Value Employees Quotes

A good vision will not just give your employees much-needed direction but also much-valued inspiration to do their work efficiently.

your employees need more than just paychecks.

It's just as great to be an employee as it is to be an entrepreneur. Great employees add immense value to businesses and therefore to markets and to economies. Being an employee is important.

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it. Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief - WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care? People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us. For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation. Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order. Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to. You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills. Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left. Trust is maintained when values and beliefs are actively managed. If companies do not actively work to keep clarity, discipline and consistency in balance, then trust starts to break down. All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.

It's good to celebrate the value your business adds. Every employee in the business should celebrate the value the business adds. What you celebrate, you give life to. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.

Passion without action is of little value.

The value of a business is a function of how well the financial capital and the intellectual capital are managed by the human capital. You'd better get the human capital part right.

When your employees enjoy holistic health, your business is better able to add value and serve it's customers.

Employee values should align with company values.

How a business presents itself is very indicative of that businesses sense of self and about how much value and respect it’s owners and employees attribute to it. If the owners and employees don’t respect the business, neither will the customers and potential customers.

As managers, we should hire people whose values align with the values of the company, and then trust them to do their job well. If you have to micromanage an employee, one of you isn't a fit for the company.

Develop a compelling change vision that inspires employees with purpose and is aligned to the organisation’s strategy, values and beliefs

Resume's are incapable of holistically communicating a candidates value.

Women are taught that to be a good woman you need to be good for other people. If your kids are happy, then you're a good mom. If your husband is happy, you're a good wife. How about a good daughter, employee, sister, friend? All of your value is essentially wrapped up in other people's happiness. How can anyone successfully navigate that for a lifetime? How can anyone dream of more? How can anyone follow their what if, if they need someone else to approve of it first?

a workplace can look as diverse as the United Nations, but if the employees are not truly respected, not truly valued, not truly involved, and not truly treated with dignity, what you have is a great photo opportunity, not real inclusion.

Countries with high levels of atheism are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms’ average employees: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle.

Every employee should feel like their job is important and that their presence in the company is valued.

We think it's important to have a company culture where employees feel loved, valued, and appreciated.

The business professional also must value his employees as well, for they are his most valuable asset. He must attend to their welfare.

Where finite-minded organizations view people as a cost to be managed, infinite-minded organizations prefer to see employees as human beings whose value cannot be calculated as if they were a piece of machinery. Investing in human beings goes beyond paying them well and offering them a great place to work. It also means treating them like human beings. Understanding that they, like all people, have ambitions and fears, ideas and opinions and ultimately want to feel like they matter.

An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions.

A home where a woman is abused is a small-scale model of much larger oppressive systems that work in remarkably similar ways. Many of the excuses an abusive man uses for verbally tearing his partner to shreds are the same ones that a power-mad boss uses for humiliating his or her employees. The abusive man’s ability to convince himself that his domination of you is for your own good is paralleled by the dictator who says, “People in this country are too primitive for democracy.” The divide-and-conquer strategies used by abusers are reminiscent of a corporate head who tries to break the labor union by giving certain groups of workers favored treatment. The making of an abuser is thus not necessarily restricted to the specific values his society teaches him about men’s relationships with women; without realizing it he may also apply attitudes and tactics from other forms of oppression that he has been exposed to as a boy or as a young adult and that he has learned to justify or even admire.

turning the traditional hierarchical pyramid upside down to emphasize that everyone is responsible—able to respond— for living the constitution and getting the desired results while modeling the organization's valued behaviors.

DIVERSITY IS ABOUT RECOGNISING, VALUING AND TAKING ACCOUNT OF PEOPLE'S DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS, KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND EXPERIENCES. HEALTH AND SAFETY SHOULD NOT BE USED TO JUSTIFY DISCRIMINATING AGAINST CERTAIN GROUPS OF EMPLOYEES

I came to realize that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life. An employee is scared of losing her job and becoming a prostitute because she does not understand that the prostitute’s life is in fact better than hers. And so she pays the price of her illusory fears with her life, her health, her body, and her mind. She pays the highest price for things of the lowest value. I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one. I also knew that if I lost my job, all I would lose with it was the miserable salary, the contempt I could read every day in the eyes of the higher level executives when they looked at the lesser female officials, the humiliating pressure of male bodies on mine when I rode in the bus, and the long morning queue in front of a perpetually overflowing toilet.

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks. … Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.

