May 11, 2025 • 54 mins
Welcome to part two of our enlightening series with special guest, Gary Hamel. In this episode, we dive deep into Hamel's insights from his book and explore the evolution of unconventional management models through case studies of pioneering companies like W.L. Gore & Associates and Google. We discuss the principles that distinguish innovative organizations, the challenges of breaking free from traditional hierarchical structures, and the critical role of purpose in driving change. With real-life examples and practical advice, this conversation is a must-watch for anyone interested in future-proofing their organization and reigniting the human spirit at work.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome Back
00:39 Exploring Gore's Unique Management Structure
04:13 Leadership and Followership at Gore
06:26 Commitments vs Assignments at Gore
08:07 Innovation and Collaboration at Gore
20:13 Google's Evolution and Challenges
26:25 Management Innovation: A Critical Necessity
27:00 A Disenchanted View of Google
28:17 The Importance of Lateral Communication
29:51 Utilizing Technology for Collective Intelligence
33:18 Challenging Organizational Orthodoxy
47:20 The Role of Purpose in Driving Change
52:39 Concluding Thoughts on Management Reinvention
The Future of Management, Gary Hamel, Management Innovation, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Collaboration, Gore, Bill Gore, Gore-Tex, Decentralized Management, Employee Empowerment, Hierarchy, Organizational Design, Innovative Companies, Workplace Culture, Management Practices, Leadership Development, Decision-Making, Peer Evaluation, Team Dynamics
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to part two of thisbrilliant book in this brilliant
series with our guest, Gary Hamel.
You're very welcome back.
Glad to be back.
We're getting awesome feedback, man.
And I don't know if people can seeon the shelves there we're getting
on through the tome of work andGary's in the midst of another, yet
another HBO article that may be.
(00:21):
Out by the time we publish this episode,but I wanted to pull out a few threads.
I, really said the last day wouldn't gonear the case studies, but I can't resist.
So I'm gonna just pull a fewthreads at the case studies because.
These are companies that have advancedbut still hold true to their original DNA.
And the first was Gore, and I thoughtI'd set you up, Gary, to tell us a
(00:44):
little bit about your findings of Gorewith the following little excerpt from
the book, which is, there were a lotof questions to answer when Bill Gore.
And his wife went to create a new DNAfor a company, new management structure.
They asked questions like, couldyou build a company with no
hierarchy, where everyone was freeto talk and with everyone else?
(01:06):
How about a company where therewere no bosses, no supervisors,
and no vice presidents?
Could you let people choose whatthey wanted to work on rather
than assigning them tasks?
Could you create a company withno core business where people.
Would put as much energy intofinding the next big thing as they
did into milking the last big thing.
(01:27):
And could you do all of thiswhile still delivering consistent
growth and profitability?
Many people will say of their companies,they are, they're not possible.
They're not mutually exclusive.
It's a zero sum game.
But Gary discovered that it is possiblenot only with his own clients like Haier,
but with Bill Gore and Co back in the day.
(01:50):
Yeah, I think probably Gore was oneof the first companies that really
attracted a lot of attention frompeople around the world who were
saying, Hey, is there another way tomanage a large complex organization?
Obviously, most of , our viewers, ourlisteners will know gore from Gore-Tex,
but they make about a thousand productsincluding medical products that are
(02:15):
used inside the body, particularkinds of fibers and so on for stents.
They make fabric that goes intothe spacesuits of astronauts.
And it all started with a fairly simpletechnology where Bill Gore then working
at DuPont, thought we could use this ina more creative way than DuPont was doing
(02:35):
and said, let me build a company, butI don't want to build a usual company.
And by the way, we'll see thistheme over and over again.
Aidan that most of these kind ofpost bureaucratic pioneers were
created by people who didn'thave management experience.
And by the way, that, that could mean thatthings could have gone horribly wrong.
But once in a while, it means youhave the chance to do something
(02:55):
quite new and unexpected.
And that's the case in Gore.
Now all of these companies the,any management model bureaucracy or
human ocracy, whatever it may be,they are inherently fragile, right?
I mean, they're entropy existsin our world and without a lot of
diligence and a lot of thought thesethings can collapse and and , every
(03:17):
system has potential vulnerabilities.
And of course, the goalis not simply to replace.
The vulnerabilities of bureaucracy beingvulnerable to power, moving too much
at the top and too little innovationand unins uninspired employees.
The goal is not to just replicatea different set of of kind of
(03:37):
vulnerabilities or disadvantagesin a anti bureaucratic structure.
And that's that's easy to do is to endup with something that's ill disciplined
or chaotic or not very efficient.
So all of this.
In any organization, you areconstantly walking a tightrope between
different ways, things that can gowrong, and so I never wanna make it.
Sound like one of one of these companieshas invented the perfect management model
(04:01):
and it's like, set and forget and it'sjust gonna produce these amazing results.
Always you are managing a set oftensions to keep things in, in line
and on kind of the straight and narrow.
But let me start with, hasbeen written about them.
I don't know if there's , as if they'regrowing or as vibrant as they once were.
(04:21):
They're privately held companies, sothat's a little bit difficult to know.
But I spent quite a bit of time atGore talking to people, just trying to
understand the gestalt of the place.
And, and Aiden, one of the, oneof the really interesting first
experiences they put me in this room.
I, I would guess about 10 or 12 peoplefrom Gore that were there to just let me
interview them and have a conversation.
(04:43):
And now usually in those meetings,I can pretty quickly suss out.
Like, who's really in control.
, And then I will just likeshamelessly suck up, right?
Like I, whatever they speak, I likelisten intently and so on and so on.
And it was disconcerting'cause I had no idea like who
was important and who wasn't.
There was no apparent deference.
(05:03):
And and so as these people were handingme their business cards, I did notice
that on a couple of these businesscards that had the word leader.
It didn't say, vice president justsaid like somebody's name and leader.
I asked the group, I said like,how do you become a leader at Gore?
They said, well, like yourcolleagues ask you to lead them.
(05:25):
I mean, quite literally.
And when that happens enough, youcan put this title on you, but like,
nobody appoints you as a leader.
And the designation of leader comes whenpeople think you're worth following.
And so a lot of the conversationsat Gore were about how do you, how
do you build genuine followership?
But, but then I asked, so I asked likehow do, how do you become a leader?
(05:49):
And some person said, well, if youcall a meeting and other people
show up, like that's a good sign.
Like you're probably on the right trackbecause nobody has to go to meetings.
And so that was one of thefirst kind of oddities , that
I, you noticed there is that.
You're not a leader because somebody failsto distinguish the word vice president
(06:10):
from leader and says, this is our leader.
You're not a leader.
You're a leader because peoplegenerally think you have ideas and
you know how to mobilize peopleand you know how to organize
things, and they wanna follow you.
The second kind of very interestingthing is they made a big distinction.
commitments versus assignments.
And of course in most organizations, ifyou're sitting somewhere in the middle,
(06:32):
you get an assignment and you oftendon't have a lot of choice in that.
And at Gore they, , the companiesrun in relatively small businesses.
A couple hundred employees is themaximum size and they'll split it up.
They do that.
So everybody believes their voice matters.
All of your colleagues or most ofthem, you can easily go to anybody
on that team cross-function.
(06:53):
So they want that.
That very strong sense ofcommunity is important to them.
But within that, and so basicallyeverybody understands the business, right?
