. Listen to what they have to say and help them in making those things happen. Create the right environment for social contacts (relatedness) to emerge. There’s usually no need to venture into the romance area, but friendships can easily arise, provided that managers take care of a fertile context. Finally, it is important for people to feel that they have some status in the organization. They shouldn’t feel like dangling somewhere at the bottom of a big hierarchy.

Arguably, the essential genius of the American political tradition consists of this complex choreography: accommodating the passions and interests opened up by the protocols of democracy without disturbing the underlying equanimity of capital accumulation and rule by propertied elites. It is a balancing act made even more complicated by the heightened fluidity of the American experience of class hierarchy, perhaps best captured by that old but still cogent observation about “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Nonetheless, rarely if ever in the past has the plutocrat so rooted himself in plebeian culture, erasing all that remained of the habits of deference once expected to inform relations between rulers and the ruled. Nor did he before now build bridges to the lower orders by pointing out precisely what separates them—namely, his unapproachable wealth—using it as a credential of his all-Americanism. Nor have such alliances, when they existed, lasted nearly as long. Nor have so many businessmen assumed second careers as elected officials without any prior experience; on the contrary, many have pointed to their lack of personal political experience as their chief virtue. That, plus offering their long years spent running companies as proving their unique aptitude to govern.

small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius

This is one of the reasons the best organizations are often run in tandem. The combination of the keeper of the vision (CVO) and the operator (the CFO or COO). It is a partnership of complementary skill sets. We are more likely to get these partnerships if we adjust the formal hierarchies in our companies to promote the right mindset to fit the purpose of the job. This means that we need to stop seeing the CEO as number one and the CFO or COO as number two and start thinking of them as vital partners in a common cause. One does not know how to do the other’s job better than they do (which is why they need each other).

I believe that there is a Maslovian hierarchy of fires that applies to most rapidly growing start-ups, where the top of the list is the most important fire to fight first: Distribution Product Revenue model Operations Competition What’s next? What this means is that for most consumer Internet start-ups, the most important fire is distribution; if your distribution goes up in flames, your company is doomed. If you are able to contain that fire, however, it will make fighting the other fires a whole lot easier. Acquiring users gives you feedback on how to improve your product. Acquiring millions of users or thousands of customers makes it a lot easier to generate revenue. Generating revenue makes it easier to pay for the infrastructure and personnel to scale up your operations, either out of cash flow or by raising investment. And if you have a successful and growing business, then it makes sense to worry about the competition.

The primary purpose of the organizational hierarchy in a company is decision-making efficiency. It follows that most CEOs tend to be Ones. If the person at the top of the decision-making hierarchy doesn’t like making extremely complex decisions, the company’s processes will be slow and unwieldy. If you’re a One, it can be counterproductive to have another One on your staff, because she will want to set her own direction rather than follow yours. This kind of strategic contention can confuse the organization and send employees in opposing directions. As a result, many great One CEOs employ primarily Twos and Functional Ones on their staff.

Through the years, companies from Polaroid (Why do we have to wait for the picture?) to Pixar (Can animation be cuddly?21) have started with questions. However, when it comes to questioning, companies are like people: They start out doing it, then gradually do it less and less. A hierarchy forms, a methodology is established, and rules are set; after that, what is there to question?

the new world will be one where bottom-up, network-designed companies and countries will trump the old top-down hierarchies that have dominated since the Industrial Revolution. My motto is: Every customer a market, every employee a business. There is no way to make America great again by returning to the rote assembly-line jobs of the past. In the not too distant future, we’ll enjoy decentralized and instant access to information technologies that allow a more egalitarian, democratic, inclusive, and productive economy and culture. Ironically, it’ll be the complete opposite of how this revolution started, with its nationalistic and racist policies aimed at protecting against the extremes of globalization

Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. Caste pushes back against an African-American woman who, without humor or apology, takes a seat at the head of the table speaking Russian. It prefers an Asian-American man to put his technological expertise at the service of the company but not aspire to CEO. Yet it sees as logical a sixteen-year-old white teenager serving as store manager over employees from the subordinate caste three times his age. Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things. What

and follow these stupid rules. Worst of all, I have to spend a horrendous amount of time in useless meetings.” The creative magic begins to wane as some of the most innovative people leave, disgusted by the burgeoning bureaucracy and hierarchy. The exciting start-up transforms into just another company, with nothing special to recommend it. The cancer of mediocrity begins to grow in earnest. George Rathmann avoided this entrepreneurial death spiral. He understood that the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline—a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place. Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth. Rathmann also understood an alternative exists: Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. When you put these two complementary forces together—a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship—you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.