We like a workplace where employees feel a sense of autonomy to make their own choices and achieve results their way. When people have that freedom and autonomy, guided by shared values, it results in having a culture of innovation and joyfulness.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency. Later, I’m going to challenge some of Dalio’s principles, but first I want to explain the weapons he has used to wage a war on groupthink.

State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.

Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.

The economic metaphor came to be applied to every aspect of modern life, especially the areas where it simply didn't belong. In fields such as education, equality of opportunity, health, employee's rights, the social contract and culture, the first conversation to happen should be about values and principles; then you have the conversation about costs, and what you as a society can afford.

Most of us know intuitively that a score on a personality test, a rank on a standardized assessment, a grade point average, or a rating on a performance review doesn’t reflect your, or your child’s, or your students’, or your employees’ abilities. Yet the concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously.

It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place. If you’re comparing two different groups of people, like comparing the performance of Chilean pilots with French pilots—as opposed to comparing two individuals from each of those groups—then the average can be useful. But the moment you need a pilot, or a plumber, or a doctor, the moment you need to teach this child or decide whether to hire that employee—the moment you need to make a decision about any individual—the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.

It’s really simple. People what to be where they feel valued and where they have the full capacity to provide value. When people have that, they stay. When they don’t, they leave. Companies that provide this to employees experience retention. Companies that don’t, experience attrition.

I see companies these days where thoughts of “exits” are foremost in the minds of top management and board, and it is so clear that this value will infect the decision making down to the smallest choice by the most junior employee. Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded?

When you listen to people, they feel valued. A 2003 study from Lund University in Sweden finds that “mundane, almost trivial” things like listening and chatting with employees are important aspects of successful leadership, because “people feel more respected, visible and less anonymous, and included in teamwork.”10 And a 2016 paper finds that this form of “respectful inquiry,” where the leader asks open questions and listens attentively to the response, is effective because it heightens the “follower’s” feelings of competence (feeling challenged and experiencing mastery), relatedness (feeling of belonging), and autonomy (feeling in control and having options). Those three factors are sort of the holy trinity of the self-determination theory of human motivation, originally developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan.11

When employees feel valued, and are more productive and engaged, they create a culture that can truly be a strategic advantage in today’s competitive market.

Employees should be very clear about the companies values. And more importantly, employee values should align with company values.

Give people a voice, encourage, motivate and reward them

Business leaders should prioritize employee well-being, as their value is the foundation of the organization's success.

Pizza as a reward at work, gotta love it. Personally, I'd rather have that than a raise. Give me a pizza, boss, and let me know you truly value the work I do.

Ensure that value is created for all stakeholders – customers, employees, partners, society, and investors – simultaneously

learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.

Intellectuals are now typically public employees, even if they work for nominally private institutions or foundations. Almost completely protected from the vagaries of consumer demand ("tenured"), their number has dramatically increased and their compensation is on average far above their genuine market value. At the same time the quality of their intellectual output has constantly fallen.

Many self-help teachers say that our schools only focus on “preparing today’s youths to get good jobs by developing scholastic skills.” They think that’s a bad thing. It’s probably the right thing. Not everyone is suited for entrepreneurship, as statistics seem to suggest. Even future entrepreneurs usually need to begin as employees to get their starting capital and to learn while they work.

Our work and educational institutions reinforce this preference for later over now throughout our lives. In school we focus on the ends — passing the semester, making the grade, or otherwise getting it all behind us — rather than the present-moment experience of actually learning. As employees, we want the work to be over as soon as it begins. Work culture is driven by quotas, billable hours, budgets, and Gantt charts — bottom lines of any sort. The value is always somewhere ahead of you, rather than here right now, in the room with you. We’re perpetually looking ahead to a payday or a weekend or some other kind of finish line. Virtually every day of our lives, we’re trained to lean towards something we don’t have, which essentially trains us to be dissatisfied with where we already are.

every employee and manager must understand who you are as a company, and what you stand for. They must be true to your brand values and be able to passionately explain them to your prospects and customers.

What Greenspan was saying, in other words, was that there was absolutely nothing wrong with bidding up to $100 million in share value some hot-air Internet stock, because the lack of that company’s “physical value” (i.e., the actual money those three employees weren’t earning) could be overcome by the inherent value of their “ideas.” To say that this was a radical reinterpretation of the entire science of economics is an understatement—economists had never dared measure “value” except in terms of actual concrete production. It was equivalent to a chemist saying that concrete becomes gold when you paint it yellow. It was lunacy.

Values define who we are, and if they change we will become something else,” Peter Nordstrom wrote in the employee publication, Loop. He described practices as “ways of doing things” and “behaviors that express our values.