It's small.
You're interacting with other functions.
I. you have a line of sight to everything.
So people pretty much know, Hey, here'sour priorities, here's what needs to be
done, and here's what the challenges are.
(07:14):
And so people commit to eachother to get things done.
And so at any point in time an associatewill have a list of, here's some of my
priorities, here's what I'm working on.
But those never come from a manager.
It comes from the teams talking about.
Well, like, this seems to be important.
We need to grow our sales over here.
We need somebody to take onbuilding this new channel.
(07:34):
Like, Susan, will you do this?
And she says like, yeah.
Okay.
And again, the philosophybehind this is commitment is
highly correlated with choice.
And if you don't give peoplechoice you can get compliance, but
you're not gonna get commitment.
And so that is a deep, deep principle.
And also that everycommitment is voluntary.
(07:54):
You can say no, there's little penaltyto saying no to something now if
you do it continuously, but , inthe moment, there's not, and what's
interesting , about the culture?
Every CEOI meet, pretty much, two of thethings they would all like to see more
of is collaboration and entrepreneurship.
So they want more lateral connection,more ideas flowing and so on.
(08:19):
And they also want people to takemore initiative and it's very
interesting that , the Gore model.
Drives exactly those two behaviors.
I think we talked about in our previousepisode, so I won't go , do go too deep
now about their performance managementsystem and their compensation system where
everybody gets rated by a group of peers.
(08:39):
And on the question like, howmuch value did you add this year?
And it's not like someelaborate HR kind of nonsense.
It's a simple question like, howmuch value did Gary add versus
all the other people in our team.
And that kind of drives,drives your compensation.
So if you think about that,all commitments are voluntary.
And yet I know that at theend of the year, my peers are
(09:00):
gonna rate my performance.
So the behaviors that creates is firstof all I don't have a set of KPIs.
I don't, it's not like in,in so many organizations.
And I think this is so toxic.
Aiden and an employee negotiates a setof targets or is given a set of targets
from their boss, the idea is if I justmeet those, I expect to be rewarded.
(09:21):
Like, check, check.
I did all these things.
That's what we agree.
That was my kind of implicitcontract and I should get rewarded.
That doesn't happen at Gore.
There's no kind of top down KPIs, sowhat people are asking, they know at
the end of the year the question'sgonna be, how much value did Gary add?
All year long, Gary is thinkingto himself, is there something
else I could be doing that'sgonna make a bigger impact?
(09:44):
So people are not trying tomeet a static, top down goal.
They're paying attention to theenvironment, they're paying attention
to what's going on in the business,and they're asking themselves is
given my skillset, is there somewherewhere I can have a bigger impact?
And if so, that's where I need to migrate.
So that's a very, I think,positive and powerful incentive.
(10:05):
Now at the same time as I said, I cansay no to requests, but I have this
little dialogue inside of my head.
If somebody comes and says, Hey,Gary, we go back to my example.
There's this new channel.
We should have a presence here.
We don't have anybody liketo go out and build that.
Will you do it?
I can say, no, there's no compulsion.
No, nobody can give me an order.
(10:27):
But again, I know at the end of theyear, my peers are gonna look at me.
And so you have these two really positive.
Motivations.
One is to say yes and to be helpful, andfrankly, to take on more rather than less.
So even though there are no topdown orders or commands, you're not
gonna find any slackers at gore.
But simultaneously people are proactivelythinking all the time, not, how do I
(10:52):
satisfy my boss and tick a box, how doI align my skills with things that will
make a substantial business difference?
, That's just like gold if you'reinside of an organization and
you can get that to happen.
So those are some of the real coresthat I think distinguished score.
We, I think we mentioned before there.
Their emphasis on kind of innovation.
(11:13):
They've been at different times.
They've been called the mostinnovative company in the world.
I think a fast company once gave them fastCompany Magazine gave them that title.
Are they still that way?
I don't know.
But it's clear they believethat innovation comes from
the bottom, not the top.
At any time you'll find hundreds of peoplethere working on dabble time projects.
(11:35):
Everybody has a certain amount oftime they can work on anything that's
interesting to them, and that's wheremost of the innovations come from.
So again will this work in everyindustry, in every context?
I don't know.
But when you look at it, youcertainly see some things.
That are important deemphasizing hierarchycontinually reinforcing the belief
(11:57):
that innovation can come from anywhere.
And they have all of their internalmythology, their stories about this.
A guy who is using a particularGore product a keen mountain
biker coded the cables on hismountain bike to, to repel dirt.
And very successfully said, Hey, maybewe could use this for guitar strings.
Well, there's a kind of strangeconnection and turns out you could.
(12:18):
And so they end up producing one of theworld's most successful guitar strings.
So you continually reinforcethat with stories like that.
everybody has aresponsibility to innovate.
They co-locate factories closetogether rather than going to the
cheapest location in the world.
They believe that the rapiddiffusion connection of ideas
(12:43):
is important to innovation.
they'll build clusters of plants thatare making and some might be doing
industrial things, something might bedoing medical things, but they locate
those plants together because they wantall this cross-fertilization going on.
So I think that's anotherpart of that model.
If you do have an idea that's interestingto you, there's very little approval.
The real approval is can you findsome people to give you their
(13:07):
dabble time to work on your idea?
And if nobody wants to volunteer tohelp you, probably not a good idea.
So, I think it's a wonderful modelfilled with wonderful principles.
And the, when I was with them,now this is a couple decades ago,
I think they were about three, 3billion yeah, about $3 billion in
(13:27):
revenue, about 10,000 associates.
So sizable business and in somehighly regulated industries.
But.
Management Renegade witha lot to learn from them.
So if any listener, reader, likeget on the web there, a lot of
cases have written about Gore.
Some may be older, but they'refilled with kind of wisdom and I
would really go check that out.
(13:48):
Great memory, man.
You covered lots of that chapter there.
There was one thing Ifound really interesting.
And, and like you, and you've writtenabout this DNA and nature and how
nature mirrors organizations, eventhe structure of an organization
can look essentially like the nonhierarchy of the worldwide web.
One of the things I discovered was ants.
(14:08):
Certain species of ants will havean ant that's almost like a stem
cell that will change role asit goes through its lifecycle.
And I loved what you said about gore.
You said people havesponsors instead of bosses.
And I thought here about howdetrimental or productive it can be.
For you with your firstexperience of your first boss.
(14:29):
So if you went into Gore and then leftand went to a traditional organization,
you'd really, really struggle.
And this little excerpt.
I'd love you to expand upon, you said,new recruits are hired into broad roles
as HR generalists, business developmentleaders, or r and d engineers, rather
than into narrowly defined jobs.
And to help newcomers navigate theorganization and find their niche,
(14:53):
each is assigned a starting sponsor.
The sponsor's not your boss.
The sponsor is somebody who's, who'sactually responsible for trying to find
the best fit between your capabilitiesand the needs of the organization.
And so often now.
Occasionally people do get hiredinto very specific roles, but often
it's not, they see somebody as a setof technical abilities or marketing
(15:16):
abilities that I that this person'sclearly world class could be useful to us.
And so again, one, I, I had this earlyin my career, I'm sure other people
have if, if you report to a boss whodoesn't really appreciate your talents
or, or, or is working on something thatyou're simply not, like, you just feel
like completely stuck that your life is.