Another sad example that reduces motivation is the Dilbert-style identical cubicle that continuously reminds people that they are low in the hierarchy, not important enough to justify any investment in them, that the company is not expecting them to be around for a long time, and that they are basically replaceable.

In response, someone (often a board member) says, “It’s time to grow up. This place needs some professional management.” The company begins to hire MBAs and seasoned executives from blue-chip companies. Processes, procedures, checklists, and all the rest begin to sprout up like weeds. What was once an egalitarian environment gets replaced with a hierarchy. Chains of command appear for the first time. Reporting relationships become clear, and an executive class with special perks begins to appear. “We” and “they” segmentations appear—just like in a real company. The professional managers finally rein in the mess. They create order out of chaos, but they also kill the entrepreneurial spirit. Members of the founding team begin to grumble, “This isn’t fun anymore. I used to be able to just get things done. Now I have to fill out these stupid forms

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. Caste pushes back against an African-American woman who, without humor or apology, takes a seat at the head of the table speaking Russian. It prefers an Asian-American man to put his technological expertise at the service of the company but not aspire to CEO. Yet it sees as logical a sixteen-year-old white teenager serving as store manager over employees from the subordinate caste three times his age. Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

If you’re a leader, no matter the size of the company or your position in the hierarchy, you need to be participating in keeping the flame of the founder burning.

STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This

The strengths of social interaction and the flows of information exchange are greatest between terminal units (that is, between individuals) and systematically decrease up the hierarchy of group structures from families and other groups to increasingly larger clusters, leading to superlinear scaling, increasing returns, and an accelerating pace of life.

But as soon as you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking in two additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends. The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts.13

common question PMs deal with is, how do we pick the right goals and supporting success metrics to focus on? In general, it depends on your company. But Sarah Tavel, who was Pinterest’s founding PM for search and discovery and is now a partner at Greylock, noticed a trend in the success metrics of successful consumer-focused internet startups, and she wrote up her findings in a blog post entitled “The Hierarchy of Engagement.

New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

Now the union leaders were as effectively isolated from the rank and file of their organization as any executive of the companies with which they did battle. Suddenly Daniel knew what it was. A new hierarchy was in the process of developing. Sooner or later, the man inside that office, behind the closed door, had to lose touch with the people outside, those whom he represented. No longer was there an emotional relationship. Now it was a calculated representation of an ideal that itself had turned into another form of big business.

People start to realize that nothing and no one is safe. In response, some instinctually behave as if they were switched to self-preservation mode. They may hoard information, hide mistakes and operate in a more cautious, risk-averse way. To protect themselves, they trust no one. Others double down on an only-the-fittest-survive mentality. Their tactics can become overly aggressive. Their egos become unchecked. They learn to manage up the hierarchy to garner favor with senior leadership while, in some cases, sabotaging their own colleagues. To protect themselves, they trust no one. Regardless of whether they are in self-preservation or self-promotion mode, the sum of all of these behaviors contributes to a general decline in cooperation across the company, which also leads to stagnation of any truly new or innovative ideas.

performed or the companies that performed them. Dickens, however, spoke in a new voice, in a new form, to a new audience, of a new world, about several old ideas reconsidered for the new system of capitalism—that care and respect are owed to the weakest and meekest in society, rather than to the strongest; that the ways in which class and money divide humans from one another are artificial and dangerous; that pleasure and physical comfort are positive goods; that the spiritual lives of the powerful have social and economic ramifications. We might today call this an ecological perspective, an intuitive understanding of the social world as a web rather than a hierarchy—the quintessential modern mode of seeing the world. Dickens grasped this idea from the earliest stages of his career and demonstrated his increasingly sophisticated grasp of it in the plots, characterizations, themes, and style of every single novel he wrote. This is the root source of his greatness. That he did so in English at the very moment when England was establishing herself as a worldwide force is the root source of his importance. That he combined his artistic vision with social action in an outpouring of energy and hard work is the root source of his uniqueness.