When employees hold the same core beliefs and values, you need fewer policies to control or manage work. Instead, your employees have an innate ability to deliver solutions and customer service that match your desired culture.

Business is inherently altruistic — to profit, a business must add value to peoples lives and It must solve peoples problems. It does this while creating income and wealth for employees and owners. This is what I call a ‘Multiplicative Value Effect.

External initiatives and perks never truly motivate people for the long term. Instead, only internal drivers—such as meaningful engagement, connectedness, and feeling valued—can engage employees on the deeper level needed for long-term commitment and productivity.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

In a multibillion dollar corporation, one person’s business decisions can easily make a difference of millions—or even billions—of dollars, compared to someone else’s decisions. Those who see paying such a person $10 million or $20 million a year as coming at the expense of consumers or stockholders have implicitly accepted the zero-sum view of economics. If the value of the services rendered exceeds the pay, then both consumers and stockholders are better off, not worse off, whether the person hired is a corporate CEO or a production line employee.

Your mission statement, vision statement, core values, and service standards provide a clear focus for all while keeping your team humble and hungry. It creates that family environment in which your employees enjoy coming to work and dealing with the challenges they face each day.

I have learned its the most difficult thing to become financially free from earning the minimum wage. So even if employees increase the minimum wage its the same thing. But once employees improve on their skills and personal value their wages go up and then financial freedom is posible.

To combat socialism Bismarck put through between 1883 and 1889 a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. It cannot be said that it stopped the rise of the Social Democrats or the trade unions, but it did have a profound influence on the working class in that it gradually made them value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector. Hitler, as we shall see, took full advantage of this state of mind. In this, as in other matters, he learned much from Bismarck. “I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation,” Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf (p. 155), “in its intention, struggle and success.

Imagine if ALL employers treated ALL of their employees with the same respect no matter what their job title was. Imagine going to work every day knowing that you and your work were valued. Unfortunately, we live in a society where some people allow their job titles to go to their head. I encourage you NOT to be one of those people. No matter what your position is, at the end of the day, EVERYBODY matters in the workplace, and every position serves a purpose. I firmly believe that how you treat others is a direct reflection of who you REALLY are. Personally, I choose integrity!

When you have a business and people in a business that are feeling fulfilled because they're adding value to other peoples lives and they're making money because of that- you've got a win win win win win win situation - everybody's winning. Customers and clients are winning because their lives are improving with the services or products that the business provides them. Business managers owners and employees are winning because they're receiving compensation and a sense of fulfillment for the value they add. And because these two groups of people are winning, society as a whole is winning.

In bad companies, when the economics disappear, so do the employees. In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: The company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave. Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.

In real life, the value capture process is sometimes deliberately managed by elites to manipulate and control others with game design-like tactics. Gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft use "badges" and rating systems to manage the decision-making environment of their driver employees. Even outside of work, social media features such as likes, shares, and retweets play the role of points in games. Over time, these simple metrics threaten to distort or take the place of values (say, the wish to meaningfully contribute to discussion or to take pride in the quality of one's work) that might otherwise have inflected our behavior on these platforms.

Operational effectiveness: necessary but not sufficient Operational effectiveness and strategy are both essential to superior performance, which, after all, is the primary goal of any enterprise. But they work in very different ways. A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both. The arithmetic of superior profitability then follows: delivering greater value allows a company to charge higher average unit prices; greater efficiency results in lower average unit costs. Ultimately, all differences between companies in cost or price derive from the hundreds of activities required to create, produce, sell, and deliver their products or services, such as calling on customers, assembling final products, and training employees. Cost is generated by performing activities, and cost advantage arises from performing particular activities more

I concluded that I didn’t have to find an optimum solution to Pronto’s difficulties, just a reasonable one. Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time. But you’ve got to have something to hang your hat on. The one core value that I chose was our high compensation policies, which I had put in place from the very start in 1958. This may sound like a strange way for polarizing a business, but I did not want to destroy the faith that Pronto Markets’ then-handful of employees had in me and in our common future. After all, they had just ponied up half the equity money needed to buy out Rexall.

4 Steps for Understanding Each Other 1. Identify your beliefs and core values; ask how they determine your behaviors and habits. 2. Realize with whom you are interacting and try to identify how their values are explaining their behavior. 3. Assume positive intent. 4. Seek ways to adapt your behavior to help bridge the cultural gap.

We will judge others based on their behaviors with little to no understanding or regard for their beliefs or values—standards we may not know, nor typically see. When we do this, things can be taken completely out of context because we are assessing their behavior against our expectations, which are produced from our own personal value system.