Under the control of this boss whoprobably doesn't wanna give you up and
(15:40):
but, but, but the, the, the sponsoris somebody says, like, Gary, you,
I know you're doing a great job andthey love you, but I think you should
go check this thing out over here.
So they're looking out for you andlooking out for the organization, right?
They're trying to find.
A role where you're, the marginalreturn on your talents is the highest.
Rather than just get stuck somewhere.
And , so a new employee, at least atthe time I was doing this research.
(16:04):
Would often audition inseveral different teams.
They'd be there for two or three or fourweeks and the team had to say, yeah,
this, like, Gary's great, we'd really likeGary to be part of our team, or, or not.
And again, back to, I talked about thatexample Whole Foods, I, it's like, to
me it's like so essential to have anorganization where your peers choose you.
(16:24):
Right?
Many, many decades ago when Iinterviewed at the London Business
School and a few other schools.
The choice of hiring meis not made by some dean
somewhere, , or the, the principal.
The choice was made by mypeers a majority of them.
Now, they still wanna hire me 40years later, you have to ask them,
but at the time, a majority said,yeah, Gary would be a good addition.
(16:46):
And you find the same thing at , at Gore.
It can be so detrimental.
And if you're a truth speaker, ifyou speak truth to power or you
call out the inefficiency of anorganization, you can just be turfed
out and even what you said there was.
For example, you're in a team.
You call out these problems andyour boss is, becomes a ceiling,
(17:08):
and then your choice is, well,I've got these golden handcuffs.
I better shut my mouth here andput my brain in my drawer and
just do what everybody does.
And then you wonder why theorganization's not innovative.
I think there's a bigpoint there too, Aidan
that kind of multilayertop down power structure.
I. That creates these large asymmetriesin, in, in form of power, I just
(17:34):
think has so many negative sideeffects that we typically just ignore.
And you just mentioned one, right?
It's very hard.
If I'm sitting on a team at Gore,and this was also, at least when I
did my research at Google's througha Google, you, if you'll find there
where there's very little, there arevery few stat status differentiators.
Very little hierarchy.
There's a lot of hierarchynow in Google, by the way.
(17:54):
But at the time.
People are quite free to just like argueand have a different opinion and say
like, no, I don't think that's true.
But if you're in a meeting wheresomebody else is controlling your
career, the ability to dissent orargue or be honest, just like people
start to self edit like crazy.
I think , that's one thing.
The second thing which you werementioning a little bit of gore.
(18:17):
You start to have people who are justdoing what the manager asked them,
rather than maximizing their potentialimpact because that they're in that power
relationship with that particular person.
You also find, we've talked aboutthis, that then so much of the
energy becomes about climbing upthat pyramid rather than simply doing
the best thing or creating value.
So I have somewhere a longlist of these things, but we
(18:40):
just take those multi-layeredpower structures for granted.
But.
And most of us, we don't wannalive in an organization where you
just feel perpetually like you'repowerless, at least with respect to,
to your boss, the people around you.
But you know, many people,that's how they feel at work.
And man, what awful way to live.
(19:03):
And it's exhausting.
It's so exhausting.
It's like masking, if you'reneurodivergent masking and
how much energy that uses up.
I feel so sorry for, and I didwork in organizations like that.
I just couldn't drink the Kool-Aid.
I had to leave, but I feltso sorry for people who were.
Really good people, really greatideas, but just had to stay or felt
(19:23):
they had to compelled to stay becauseof those golden handcuffs again.
But I know Google, youmentioned it has changed a lot.
Even, for example, here in Ireland,we have a huge Google facility.
I. And it's massive now.
And you, you said, and I thought this agedquite well, you said the jury is still
out on whether Google's founders willsucceed in their quest to build a company
(19:45):
that can outrun the future as of writing.
So again, two decades ago, Google stillderives nearly a hundred percent of
its revenue from ad supported search.
With a few non-search products have,having made strong showings, Gmail,
Google News, and Google Maps forinstance, many others have received
a lukewarm reception from users.
(20:05):
They have managed to get afew new products out there.
Google Cloud being one that's huge forthem, and I thought that aged very well.
But I'm using it as a segue totalk a little bit about Google.
Yeah, well again, I haven't been closeto Google in a long time, but what,
what I think you see there though alittle bit what I said earlier, you
(20:27):
see people like, like Sergey Brin andLarry Page, the founders co-founders.
Who very much understood theenvironment that created Google, right?
Because in Silicon Valley, forevery Google, there's a hundred or a
thousand companies that never becamethat successful or successful at all.
And so they understand there's this,like, this ecosystem here where
(20:50):
you have to try a lot of things andnot all of them are gonna succeed.
And one of the, one of the folks Italked to early on then when I was
doing my research was Marissa Meyer,super smart woman, Stanford graduate
employee number 20 at at at Google.
Went on for somewhat ill-fatedrun at Yahoo as a CEO there.
I dunno what she's done since she had thesame spirit of we're gonna launch a lot
(21:17):
of things and most of 'em are gonna fail.
You find the same thing atAmazon where Jeff Bezos says.
If you call it an experiment,it means it's more likely
to fail than succeed, right?
It's not a pilot, it's an experiment,and we're gonna do thousands of them.
So they had that ethos, and I thinkit came out of that understanding
about just the ecology of innovation.
And you have to kiss a lot of frogsto find your prince or princess.
(21:40):
But again, when you have asuccess as, as large and as
singular as Google search became.
It's very hard to preserve thatspirit when everybody is just
like trying to grow the core asfast as possible, feed that beast.
I talked about something similarat Hewlett Packard when they became
(22:01):
lords of the printer business.
That kind of sucked all the innovationout of the rest of the company.
So it's super hard.
You, can start with.
With the right intentions, but it'ssuper hard to keep that as you scale up
and if you're not , very mindful of it.
, I think I mentioned we, I might mentionit again, , so forgive me, but I, I
(22:22):
think it was about 15 months , or so ago
mark Zuckerberg , at Meta at Facebook.
Was, he could see how thecompany become very bureaucratic,
10 or 11 management layers.
And he made this point, he said, youdon't want a company where you have
managers, managing managers, managingmanagers, managing managers, managing
the people who are doing the work.
I was like, yeah, no, that's a bad idea.
(22:44):
But what was very interesting issomething else he said a few years
earlier, about a decade earlier.
Where he admitted, he said,I know we're constantly at
risk from big company disease.
Maybe he didn't use that phrase, but hesaid most companies, they get big, like
they lose their mojo, and he said, Idon't think it's gonna happen at Facebook.
because we talk so much movingfast and breaking things.
(23:06):
I think there's enormous,naivety in that statement.
In that if we just keep talking aboutthese things, right then somehow they
will be embedded in the organization.
They're not, I. What gets embedded isthe systems, the processes, and so on.
(23:26):
And so unless you are super explicitabout thinking about what kind of
compensation structure what kind ofinternal network, lateral linkages how
how are we going to distribute power, whogets it, and under what circumstances?
Unless you're thinking like super,super thoughtfully about those things.
(23:48):
You just end up being overtaken bybureaucracy because it's a default
setting so you don't it's talking aboutrhetoric and culture and exhortation
not gonna protect you from those things.
You have to be super explicit about it.
And I think that's probablywhere Google missed it.
I think they had the rightimpulses, the right instincts.