…Our overriding objective is excellence, or more precisely, constant improvement - A superb, constantly improving company in all respects. Conflict in the pursuit of excellence is a terrific thing. There should be no hierarchy based on age or seniority: Power should lie in the reasoning, not the position of the individual. The best ideas win, no matter who they come from. Criticism is an essential ingredient in the improvement process, yet, if handled incorrectly, can be destructive. It should be handled objectively. There should be no hierarchy in the giving or receiving of criticism. Teamwork and spirit are essential, including intolerance of substandard performance. This is referring to two things: First, one’s recognition of the responsibilities one has to help the team achieve it’s common goal, and second, the willingness to help others work within a group toward these common goals. Our fates are intertwined. One should know that others can be relied on to help. As a corollary, substandard performance cannot be tolerated anywhere, because it would hurt everyone. …Long-term relationships are both intrinsically gratifying and efficient, and should be intentionally built.

An overarching theme across our research findings is the role of discipline in separating the great from the mediocre. True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations. The only legitimate form of discipline is self-discipline, having the inner will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you create a powerful mixture that drives great performance.

First, they give lower-level employees and managers more autonomy, flattening their hierarchies. Second, they nurture collaboration across functions, business units, geographies, and other traditional silos. These organizational moves fuel trust in the workforce and commitment to the purpose. At the same time, purpose itself enables trust to flourish, facilitating the departure from traditional bureaucratic structures.

Learning Plan Template Before Entry Find out whatever you can about the organization’s strategy, structure, performance, and people. Look for external assessments of the performance of the organization. You will learn how knowledgeable, fairly unbiased people view it. If you are a manager at a lower level, talk to people who deal with your new group as suppliers or customers. Find external observers who know the organization well, including former employees, recent retirees, and people who have transacted business with the organization. Ask these people open-ended questions about history, politics, and culture. Talk with your predecessor if possible. Talk to your new boss. As you begin to learn about the organization, write down your first impressions and eventually some hypotheses. Compile an initial set of questions to guide your structured inquiry after you arrive. Soon After Entry Review detailed operating plans, performance data, and personnel data. Meet one-on-one with your direct reports and ask them the questions you compiled. You will learn about convergent and divergent views and about your reports as people. Assess how things are going at key interfaces. You will hear how salespeople, purchasing agents, customer service representatives, and others perceive your organization’s dealings with external constituencies. You will also learn about problems they see that others do not. Test strategic alignment from the top down. Ask people at the top what the company’s vision and strategy are. Then see how far down into the organizational hierarchy those beliefs penetrate. You will learn how well the previous leader drove vision and strategy down through the organization. Test awareness of challenges and opportunities from the bottom up. Start by asking frontline people how they view the company’s challenges and opportunities. Then work your way up. You will learn how well the people at the top check the pulse of the organization. Update your questions and hypotheses. Meet with your boss to discuss your hypotheses and findings. By the End of the First Month Gather your team to feed back to them your preliminary findings. You will elicit confirmation and challenges of your assessments and will learn more about the group and its dynamics. Now analyze key interfaces from the outside in. You will learn how people on the outside (suppliers, customers, distributors, and others) perceive your organization and its strengths and weaknesses. Analyze a couple of key processes. Convene representatives of the responsible groups to map out and evaluate the processes you selected. You will learn about productivity, quality, and reliability. Meet with key integrators. You will learn how things work at interfaces among functional areas. What problems do they perceive that others do not? Seek out the natural historians. They can fill you in on the history, culture, and politics of the organization, and they are also potential allies and influencers. Update your questions and hypotheses. Meet with your boss again to discuss your observations.

In the unwritten hierarchy of world Jewry, the Sephardim are considered, and consider themselves, the most noble of all Jews because, as a culture, they claim the longest unbroken history of unity and suffering. The arrival of twenty-three Sephardim in New Amsterdam was not auspicious. When he discovered they were penniless, Governor Peter Stuyvesant threw the lot of them in prison. There they might have stayed, but, fortunately for them, many stockholders of the Dutch West India Company were Jewish and so Stuyvesant was persuaded to release the twenty-three on the condition that “the poor among them” be no burden and “be supported by their own nation.

New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

Sydney Finkelstein, a Dartmouth professor who studied major failures at over fifty companies, found that those higher in the management hierarchy were more likely to blame factors other than themselves compared to those with less power. Oddly, those with the most power seem to feel they have the least control. So much for the “buck stops here” thinking popularized by U.S. president Harry Truman.

it’s destructive for leaders to sit atop an organization far removed from the people who make its interfaces and user experience work. Building a structure and methodology for ideas to flow not just down but up the hierarchy, as well as across different areas of the organization, is critical not only to survive but also to thrive. Having worked with a large number of companies undergoing digital transformation, I’ve seen over and over again that the ones that did this kind of management transformation before rather than after they attempted digital transformation were more successful at it.