Ambiverts typically . . . • Can process information both internally and externally. They need time to contemplate on their own, but consider the opinions and wisdom from people whom they trust when making a decision. • Love to engage and interact enthusiastically with others, however, they also enjoy calm and profound communication. • Seek to balance between their personal time and social time, they value each greatly. • Are able to move from one situation to the next with confidence, flexibility, and anticipation. “Not everyone is going to like us or understand us. And that is okay. It may have nothing to do with us personally; but rather more about who they are and how they relate to the world.

Ava, why don’t you ring this gentleman up for the Richard Argus moonlight piece?” She looked uneasy. “But—” “Now.” My smile cut across my face with the precision of a honed knife. “Careful with the tone, Fred. Ava is your best employee. You wouldn’t want to alienate her or any customers who value her opinion very highly, would you?” He blinked, his eyes darting around as his tiny brain struggled to process the not-so-subtle threat behind my words. “N-no, of course not,” Fred stuttered. “In fact, Ava, you stay right here with this gentleman. I’ll pack the piece myself.” “But she’ll get the commission.” I arched an eyebrow. “Yes.” The manager nodded so fast he resembled a bobblehead doll. “Of course.

Boundaries help you perform your best when you’re on the clock, and they help you recharge effectively when you’re not. They improve your mental and physical health; create a culture of respect and trust; keep morale, motivation, and loyalty high; and prevent good employees (like you) from burning out—because burnout is very, very real even if you’re doing a job you love. When employees are feeling energized, respected, and valued, it has a positive impact on their productivity, creativity, and the results they achieve for the business. Remember that the next time you’re tempted to feel guilty for setting a boundary at work—you’re a true team player because you’re helping to create a workplace culture in which everyone thrives.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency.

was not obvious at the time, even to me, but we had one thing that Blockbuster did not: a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls. Our culture, which focused on achieving top performance with talent density and leading employees with context not control, has allowed us to continually grow and change as the world, and our members’ needs, have likewise morphed around us.

Space agencies keep a firm grip on their public image, and it's less troublesome for employees and contractors to say no to someone like me than to take their chances and see what I write. Happily there are people involved in the human side of space exploration who see value in unconventional coverage(or are just plain too nice to say no). For their candor and wit - and the generosity with which they shared their time and know-how - super-galactic thanks.

How to build a strong culture44 1. Have strong hiring filters in place. Explicitly filter for people with common values. You need to be careful that this does not act as a mechanism to inadvertently filter out diverse populations. You can have both a common sense of purpose and a diverse employee base at the same time. See later sections and the interview with Joelle Emerson for more information. 2. Constantly emphasize values day-to-day. Repeat them until you are blue in the face. The second you are really sick of saying the same thing over and over, you will find people have started repeating it back to you. 3. Reward people based on performance as well as culture. People should be rewarded (with promotions, financially, etc.) for both productivity and for living the company’s values. 4. Get rid of bad culture fits quickly. Fire bad culture fits even faster than you fire low performers.45 This chapter focuses on #1 above:

Design for 80 percent and build separate paths for exceptions. Eliminate or reduce the impact of low-value steps. Simplify complex steps. Combine simple steps. Work to design quality into the work, rather than inspect step outputs after the fact. Use parallel paths wherever possible. Broaden job content and empower employees. Don’t design things to the task level unless the risk of variation is unacceptable and you’re willing to invest in testing prior to implementation.

THREE COMMUNICATION LESSONS FROM THE MOST FASCINATING BRANDS       1.   Don’t focus on how you are similar to others, but how you are different. Leading brands stand out by sharpening their points of difference. The more clearly and distinctly a brand can pinpoint its differences, the more valuable it becomes. If a brand can carve out a very clear spot in people’s minds, the product or service ceases to be a commodity. As we’ll see in Part II, different personality Advantages can be more valuable than similar ones. 2.   Your differences can be very small and simple. The reality is, most products are virtually indistinguishable from their competitors. Yet a leading brand can build a strong competitive edge around very minor differences. Similarly, you don’t need to be dramatically different than everyone else—your difference can be minute, as long as it is clearly defined. The more competitive the market, the more crucial this becomes. 3.   Once you “own” a difference, you can charge more money. People pay more for products and people who add distinct value in some way. And just as customers pay more for fascinating brands, employers pay higher salaries for employees who stand out with a specific benefit. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, your clients and customers will have a higher perceived value of your time and services if they can clearly understand why you are different than your competitors. The more crowded the environment, the more crucial these lessons become.