And some of it for surestill exist there, but
(24:13):
they probably mistook talking aboutit for actually really thinking hard
about what kind of architecture,systems, processes will make this
capability of being fast and innovative,something that's truly in our DNA.
As opposed to a distant memory thatwe bring out once in a while to
(24:34):
remind ourselves what we used to be.
I mean,, I saw something similar when,when Carly Fiorina, who had ultimately
run for president in the United States.
I think when she was CEO , atHP at Packer, he'd come
from a telecommunicationsmanufacturer, Lucent, I believe.
But she sent around like
(24:56):
a little document on the rules forthe garage because HP famously was
invented in a garage in Silicon Valley.
And and so this was like lovelyrhetoric, the same kind of thing
be small, be fast, whatever.
But you don't change anything by sendingaround a little memento to the past.
(25:16):
What they never did was like the hardwork of, okay, let's re-engineer our
whole management model in a way thatkind of allows us to do things to
harness those advantages at scale.
The ones we had when we werea few hundred people, rather
than a hundred thousand people.
I. I'm always so disappointed when youhear these stories 'cause it's everywhere.
(25:37):
I mean, working in organizationsand having the courage to actually
go and here's a new product for us.
I believe this is a placewhere the company can win and
then you're punished for that.
Or worst you're jettisoned for that.
It what happens.
A lot of people or you're frustratedoutta the company and as you said, in.
(25:58):
Competence paced competition when wetalked about that, that most companies
are developed by a disgruntledemployee from a different company,
so why not engage those people?
And I just think that's thebiggest cruelty of all of this.
I.
Well it is, but it's, it's just.
It's not inevitable because you, wecan find organizations of large scale
(26:22):
who haven't fallen into those traps.
Not very many, but someof them are out there.
It's not inevitable in some cosmicsense, but it's inevitable if you don't
really take this work of managementinnovation super, super seriously.
Let me share, I just pulled up a quote.
This is a very interesting quote.
From a guy named Praveen Seshadri, I'mmis mispronouncing it, but he was an
(26:45):
entrepreneur who had built an interestingbusiness that he sold to Google.
And he sold it to Google in 2020.
And he stayed on, I think for three years.
But when his retention agreementexpired, he left , this was
what he found in Google in 2020.
He said like mice, like mice,Google's employees are trapped
and a maze of approvals.
(27:06):
Launch processes, legal reviews,performance reviews, exec reviews,
documents, meetings, bug reports, triage,OKRs H one plans followed by H two
plans, all hands summits and in Venable.
Reorgs, he said Very few googs.
Come to work thinking theyserve a customer or a user.
It's a closed world where almosteveryone is working for other
(27:28):
Googlers, and the feedback loopis based on what your colleagues
and managers think of your work.
Hmm.
know, I don't know if that's true maybehe was just disenchanted or frustrated
or wanted a crap on them on the way outthe door, like all that others like, but.
But it doesn't sound unusual to me forwhat you'd see in a large organization.
(27:51):
And I wanted to pull somethingthat they had strived for because.
This is the problem is that as you go upthat S-curve, you become more like , that
quote, rather than actually what youtalked about and what you had found there.
When you interviewed people in Google,you talked about their desire to have
a continuous company-wide conversation.
(28:12):
So I'd love you to share withabout this, regardless of Google.
I'll use Google and thequote here to get us started.
But you said in hierarchical companies,communication pathways are primarily
ver vertical rather than horizontal.
And information systems are built firstand foremost to move data from the front
lines to the top level decision makers.
Google's executives don't lackfor data yet the lateral flow of
(28:36):
communication within the company iseven denser than the vertical flow.
This is no accident Google.
Has invested heavily in building ahighly networked organization that
makes it easy for employer employeesto share ideas, poll peers, recruit
volunteers, and build constituenciesfor change, all of which require a
lot more than a good email system.
(28:58):
And you talked about some of thesystems that they had in place there.
I know you've worked massively withHaier to implement some of this.
We'll talk about that againlater, in Humanocracy.. But for
a Google perspective, what didyou find then compared to what
you found with that quote today?
Well, of course, I don't know what existstoday, but I think Aiden, the critical
(29:24):
thing is not just whether you havelateral technology and lateral systems.
Most organizations today, they have slack.
they may have some kind of idea marketsthey have chat functions across the
company, so, you can reach anybody in thecompany probably fairly easily and so on.
(29:44):
So I think at the time Google wasinvesting in that probably ahead of a
lot of competitors today, I think mostorganizations have something like that.
Probably the deeper question is,what do you think that thing is for.
What do you use that technology for?
And a lot of it is just a search function.
People are saying, Hey, is there anybodyout there who can help me with X?
So you're trying to find aparticular kind of expertise.
(30:06):
It's often used to problemsolve, Hey, I've run up against
something who can help me?
Who can help me with this?
It can be a bitch session where.
There's maybe a lot ofwhining and so on going on.
And then a huge amount of it today isjust using project work where you got a
team of people maybe co-located aroundthe world and they're just constantly
on Slack or something else, and that'sjust the way the work gets done.
(30:29):
So the questions, are you actuallyusing that in a discipline way?
To track what's changingin the world, right?
You, think of how easy it is todayto tag something and how you can
share things and you can, I, Ithink they call it taxonomy, right?
Where you can people tag things and thisis interesting, and then it becomes viral.
(30:51):
You think about a large organization,we have people around the world
often the people at the centerdon't know what's going on.
having a system where somebody atthe others says, say, I saw a new
release from a competitor in China.
This is what it is, and they tagit and then that's available.
Every employee acrossthe world can see that.
So you build a collective intelligencesystem that can monitor the entire world,
(31:13):
where everybody can see what's happening,where you can put that picture together.
There are ways of doing that today thatyou couldn't have done 20 years ago Now.
How many companies have that?
I don't know.
Not very many.
Probably similarly todaywe can do open strategy.
We've talked about this before.
I won't go here deep now, but Google hadsome processes , led by the CEO and others
where you'd bring young people in andyou'd have these really robust debates
(31:36):
about what else should we be doing?
They would occasionally kindof crowdsource big questions
down to the organization.
One of 'em at one point was like.
How do we catalog and givepeople access to uploaded video.
I, that was probablybefore YouTube was a thing.
I don't know.
But, and so, they were trying to engagethe periphery of the organization, the
core and these kind of conversations.
(31:58):
But at some point, if you're doing that.
With old technology, yousimply can't scale that, right?
It's like you, youcan't get enough people.
But we have a lot of experience ofdoing that at scale and bringing tens
of thousands of people together andgetting the best ideas to the fore.
So it's not, the technology isusually not the limiting factor here.
I. The limiting factor is either asenior group that's not very curious
(32:21):
or one that wants to hold onto theirpower and doesn't want to admit that
there are a lot of people out therewho may have better ideas than they do.
Or who frankly just don't know how youuse online tools to do things at scale.
Variety of reasons, but yeah, the toolsare not really it's the spirit behind
(32:41):
them and this idea we have to have.
The best insights from the best peoplewherever they are, and we need to
make sure those are getting to thefore that other people can corroborate
or not based on their own evidence.
The things that we see collectivelyas emerging and gaining speed.
We need to be able topay attention to those.
We need to be able to interrogatethe entire organization.
(33:01):
What do we do about that?
What, how do we turnthis into an opportunity?
It's just like shocking tome that so few organizations.
Yet are using the tools in that way.