Werner Vogels of Amazon notes that this approach—where you’re knowingly permissive of duplicated work—is often a nonstarter at traditional companies, which tend to feel it’s out of control or chaotic. “It’s so counterintuitive for them because they’re all about efficiency,” he explains. “They’re used to having top-down control, and in essence the hierarchy becomes more important than moving fast.

It was a multi-step process that involved first contacting the number-two person in the management hierarchy and offering some special investment opportunities and then, when there wasn’t interest right away, tracking in real dollars what they had turned down. Three months later I would place a call to the number-one person at the company and note that I had called before, saying, "I would have been calling you to send you a check for one hundred thousand dollars, but you didn’t feel that it was of interest at the time. Here’s what I’m calling you about now..." Almost across the board immediate interest and some subsequent trading followed.

Motivate the Workforce. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it? Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications? Are you keeping your powder dry for those urgent moments when you may need it?   8. Embrace the Front Lines. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act? Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers? Is everybody able to communicate their ideas and concerns to you?   9. Build Leadership in Others. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates? Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership? Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers? 10. Manage Relations. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up? Are managers self-aware and empathetic? Are autocratic, egocentric, and irritable behaviors censured? 11.

Motivate the Workforce. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it? Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications? Are you keeping your powder dry for those urgent moments when you may need it?   8. Embrace the Front Lines. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act? Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers? Is everybody able to communicate their ideas and concerns to you?   9. Build Leadership in Others. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates? Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership? Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers? 10. Manage Relations. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up? Are managers self-aware and empathetic? Are autocratic, egocentric, and irritable behaviors censured? 11. Identify Personal Implications. Do employees appreciate how the firm’s vision and strategy impact them individually? What private sacrifices will be necessary for achieving the common cause? How will the plan affect people’s personal livelihood and quality of work life? 12. Convey Your Character. Have you communicated your commitment to performance with integrity? Do those in the organization know you as a person, and do they appreciate your aspirations and your agendas? Have you been in the same room or at least on the same call with everybody who works with you during the past year? 13. Dampen Overoptimism and Excessive Pessimism. Have you prepared the organization for unlikely but extremely consequential events? Do you celebrate success but also guard against the by-products of excessive confidence? Have you paved the way not only for quarterly results but for long-term performance?

Emerging operating models also mean that talent and culture have to be rethought in light of new skill requirements and the need to attract and retain the right sort of human capital. As data become central to both decision-making and operating models across industries, workforces require new skills, while processes need to be upgraded (for example, to take advantage of the availability of real-time information) and cultures need to evolve. As I mentioned, companies need to adapt to the concept of “talentism”. This is one of the most important, emerging drivers of competitiveness. In a world where talent is the dominant form of strategic advantage, the nature of organizational structures will have to be rethought. Flexible hierarchies, new ways of measuring and rewarding performance, new strategies for attracting and retaining skilled talent will all become key for organizational success. A capacity for agility will be as much about employee motivation and communication as it will be about setting business priorities and managing physical assets. My

In combat deployment (where he earned a Silver Star for bravery and two Purple Hearts), Smith gained the central insight that would power Federal Express from an idea into a viable business, from a business into a great company. Like Manchester, he realized that people will do unreasonable things to come through—not for grand ideas or incentives or bosses or hierarchies or even recognition, but for each other.

It is the principle of Level 5. Level 5 is the highest level in a hierarchy of capability ranging from Level 1 (individual skills) to Level 2 (teamwork skills) to Level 3 (management skills) to Level 4 (leadership skills). At Level 5, a leader applies all the skills from Levels 1 through 4 in service to a cause larger than self, and does so with a paradoxical blend of personal humility and indomitable will. Level 5 leaders are incredibly ambitious. They are fanatic, obsessed, monomaniacal, relentless, exhausting. But their ambition is first and foremost for the cause, for the company, for the purpose, for the work, not themselves.

One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is the "safety-valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions, it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self sufficient, in command at all times. Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptable high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another. Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally.

One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is the "safety-valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions, it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self sufficient, in command at all times. Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptable high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another. Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally.

When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.