Yet, we must remember that even White privilege is not distributed evenly among Whites. Many White people never get a piece of the pie. This fact, sadly, instead of making them unite with other marginalized and oppressed American employees, it makes them unload their rage and disappointment on the already suffering low-income, refugee, or poor ethnicities, accusing them of ‘stealing our jobs’, or ‘destroying our country and values’. In doing so, they miss the chance of working together with a significant number of allies for real change. Furthermore, they vote for and side with their oppressors thinking that voting for racist and supremacist candidates will change this ugly reality. What they fail to realize is that politics is literally a nasty business that is fed by the masses’ hatred and, once in power, that business never thrives by changing the way the business is done. If all these supposed problems are solved, where will future politicians get their fodder to feed hatred to masses who will bring them to power?

A sustainable firm provides employees and customers with an inspiring vision to make the world a better place; efficiently delivers value to its customers, consistent with the firm’s vision, thereby earning economic returns, over the long term, that at least equal the cost of capital; builds long-term, win–win relationships with all its stakeholders; and applies creative systems thinking to the design, manufacturing, delivery, and recycling of its products, including their supply chains, so as to reduce waste and harm to the environment. The

Large or small, our actions forge our futures, hopefully inspiring others along the way. Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable. In times of adversity and change, we really discover who we are and what we’re made of. Effective leaders share two intertwined attributes: an unbridled level of confidence about where their organizations are headed, and the ability to bring people along. Fixing moments, like mopping a dirty floor, only provides short-term satisfaction. But take the time to understand the cause of the problem—like how to keep a floor from getting so dirty in the first place—solves, and maybe eliminates, a problem. How leaders embody the values they espouse sets a tone, an expectation, that guides their employees’ behaviors. While I would not want to constantly battle against the odds, the raw feeling of accomplishing something that others did not think possible, or leading people beyond where they thought they could go, is extremely gratifying.

By letting the participants create their own follow-ups and time schedule, I’m trying to create a sense of ownership in them. This principle is known as the “IKEA Effect,” named for the home furnishings retailer whose products are notoriously difficult to assemble. The IKEA Effect states that by forcing consumers to play an active role in the assembly of their dresser or bookshelf, they will value the product more highly than if it were assembled in store.11 In a similar fashion, by creating their own deadlines, employees will be more motivated to meet them.

At a high level, we look for people who think independently, argue open-mindedly and assertively, and above all else value the intense pursuit of truth and excellence, and through it, the rapid improvement of themselves and the organization. Because we treat work as more than just what we do to make a living, we look at every potential hire not just as an employee but as someone we’d want share our lives with. We insist that the people we work with are considerate and have a high sense of personal accountability to do the difficult, right things. We look for people with generous natures and high standards of fairness.

nothing. Even when unfairness is only a minor concern, system noise poses another problem. People who are affected by evaluative judgments expect the values these judgments reflect to be those of the system, not of the individual judges. Something must have gone badly wrong if one customer, complaining of a defective laptop, gets fully reimbursed, and another gets a mere apology; or if one employee who has been with a firm for five years asks for a promotion and gets exactly that, while another employee, whose performance is otherwise identical, is politely turned down. System noise is inconsistency, and inconsistency damages the credibility of the system.

Many energy companies will use models to value assets with lifetimes of 20 years or longer—things like power plants, pipelines, and natural gas wells. Even if the model was sufficient when first developed, it can still fail before its lifetime is up. Assumptions made 15 years earlier are often invalidated due to regulatory changes, population shifts, and technological changes. Exacerbating this problem is the problem of employee turnover—commonly, the original developers of the models have moved to other jobs when problems develop. After a number of years, organizations need to take steps to ensure that someone still understands every model that is in production.

The portrait was stolen on 21 August 1911 and the Louvre was closed for an entire week to aid the investigation of the theft. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be burnt down, was arrested and put in jail. Apollinaire tried to implicate his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later released and exonerated. At the time, the painting was believed to be lost forever, and it was two years before the real thief was discovered. Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia had stolen it by entering the building during regular hours, concealing himself in a broom closet and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed. Peruggia was an Italian patriot, who believed Leonardo’s painting should be returned to Italy for display in an Italian museum. Peruggia may have also been motivated by a friend who sold copies of the painting, which would skyrocket in value after the theft of the original. After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to the directors of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The painting was exhibited all over Italy and returned to the Louvre in 1913. Peruggia was hailed for his patriotism in Italy and served only six months in jail for the crime.

The larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to train employees at every level, acting autonomously, to make prioritization decisions that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. That is why successful senior executives spend so much time articulating clear, consistent values that are broadly understood throughout the organization. Over time, a company’s values must evolve to conform to its cost structure or its income statement, because if the company is to survive, employees must prioritize those things that help the company to make money in the way that it is structured to make money.

We've reached a point in human history where higher education no longer works. As a result of technology, higher education in its traditional college setting no longer works. It will never be effective or progressive enough to keep up with the growing needs of employers who look to college institutions for their future employees. I can appreciate the good intent the college system set out to achieve. For previous generations, the formula actually worked. Students enrolled into universities that were affordable, they gained marketable skills and they earned good jobs. Since there was a proven track record of success, parents instilled the value of college in their children thinking they would achieve the same success story they did, but unfortunately Wall Street was watching. Wall Street, the federal government and the college system ganged up and skyrocketed the cost of tuition to record highs. This was easy to do because not only did they have posters blanketing high schools showing kids what a loser they would be if they didn't go to college, they also had Mom and Dad at home telling them the same thing. This system - spending 4+ years pursuing a college education when the world is changing at the speed of light - no longer works and it's not fixable. We now have the biggest employer's market in human history, where employers have their pick of the litter, and because of this employees will get paid less and less and benefits will continue to erode.

As the idea of culture has migrated from anthropology to organizational theory, so it has become highly instrumentalized and reified. It is another example of the hubris of managerialism, which claims to be able to analyse, predict and control the intangible, and with the result that it can bring about the opposite of what it intends. In other words, with the intention of ensuring that employees are more committed to their work and are more productive, repeated culture change programmes can have the effect of inducing cynicism or resistance in staff (McKinlay and Taylor, 1996). With an insistence that staff align their values with those of the organization, what may result is gaming strategies on the part of staff to cover over what they really think and feel (Jackall, 2009).

Play Fair You’re sure to elicit a threat response if you provide feedback the other person views as unfair or inaccurate. But how do you avoid that, given how subjective perceptions of fairness and accuracy are? David Bradford of the Stanford Graduate School of Business suggests “staying on our side of the net”—that is, focusing our feedback on our feelings about the behavior and avoiding references to the other person’s motives. We’re in safe territory on our side of the net; others may not like what we say when we describe how we feel, but they can’t dispute its accuracy. However, when we make guesses about their motives, we cross over to their side of the net, and even minor inaccuracies can provoke a defensive reaction. For example, when giving critical feedback to someone who’s habitually late, it’s tempting to say something like, “You don’t value my time, and it’s very disrespectful of you.” But these are guesses about the other person’s state of mind, not statements of fact. If we’re even slightly off base, the employee will feel misunderstood and be less receptive to the feedback. A more effective way to make the same point is to say, “When you’re late, I feel devalued and disrespected.” It’s a subtle distinction, but by focusing on the specific behavior and our internal response—by staying on our side of the net—we avoid making an inaccurate, disputable guess. Because motives are often unclear, we constantly cross the net in an effort to make sense of others’ behavior. While this is inevitable, it’s good practice to notice when we’re guessing someone’s motives and get back on our side of the net before offering feedback.

As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the priorities they have learned to accept, and the ways of doing things and methods of making decisions that they have employed so successfully, are the right way to work. Once members of the organization begin to adopt ways of working and criteria for making decisions by assumption, rather than by conscious decision, then those processes and values come to constitute the organization’s culture. 7 As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how it should be done so that the right jobs are done repeatedly and consistently can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in these situations. Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently. Hence, the location of the

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Sirien gives, for the first time, an honest account of the extent of her sexual experience. All the cocks she has sucked as a humble massage parlor employee, she has sucked in the anticipation, in the hope of sucking Bob's cock, into which all the others were subsumed - well, I'd have to work on the dialogue. Cross fade between the two rivers (the Chao Phraya, the Delaware). Closing credits. For the European market, I already had line in mind, along the lines of "If you liked The Music Room, you'll love The Massage Room.

Wal-Mart can't seem to grasp an essential fact: in 2006, the company has exactly the reputation it has earned. No, we don't give the company adequate credit for low prices. But the broken covenant Sam Walton had with how to treat store employees, the relentless pressure that hollows out companies and dilutes the quality of their products, the bullying of suppliers and communities, the corrosive secrecy, the way Wal-Mart has changed our own perception of price and quality, of value and durability--none of these is imaginary, or trivial, or easily changed with a fresh set of bullet points, an impassioned speech, and a website heavy with "Wal-Mart facts". If Wal-Mart does in fact double the gas mileage of its truck fleet, and thereby double the gas mileage of every long-haul truck in America, that will be huge. It will change gas consumption in the United States in a single stroke. But it hasn't happened yet. And even if it does, it will not make Wal-Mart a good company or a good corporate partner or a good corporate citizen.