'cause you clearly can.
You then move to solution mode andyou highlight a couple of things.
And I thought was really interesting whereyou talked about the limits of language
(33:22):
and how innovation or reinvention needsnew language, and it reminded me of that
Wittgenstein quote, the limits of mylanguage mean the limits of my world.
And what you said was even ourlanguages held hostage by our paradigms.
Consider, for example, how thoroughly thenotion of hierarchy has infiltrated the
lexicon of management, chain of command.
(33:44):
Pyramid, boss, subordinate, directreports, organizational levels,
top down, bottom up, cascade.
All these terms connote a formalscale of power and authority.
Indeed, managers have as many waysof talking about hierarchy as Eskimos
have about talking about snow.
Yeah, I think and obviously the language.
(34:07):
Is just a reflection of theunderlying kind of architecture
belief system that we have.
And I think I, I spend an entire chapterin this book basically saying and we
talked about this a little bit withrespect to maybe orthodoxy or dogma
with respect to products and technology.
But it's equally important when youthink about how we manage right there.
(34:29):
I, I just hear over and over again, Ihear people say things in organizations.
As if, like aphorisms and , they take asif like they're, they, they're written on
commandments like in stone somewhere, andthat they exist independent of just the
way we chose to build our organizations.
(34:49):
I think one, one of the examplesI took, and we did this as an
experiment in, in a bunch oforganizations , where I'd ask people.
What, what are the 10 things you believemost deeply about, let's say change,
or you could say strategy, you couldsay employee motivation or something.
And by the way, this is a really, interesting exercise to do , and
maybe an important one to do.
Ask your colleagues, okay, picksome important topic and ask them
(35:10):
like, what are the things youbelieve most deeply about this?
So when we'd ask this about change,the typical kinds of things that would
come up is somebody would say, well,it typically takes a crisis to provoke.
Like real deep change.
Okay.
Or you need a strongleader to drive change.
Okay.
Or change starts at the topand you go like, well, okay.
(35:31):
All of those things are true in the sensethat they accord , with our reality.
Yeah.
Most organizations don't change untilthey've had a long period of substandard
performance, a crisis of some sort, andthen you do a strategy reboot often.
The only way to get deep change is youbring in a strong leader, a new leader
who has no loyalty to the past and feelsfree to like, do really hard things.
(35:56):
And yet it, it tends we thinkthat until the guys at the top
get it, nothing else can be done.
And then you go like, okay.
None of those things are truein any absolute sense, right?
They're simply true of hierarchicalorganizations where the power to
initiate change is at the top andwhere there's a lot of learned
helplessness everywhere else.
I. And where there are poor systemsfor understanding how the world
(36:17):
is changing and responding to it.
Yeah.
Then you're gonna end up with a crisis.
Only somebody at the top is gonnabe able to get this thing done.
And so once, you find somethingthat's true, you have to say, is
this inevitably true in every contextforever and in every system, biological,
human, physical that we can imagine?
Or is this just something that we've that.
(36:39):
That we've inherited.
And I think just very seldom, know,are we thoughtful in that way?
And I will tell you one of the thingsI learned, and maybe we'll come back
to this in a different context Aiden,but, and forgive me again if this is
something I've said in another way,but in a world of AI and instantly
accessible knowledge and information,it is impossible to know more.
(37:02):
there's always somebody whohas better information can know
more about any topic than I can.
But the value comes not from knowingmore, but from knowing different.
The value comes from when you canstep outside the dominant paradigm
and go like, why the hell is that?
Is it that way?
one of the examples I have in the book,which is really quite a fun one, it's
an older one, but quite a fun one is 2,researchers at a hospital in Perth, which
(37:27):
literally is like the end of the world.
Were both frustrated.
One I think was a hospital one,one was an internal medicine
guy other one, a pathologist.
And they were frustrated at theirpatients suffering from ulcers.
And of course, the received wisdom amonggastroenterologists were ulcers are the
(37:48):
product of stress and booze and so on.
And these guys just said, really,it's, it is like that all there is.
So they started a culture take culturesoutta the guts of their patients.
And to see if anything wouldgrow in those cultures.
And and the answer was apparently no.
But then over one long weekend oneof these cultures is left unattended
and the guy comes back Barry Marshalland Robin Warren, what are the names?
(38:12):
It comes back over a long weekend andthere's something growing and they
find this little ew shaped bacteria.
So like, could that, that be the culprit?
So these guys like hatch a brewof this and drink it themselves,
and then become quickly be like.
Very unwell and so they said, yeah,this is, and so they started to treat
this in a different way and theycould watch these ulcers disappeared.
(38:35):
Well they went to, to present this ata big conference and they basically got
pulled from the stage, like that theexisting mental models were so out of
sync with what they were found, findingthat people literally, you couldn't see
the data that was just in front of you.
The good news is ultimately thischanges the practice of medicine and
(38:56):
these two guys win the Nobel Prize.
But it just
it tells us how much work I. We have toput in to challenging what we already
believe our own confirmation biases.
And , I always tell people when youhear something that you literally
think , this is crazy, I disagree with,and some of it is like, so obvious, you
(39:19):
can just say, okay, that's like nuts.
But take some time to ask like, underwhat circumstances might this be true?
Or what evidence is here.
But the tendency we all have just as like,well, that doesn't fit with my worldview.
Like, I'm just gonna dismissthat is like so high and so deep.
And that's that's theprimary reason we're stuck.
(39:40):
We're all drinking the samebureaucratic bath water.
We're not drinking the ulcer juice.
I, I was, man, I was telling you beforewe came on air, I went down so many
rabbit holes based on stuff like this.
So I went then reading.
I like, I don't have any extra time toread the patterns of military revolutions,
(40:02):
the book that you mentioned in there,and how about the long bow and how the
technology changes, but that doesn'tchange how you go into war and how when
lives depend on it, we still cling tothese old orthodoxies based on power
and status quo, et cetera, that it'sso pervasive and that's what I, just
want people to listen to this becauseyou don't spot it when it's you.
(40:25):
I mean, that's the problem when it's you.
And, and, and the other thing youhave to ask, and it's hard, is like,
does, does this belief that I'veheld onto for a while, does it
serve my self-interest in some way?
Because that's when you reallyhave to be careful, right?
So if you assume that , I'm in myposition because I'm the smartest person
(40:51):
and I'm the best qualified, and so on.
And that's why we have a hierarchy, thatit's a reflection of who really has the
skills, the expertise, and they get ahead.
Like if you hang on that belief, wellit might be true, but you may believe it
simply because it makes you feel good.
So we have a lot of self-soothingassumptions in our organizations.
, And the higher you are in theorganization, the more likely
(41:13):
to fall prey to those things.
'cause they are, they are beliefsthat reinforce your position,
your privilege, and so on.
So you gotta be.
You gotta be particularly careful whenyou see a belief that, that that makes
you feel good to believe it or makesyou feel more important to believe it.
Those are the ones you have tobe particularly suspicious about.
(41:35):
Gary, there was a table I wanted toshare because you move on to when
you're in solution mode there, butjust a nod of the hat to a couple of
the case studies you cover in there.
There was a, a company calledRite-Solutions and Jim Lavoie,
and what I loved about that casestudy was the language he changed.
So he brought in.
Systems for Innovation.