The word Jerusalem did not originally refer to a location. It referred to a company of the Magi united by their common knowledge of nature and the heavens. The word is probably a corruption of derusalem, darusalem or djerusalem connoting the Druids. It is found in the Greek as Hierosolyma, meaning “high” or “sacred.” The root hieros (meaning sacred) gives us hierophant and hierarchy. It referred to the wise ones, the elect, the keepers of knowledge. The letter “H” was later pronounced as a “J,” and thus we arrive at Jerus-alem. In Arabic Aleim means “the gods” and gives us the Hebrew word Elohim that connotes a plurality of gods. Jerusalem would, in its simplest form, mean “place of the godly or godlike men.” The Roman mythographers cunningly took words like “Jerusalem,” “Hebrew,” “Jew,” “Israelite” and “Phoenician,” etc, and attributed them where they did not belong. They massacred those who once bore these titles, so honoring and respecting mere names and words was not a major concern. The sacred language had, by deliberate design, been successfully eradicated, and soon the world would believe whatever the new Romish hegemony dictated concerning world history and religion. Ireland’s great civilization was erased and Egypt’s civilization obliterated. Alexandria was burned to the ground and many other colleges and libraries smoldered to ash. Eventually, the world would forget the role of Athens, and time would not spare Rome’s vast empire. It too would eventually diminish and cease to exist. Those who sought to erase traces of Ireland’s contribution and tradition were most successful in their diabolical and sacrilegious undertaking.

Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives. Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management. As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.

When we think of social animals-that is, animals who live together in well-defined groups, and form enduring relationships- we usually think of the great apes, of wolves and other members of the dog family, and, or course, of humans. Science considers bears to be solitary animals. But while bears don't live in established groups or obey rigid hierarchies as chimps and wolves do, they have amazingly complex social relationships.

The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong. Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads. Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future. Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on

With a zero risk profile, no one dares to take responsibility. Mistakes are hidden like dust is swept under the carpet and when they come to light, innocent people who had nothing to do with the mistakes are let go, while the responsible people stay in their positions. Company leaders understand the zero risk profile and rule with authority. People not wanting to risk their income, do unpaid overtime. Though this is illegal, the lack of “Western” ethics does neither shock nor surprise any of the employees. People complaining are creatively fired. Most employees keep their mouths shut and know other companies apply the exact same methods. It merely is business as usual. This demotivates the masses and – consequently - service levels become progressively worse. With the strong company hierarchies and the many levels of middle management, information from the lowest levels in the company hardly reaches general management and vice versa. Underutilized resources, like the employees, generate - relatively seen – little added value. Salaries are in line with these values and people just accept it. Regardless of their age or background, they know their friends and family members earn a similar low salary elsewhere. It is what it is, right?

Strelsin asked CEOs an easy question: “How would you describe the most important aspect of your role in the organization?” The CEOs whose companies were inconsistent in their performance prioritized creating a vision, building a specific corporate culture, and developing a specific business strategy. But when Strelsin posed the same question to CEOs of industry-leading companies, most said that they had made it their personal mission, above all else, to simplify the lives of those who worked below them. They pursued simplification in a number of ways: they simplified their strategies so their peers and subordinates could focus on the most important challenges. They simplified their hierarchies, so that their companies could execute their strategies more effectively. They made it a priority to communicate in clear prose that inspired everyone to join in their company’s respective mission. In short, the most successful executives in Strelsin’s study excelled in their jobs because they regarded themselves not merely as CEOs, but as chief simplifiers.

In his seminal book, Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes, Sydney Finkelstein, a management professor at Dartmouth College, investigated major failures at more than fifty corporate institutions. 11 He found that error-denial increases as you go up the pecking order. Ironically enough, the higher people are in the management hierarchy, the more they tend to supplement their perfectionism with blanket excuses, with CEOs usually being the worst of all. For example, in one organization we studied, the CEO spent the entire forty-five-minute interview explaining all the reasons why others were to blame for the calamity that hit his company. Regulators, customers, the government, and even other executives within the firm—all were responsible. No mention was made, however, of personal culpability. The reason should by now be obvious. It is those at the top of business who are responsible for strategy and therefore have the most to lose if things go wrong. They are far more likely to cling to the idea that the strategy is wise, even as it is falling apart, and to reframe any evidence that says otherwise. Blinded by dissonance, they are also the least likely to learn the lessons.

Then another participant, Mr. Deng, raised his hand, I restated the specific question: “What steps should the team leader in this case take to manage different attitudes toward confrontation on the team?” Mr. Deng began: Let me give my perspective. I have been working in the technology industry for many years. In my company, we have lots of young people who are very eager and hardworking. Yet hierarchy is still strong in our company. During a meeting, if a young person is asked a question, he will look to his boss first to see if the boss’s face indicates approval. If the boss approves, the younger employee will also express approval.