The Proofs Human society has devised a system of proofs or tests that people must pass before they can participate in many aspects of commercial exchange and social interaction. Until they can prove that they are who they say they are, and until that identity is tied to a record of on-time payments, property ownership, and other forms of trustworthy behavior, they are often excluded—from getting bank accounts, from accessing credit, from being able to vote, from anything other than prepaid telephone or electricity. It’s why one of the biggest opportunities for this technology to address the problem of global financial inclusion is that it might help people come up with these proofs. In a nutshell, the goal can be defined as proving who I am, what I do, and what I own. Companies and institutions habitually ask questions—about identity, about reputation, and about assets—before engaging with someone as an employee or business partner. A business that’s unable to develop a reliable picture of a person’s identity, reputation, and assets faces uncertainty. Would you hire or loan money to a person about whom you knew nothing? It is riskier to deal with such people, which in turn means they must pay marked-up prices to access all sorts of financial services. They pay higher rates on a loan or are forced by a pawnshop to accept a steep discount on their pawned belongings in return for credit. Unable to get bank accounts or credit cards, they cash checks at a steep discount from the face value, pay high fees on money orders, and pay cash for everything while the rest of us enjoy twenty-five days interest free on our credit cards. It’s expensive to be poor, which means it’s a self-perpetuating state of being. Sometimes the service providers’ caution is dictated by regulation or compliance rules more than the unwillingness of the banker or trader to enter a deal—in the United States and other developed countries, banks are required to hold more capital against loans deemed to be of poor quality, for example. But many other times the driving factor is just fear of the unknown. Either way, anything that adds transparency to the multi-faceted picture of people’s lives should help institutions lower the cost of financing and insuring them.

Shareholders have a residual claim on a firm’s assets and earnings, meaning they get what’s left after all other claimants—employees and their pension funds, suppliers, tax-collecting governments, debt holders, and preferred shareholders (if any exist)—are paid. The value of their shares, therefore, is the discounted value of all future cash flows minus those payments. Since the future is unknowable, potential shareholders must estimate what that cash flow will be; their collective expectations about the future determine the stock price. Any shareholders who expect that the discounted value of future equity earnings of the company will be less than the current price will sell their stock. Any potential shareholders who expect that the discounted future value will exceed the current price will buy stock. This means that shareholder value has almost nothing to do with the present. Indeed, present earnings tend to be a small fraction of the value of common shares. Over the past decade, the average yearly price-earnings multiple for the S&P 500 has been 22x, meaning that current earnings represent less than 5 percent of stock prices.

The experience of stress has three components. The first is the event, physical or emotional, that the organism interprets as threatening. This is the stress stimulus, also called the stressor. The second element is the processing system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor. In the case of human beings, this processing system is the nervous system, in particular the brain. The final constituent is the stress response, which consists of the various physiological and behavioural adjustments made as a reaction to a perceived threat. We see immediately that the definition of a stressor depends on the processing system that assigns meaning to it. The shock of an earthquake is a direct threat to many organisms, though not to a bacterium. The loss of a job is more acutely stressful to a salaried employee whose family lives month to month than to an executive who receives a golden handshake. Equally important is the personality and current psychological state of the individual on whom the stressor is acting. The executive whose financial security is assured when he is terminated may still experience severe stress if his self-esteem and sense of purpose were completely bound up with his position in the company, compared with a colleague who finds greater value in family, social interests or spiritual pursuits. The loss of employment will be perceived as a major threat by the one, while the other may see it as an opportunity. There is no uniform and universal relationship between a stressor and the stress response. Each stress event is singular and is experienced in the present, but it also has its resonance from the past. The intensity of the stress experience and its long-term consequences depend on many factors unique to each individual. What defines stress for each of us is a matter of personal disposition and, even more, of personal history. Selye discovered that the biology of stress predominantly affected three types of tissues or organs in the body: in the hormonal system, visible changes occurred in the adrenal glands; in the immune system, stress affected the spleen, the thymus and the lymph glands; and the intestinal lining of the digestive system. Rats autopsied after stress had enlarged adrenals, shrunken lymph organs and ulcerated intestines.