(41:56):
One he called, he used the marketplacebasically to, in, to change the language
about how people thought about innovation,the spas deck, the Bio Jones and
savings bonds within the organization.
There's a great case study inthere and, and I encourage people
to get the book to read aboutthat, but I wanted to share this
diagram this table that you share inthe book because it's the principles
(42:21):
of modern management and you look atdifferent elements here and maybe we
don't have to go through them all, butmaybe pick and choose at a couple of them
here for, and we'll have a little bit ofempathy for people who are just listening,
which is the majority of the show.
we'll get at this, I think much deeperwhen we talk about human ocracy, and
I'll try to explain a little bit why,if you want to do anything, if you
(42:43):
want to build an organization that'sin any way fundamentally better than
the one you have now, I. You have tostart , with new principles, not new
practices, not new structures, notnew processes, but you have to go
like very deep back to principles.
again, this is kind of part of ourinheritance, a set of principles
that developed in the industrial age.
Again, with the purpose ofproducing very compliant employees
(43:05):
and very efficient organizations.
But principles like specializationyou put like with like in an
organization and you disaggregate jobsinto small, repeatable components.
Standardization that you just put ahigh premium on doing the same things
over and over again on, on perfectreplicability alignment, where you
(43:26):
know, you want everybody with the sametargets pushing in the same direction.
Hierarchy that, you know, theway you manage complexity is you
simply have a hierarchy of managerswith ascending decision rights.
Elaborate systems forplanning and control.
So control is a hugelyimportant principle.
Control over tasks, over budgeting,over resource allocation regularity
(43:49):
and predictability and operations.
And then finally, this belief that we'remostly motivated by extrinsic rewards.
Pay for performance.
None of these things are wrong, right?
Like, none of those are all likereally, really good principles.
And we'll talk about this again, I'm sure.
Collectively though, they createan ideology and that really
(44:11):
has control at its center.
And the dilemma with any ideology isif you're not careful, at some point
it slips the balance of common sense.
Or you just take it pastthe point of like logic.
And I think that's what's happened.
And so my view is you only beatone set of principles by having
a better set of principles.
(44:33):
we'll come back to this, but you haveto understand that those principles of
specialization, standardization, control,goal alignment, they are deeply marbled
into every system and every process.
In fact.
If you look at the processes of mostorganizations, they are built on and
serve those principles, those goals, andtrying to find systems or processes that
serve any other goal or be somethingis like really hard, they simply don't
(44:56):
exist, which is why we end up with thesevery lopsided organizations that are very
good at discipline, control, alignmentand not very good at anything else.
Those principles, they're like DNA, right?
Or they're like, the water youdrink, they're just everywhere.
Mostly unnoticed with nopowerful ideological rivals.
And so they just predominate and ourorganizations therefore, are very
(45:19):
unbalanced and highly capable in someways, and entirely incompetent in others.
When I was looking at them,I, I thought about stuff like,
regardless of the workplace.
We, start this socialization in school.
Parents do it, we do itas parents done it myself.
I'm guilty of some of those thingswhere you're forming the mindset of
(45:42):
this is how it's done in the world.
This is how you operate in the world.
And then we wonder why ourorganizations are like that.
And again, so pervasive.
.People track like creativity and basically it falls off a cliff once you start
school because when your child preschool,whatever, there are no stupid questions.
(46:03):
Dad, why is this sky blue?
Well, let's think about that, right?
But you go to school and there're stupidquestions and there's stupid answers,
and nobody wants to be humiliated.
And I think it's thesame in organizations.
There's this pervasive fear thatthere, if I ask the question that's
a little weird or a little strange,like, somebody's gonna have an
(46:25):
answer and make me look stupid.
And so people do notchallenge these old beliefs.
Like, why do we let managersassess , the performance of employees?
there's a lot of good reasons notto do that, but it can be very
intimidating to ask that question.
'cause you just assume, well,somebody's really thought
this through and No, no, no.
Most of the things that are thereare not very thought through.
(46:46):
And, and if you look atall , these elaborate corporate
processes, we've scoured theliterature, we know the research.
There's almost no corporate process wherea majority of people think it adds value.
And yet we keep like out there likedancing naked around the campfire,
hoping something's gonna happen, right?
again, it's, it goes back to,well, if you are a. Rabble rouser.
(47:08):
If you're the person who thinksdifferently, it doesn't often
end well for the whistleblowerand it's so, so difficult.
I thought I'd share, share one lastdiagram and I'll just highlight one
thing, which is so so important.
And again, even as a parent, I see this,that if your child has a purpose, if
they feel they have a purpose that theyown, they don't wonder, they don't then
(47:30):
do things you don't want them doing.
And you talk about the importance of this.
From change initiatives, you saypeople change for what they care
about in the final analysis.
There are no adaptableorganizations, only adaptable people.
While a company's management processes caneither imp plead or encourage adaptation,
it's the willingness of individualsto change that ultimately matters.
(47:52):
Most books on change start from thepremise that people reflexively resist
change and have to be manipulated,browbeat or cajoled into abandoning
the serenity of the status quo.
Gary has a different view.
He believes most people, mosthuman beings, welcome change for
all our reactionary tendencies.
We are always looking for newexperiences and new challenge, but
(48:15):
purpose is at the heart of that.
Yeah.
Somebody gave me a good analogy oncethey said, Gary, when you talk about the
purpose, it's about like having a son thatpulls the little shoots out of the ground.
Right.
And nourishes them and whatever.
And I think again, there's been alot of talk about purpose over the
(48:37):
last few years and became kind of.
fairly politicized, I think, andit got merged with all the ESG
stuff and stakeholder capitalism.
But, and some of thoseideas have a lot of merit.
But I think I. You put, putting somevague social do-gooder thing on top
(48:58):
of a corporate's purpose is not, Imean, it's something that has to come
from inside and has to be deeply felt.
I I talked about Whole Foods.
I don't know if they still have thatpurpose, but they used to talk about whole
Foods, whole people, and whole planet andso we wanna create foods that like your
grandmother would recognize and are not.
Now I think, what do we call 'em now?
We don't call 'em engineeredfoods, highly processed foods.
(49:18):
Right.
Which we're learning arelike super bad for us.
So, no, no, we're not gonna do that.
We want whole people.
We wanna worry about your nutrition andhow that affects all of your health.
we eat, super powerful drug.
then finally a whole planettake care of the planet.
And they didn't do that kind ofbelatedly as a, so to some outside
(49:39):
pressure group, they did that becauseJohn Mackey co-founder and those early
employees, this is what they believed.
And so, and, and they attractedpeople who cared about that.
And I think.
As we've talked about before, youhave to have a purpose that has enough
stretch in it, that it continues toencourage you to change and do more.
And again, that purpose is not shareholderwealth, and it's not some vague thing
(50:03):
about making the world a better place.
It has to be specific and
yeah.
And the reason I would say thisAidan, is maybe a final thought.
You'll know if your organization hasa purpose, partly by whether they can
articulate it or not, and by the way,whether people can articulate it without
having to go back and look at something.
If you just ask people likewhat are we here to do?
(50:26):
And everybody has the sameanswer, that's a pretty good sign.
The other way you'll know if it'sreal is if you can say, where have
we done something really hard?
Or sacrifice something forthe sake of that purpose.
And that's where you find that mostorganizations, they haven't done that.