My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . . on you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing--castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of teh mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting--"passengers will now reclaim their seats" and much as you'd like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it's no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it's the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight...as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity--but there is meanwhile this trip to be on ... over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: "Once, only once..." One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle--that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekule, have taken the Serpent to mean.

Effective leadership begins with having the right mind-set; in particular, it begins with having an ownership mind-set. This means a willingness to put oneself in the shoes of a decision maker and think through all of the considerations that the decision maker must factor into his or her thinking and actions. Having an ownership mind-set is essential to developing into an effective leader. By the same token, the absence of an ownership mind-set often explains why certain people with great promise ultimately fail to reach their leadership potential. An ownership mind-set involves three essential elements, which I will put in the form of questions: •  Can you figure out what you believe, as if you were an owner? •  Can you act on those beliefs? •  Do you act in a way that adds value to someone else: a customer, a client, a colleague, or a community? Do you take responsibility for the positive and negative impact of your actions on others? These elements are not a function of your formal position in an organization. They are not a function of title, power, or wealth, although these factors can certainly be helpful in enabling you to act like an owner. These elements are about what you do. They are about taking ownership of your convictions, actions, and impact on others. In my experience, great organizations are made up of executives who focus specifically on these elements and work to empower their employees to think and act in this way.

Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either. Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers--obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

Yet just eighty years ago it still seemed an impossible mission when U.S. President Herbert Hoover was tasked with beating back the Great Depression with only a mixed bag of numbers, ranging from share values to the price of iron to the volume of road transport. Even his most important metric – the “blast-furnace index” – was little more than an unwieldy construct that attempted to pin down production levels in the steel industry. If you had asked Hoover how “the economy” was doing, he would have given you a puzzled look. Not only because this wasn’t among the numbers in his bag, but because he would have had no notion of our modern understanding of the word “economy.” “Economy” isn’t really a thing, after all – it’s an idea, and that idea had yet to be invented. In 1931, Congress called together the country’s leading statisticians and found them unable to answer even the most basic questions about the state of the nation. That something was fundamentally wrong seemed evident, but their last reliable figures dated from 1929. It was obvious that the homeless population was growing and that companies were going bankrupt left and right, but as to the actual extent of the problem, nobody knew. A few months earlier, President Hoover had dispatched a number of Commerce Department employees around the country to report on the situation. They returned with mainly anecdotal evidence that aligned with Hoover’s own belief that economic recovery was just around the bend. Congress wasn’t reassured, however. In 1932, it appointed a brilliant young Russian professor by the name of Simon Kuznets to answer a simple question: How much stuff can we make? Over the next few years, Kuznets laid the foundations of what would later become the GDP. His

Most exciting, the growth mindset can be taught to managers. Heslin and his colleagues conducted a brief workshop based on well-established psychological principles. (By the way, with a few changes, it could just as easily be used to promote a growth mindset in teachers or coaches.) The workshop starts off with a video and a scientific article about how the brain changes with learning. As with our “Brainology” workshop (described in chapter 8), it’s always compelling for people to understand how dynamic the brain is and how it changes with learning. The article goes on to talk about how change is possible throughout life and how people can develop their abilities at most tasks with coaching and practice. Although managers, of course, want to find the right person for a job, the exactly right person doesn’t always come along. However, training and experience can often draw out and develop the qualities required for successful performance. The workshop then takes managers through a series of exercises in which a) they consider why it’s important to understand that people can develop their abilities, b) they think of areas in which they once had low ability but now perform well, c) they write to a struggling protégé about how his or her abilities can be developed, and d) they recall times they have seen people learn to do things they never thought these people could do. In each case, they reflect upon why and how change takes place. After the workshop, there was a rapid change in how readily the participating managers detected improvement in employee performance, in how willing they were to coach a poor performer, and in the quantity and quality of their coaching suggestions. What’s more, these changes persisted over the six-week period in which they were followed up. What does this mean? First, it means that our best bet is not simply to hire the most talented managers we can find and turn them loose, but to look for managers who also embody a growth mindset: a zest for teaching and learning, an openness to giving and receiving feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles. It also means we need to train leaders, managers, and employees to believe in growth, in addition to training them in the specifics of effective communication and mentoring. Indeed, a growth mindset workshop might be a good first step in any major training program. Finally, it means creating a growth-mindset environment in which people can thrive. This involves: • Presenting skills as learnable • Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready-made genius or talent • Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success • Presenting managers as resources for learning Without a belief in human development, many corporate training programs become exercises of limited value. With a belief in development, such programs give meaning to the term “human resources” and become a means of tapping enormous potential.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.