They have something that is out theresomewhere often about customers, but
then you find they're only too happyto screw the customer over if so yeah,
(50:50):
I mean, again, you shouldn't haveto say any of this, but again, it's
a testament, but in, in fact, letme go back one little, an anecdote.
Frederick Winslow Tayloroften gets a bad rap.
The father of scientific management and.
Spent a lot of time, as youmight say, de-skilling work, but
also trying to make it better.
He would study for hours, somebodyshoveling coal to understand like,
(51:13):
what's the best way to do this?
But but he thought in a kind of lovelypuritan way, he said, to waste an
hour of human labor is iniquitous.
Like, if you couldn't find a simpler,easier way for human beings to do
something, why wouldn't you do that?
And so we can look at that and maybethere was some self rationalization
(51:35):
going on there, but you can look at itand go like, yeah, this is the guy who
like turned everybody into automatons.
But you can also look at it, say,here's a guy who said like we want
human work to make a differenceand to raise our productivity.
And the fact today that we'reproducing 20, 40, 60 times more
output per hour than we did a centuryago is like un flipping believable.
(51:58):
a lot of his work had adeep purpose behind it.
And today we live in a disenchanted world.
I. Where very few peoplereally have a purpose and very
few people think about it.
'cause why would you think aboutit when you spend all of your
time entertaining yourself todeath with your smartphone, right?
Why think about anything moreimportant or bigger or anything else
because you always have somethingat hand to distract you from hard
(52:20):
questions and metaphysical concerns.
But the end, we end up livingin impoverished lives and
impoverished organizations.
It's massive and we will get to it.
I wanted to share more, but I'mgonna, I'm gonna leave it there.
'cause Gary beautifully finishesthe book and I pulled out a little
excerpt just to tail the book.
'cause we started with this, the bookstarts with the end of management and I,
(52:45):
I pulled a little line just from chapterseven where you said, it turns out we
haven't reached the end of management.
We really can reinvent the way bigcompanies are structured and run.
There isn't any law that preventslarge organizations from being
engaging, innovative, and adaptable,and mostly bureaucracy free.
Even better.
It really is possible to set the humanspirit free at work, so no more excuses.
(53:08):
It's time for you to buckle down andstart inventing the future of management.
Beautiful lines, Gary, and it'sa brilliant book and again.
Beautifully fits in, and it's a pleasureto go through chronologically how your
own ideas formed, how you studied.
'cause there was just so muchresearch in all these books, the
interviews that you did, et cetera.
And there's tons, by the way, forpeople interested of articles.
(53:31):
Gary wrote from FortuneHBR, still writing for HBR.
There's tons and tonsof articles out there.
You can find them all.
I highly, highly recommend them.
Gary, for people who wannafind you and find some of those
articles, where's the best place?
LinkedIn is a pretty good place.
Just put up an article there on,elon Musk and Doge and what they
(53:52):
may be doing right and wrong.
So please find me on LinkedIn, ask aquestion, connect I'll occasionally
post on x as well, so you can find methere under prof, hamel, and emails.
I'm just gary gary hamel.com.
So yeah, if something sparks yourinterest, you wanna go deeper
you want some more resources,always happy to help out.
(54:13):
Author of the Future ofManagement, Gary Hamel.
Thank you for joining us.
A pleasure, Aiden.
Welcome back to part two of thisbrilliant book in this brilliant
series with our guest, Gary Hamel.
You're very welcome back.
Glad to be back.
We're getting awesome feedback, man.
And I don't know if people can seeon the shelves there we're getting
on through the tome of work andGary's in the midst of another, yet
another HBO article that may be.
(00:21):
Out by the time we publish this episode,but I wanted to pull out a few threads.
I, really said the last day wouldn't gonear the case studies, but I can't resist.
So I'm gonna just pull a fewthreads at the case studies because.
These are companies that have advancedbut still hold true to their original DNA.
And the first was Gore, and I thoughtI'd set you up, Gary, to tell us a
(00:44):
little bit about your findings of Gorewith the following little excerpt from
the book, which is, there were a lotof questions to answer when Bill Gore.
And his wife went to create a new DNAfor a company, new management structure.
They asked questions like, couldyou build a company with no
hierarchy, where everyone was freeto talk and with everyone else?
(01:06):
How about a company where therewere no bosses, no supervisors,
and no vice presidents?
Could you let people choose whatthey wanted to work on rather
than assigning them tasks?
Could you create a company withno core business where people.
Would put as much energy intofinding the next big thing as they
did into milking the last big thing.
(01:27):
And could you do all of thiswhile still delivering consistent
growth and profitability?
Many people will say of their companies,they are, they're not possible.
They're not mutually exclusive.
It's a zero sum game.
But Gary discovered that it is possiblenot only with his own clients like Haier,
but with Bill Gore and Co back in the day.
(01:50):
Yeah, I think probably Gore was oneof the first companies that really
attracted a lot of attention frompeople around the world who were
saying, Hey, is there another way tomanage a large complex organization?
Obviously, most of , our viewers, ourlisteners will know gore from Gore-Tex,
but they make about a thousand productsincluding medical products that are
(02:15):
used inside the body, particularkinds of fibers and so on for stents.
They make fabric that goes intothe spacesuits of astronauts.
And it all started with a fairly simpletechnology where Bill Gore then working
at DuPont, thought we could use this ina more creative way than DuPont was doing
(02:35):
and said, let me build a company, butI don't want to build a usual company.
And by the way, we'll see thistheme over and over again.
Aidan that most of these kind ofpost bureaucratic pioneers were
created by people who didn'thave management experience.
And by the way, that, that could mean thatthings could have gone horribly wrong.
But once in a while, it means youhave the chance to do something
(02:55):
quite new and unexpected.
And that's the case in Gore.
Now all of these companies the,any management model bureaucracy or
human ocracy, whatever it may be,they are inherently fragile, right?
I mean, they're entropy existsin our world and without a lot of
diligence and a lot of thought thesethings can collapse and and , every
(03:17):
system has potential vulnerabilities.
And of course, the goalis not simply to replace.
The vulnerabilities of bureaucracy beingvulnerable to power, moving too much
at the top and too little innovationand unins uninspired employees.
The goal is not to just replicatea different set of of kind of
(03:37):
vulnerabilities or disadvantagesin a anti bureaucratic structure.
And that's that's easy to do is to endup with something that's ill disciplined
or chaotic or not very efficient.
So all of this.
In any organization, you areconstantly walking a tightrope between
different ways, things that can gowrong, and so I never wanna make it.
Sound like one of one of these companieshas invented the perfect management model
(04:01):
and it's like, set and forget and it'sjust gonna produce these amazing results.
Always you are managing a set oftensions to keep things in, in line
and on kind of the straight and narrow.
But let me start with, hasbeen written about them.
I don't know if there's , as if they'regrowing or as vibrant as they once were.
(04:21):
They're privately held companies, sothat's a little bit difficult to know.
But I spent quite a bit of time atGore talking to people, just trying to
understand the gestalt of the place.
And, and Aiden, one of the, oneof the really interesting first
experiences they put me in this room.
I, I would guess about 10 or 12 peoplefrom Gore that were there to just let me
interview them and have a conversation.
(04:43):
And now usually in those meetings,I can pretty quickly suss out.
Like, who's really in control.
, And then I will just likeshamelessly suck up, right?
Like I, whatever they speak, I likelisten intently and so on and so on.
And it was disconcerting'cause I had no idea like who
was important and who wasn't.
There was no apparent deference.
(05:03):
And and so as these people were handingme their business cards, I did notice
that on a couple of these businesscards that had the word leader.
It didn't say, vice president justsaid like somebody's name and leader.
I asked the group, I said like,how do you become a leader at Gore?
They said, well, like yourcolleagues ask you to lead them.
(05:25):
I mean, quite literally.
And when that happens enough, youcan put this title on you, but like,
nobody appoints you as a leader.
And the designation of leader comes whenpeople think you're worth following.
And so a lot of the conversationsat Gore were about how do you, how
do you build genuine followership?
But, but then I asked, so I asked likehow do, how do you become a leader?
(05:49):
And some person said, well, if youcall a meeting and other people
show up, like that's a good sign.
Like you're probably on the right trackbecause nobody has to go to meetings.
And so that was one of thefirst kind of oddities , that
I, you noticed there is that.
You're not a leader because somebody failsto distinguish the word vice president
(06:10):
from leader and says, this is our leader.
You're not a leader.
You're a leader because peoplegenerally think you have ideas and
you know how to mobilize peopleand you know how to organize
things, and they wanna follow you.
The second kind of very interestingthing is they made a big distinction.
commitments versus assignments.
And of course in most organizations, ifyou're sitting somewhere in the middle,
(06:32):
you get an assignment and you oftendon't have a lot of choice in that.
And at Gore they, , the companiesrun in relatively small businesses.
A couple hundred employees is themaximum size and they'll split it up.
They do that.
So everybody believes their voice matters.
All of your colleagues or most ofthem, you can easily go to anybody
on that team cross-function.
(06:53):
So they want that.
That very strong sense ofcommunity is important to them.
But within that, and so basicallyeverybody understands the business, right?
It's small.
You're interacting with other functions.
I. you have a line of sight to everything.
So people pretty much know, Hey, here'sour priorities, here's what needs to be
done, and here's what the challenges are.
(07:14):
And so people commit to eachother to get things done.
And so at any point in time an associatewill have a list of, here's some of my
priorities, here's what I'm working on.
But those never come from a manager.
It comes from the teams talking about.
Well, like, this seems to be important.
We need to grow our sales over here.
We need somebody to take onbuilding this new channel.
(07:34):
Like, Susan, will you do this?
And she says like, yeah.
Okay.
And again, the philosophybehind this is commitment is
highly correlated with choice.
And if you don't give peoplechoice you can get compliance, but
you're not gonna get commitment.
And so that is a deep, deep principle.
And also that everycommitment is voluntary.
(07:54):
You can say no, there's little penaltyto saying no to something now if
you do it continuously, but , inthe moment, there's not, and what's
interesting , about the culture?
Every CEOI meet, pretty much, two of thethings they would all like to see more
of is collaboration and entrepreneurship.
So they want more lateral connection,more ideas flowing and so on.
(08:19):
And they also want people to takemore initiative and it's very
interesting that , the Gore model.
Drives exactly those two behaviors.
I think we talked about in our previousepisode, so I won't go , do go too deep
now about their performance managementsystem and their compensation system where
everybody gets rated by a group of peers.
(08:39):
And on the question like, howmuch value did you add this year?
And it's not like someelaborate HR kind of nonsense.
It's a simple question like, howmuch value did Gary add versus
all the other people in our team.
And that kind of drives,drives your compensation.
So if you think about that,all commitments are voluntary.
And yet I know that at theend of the year, my peers are
(09:00):
gonna rate my performance.
So the behaviors that creates is firstof all I don't have a set of KPIs.
I don't, it's not like in,in so many organizations.
And I think this is so toxic.
Aiden and an employee negotiates a setof targets or is given a set of targets
from their boss, the idea is if I justmeet those, I expect to be rewarded.
(09:21):
Like, check, check.
I did all these things.
That's what we agree.
That was my kind of implicitcontract and I should get rewarded.
That doesn't happen at Gore.
There's no kind of top down KPIs, sowhat people are asking, they know at
the end of the year the question'sgonna be, how much value did Gary add?
All year long, Gary is thinkingto himself, is there something
else I could be doing that'sgonna make a bigger impact?
(09:44):
So people are not trying tomeet a static, top down goal.
They're paying attention to theenvironment, they're paying attention
to what's going on in the business,and they're asking themselves is
given my skillset, is there somewherewhere I can have a bigger impact?
And if so, that's where I need to migrate.
So that's a very, I think,positive and powerful incentive.
(10:05):
Now at the same time as I said, I cansay no to requests, but I have this
little dialogue inside of my head.
If somebody comes and says, Hey,Gary, we go back to my example.
There's this new channel.
We should have a presence here.
We don't have anybody liketo go out and build that.
Will you do it?
I can say, no, there's no compulsion.
No, nobody can give me an order.
(10:27):
But again, I know at the end of theyear, my peers are gonna look at me.
And so you have these two really positive.
Motivations.
One is to say yes and to be helpful, andfrankly, to take on more rather than less.
So even though there are no topdown orders or commands, you're not
gonna find any slackers at gore.
But simultaneously people are proactivelythinking all the time, not, how do I
(10:52):
satisfy my boss and tick a box, how doI align my skills with things that will
make a substantial business difference?
, That's just like gold if you'reinside of an organization and
you can get that to happen.
So those are some of the real coresthat I think distinguished score.
We, I think we mentioned before there.
Their emphasis on kind of innovation.
(11:13):
They've been at different times.
They've been called the mostinnovative company in the world.
I think a fast company once gave them fastCompany Magazine gave them that title.
Are they still that way?
I don't know.
But it's clear they believethat innovation comes from
the bottom, not the top.
At any time you'll find hundreds of peoplethere working on dabble time projects.
(11:35):
Everybody has a certain amount oftime they can work on anything that's
interesting to them, and that's wheremost of the innovations come from.
So again will this work in everyindustry, in every context?
I don't know.
But when you look at it, youcertainly see some things.
That are important deemphasizing hierarchycontinually reinforcing the belief
(11:57):
that innovation can come from anywhere.
And they have all of their internalmythology, their stories about this.
A guy who is using a particularGore product a keen mountain
biker coded the cables on hismountain bike to, to repel dirt.
And very successfully said, Hey, maybewe could use this for guitar strings.
Well, there's a kind of strangeconnection and turns out you could.
(12:18):
And so they end up producing one of theworld's most successful guitar strings.
So you continually reinforcethat with stories like that.
everybody has aresponsibility to innovate.
They co-locate factories closetogether rather than going to the
cheapest location in the world.
They believe that the rapiddiffusion connection of ideas
(12:43):
is important to innovation.
they'll build clusters of plants thatare making and some might be doing
industrial things, something might bedoing medical things, but they locate
those plants together because they wantall this cross-fertilization going on.
So I think that's anotherpart of that model.
If you do have an idea that's interestingto you, there's very little approval.
The real approval is can you findsome people to give you their
(13:07):
dabble time to work on your idea?
And if nobody wants to volunteer tohelp you, probably not a good idea.
So, I think it's a wonderful modelfilled with wonderful principles.
And the, when I was with them,now this is a couple decades ago,
I think they were about three, 3billion yeah, about $3 billion in
(13:27):
revenue, about 10,000 associates.
So sizable business and in somehighly regulated industries.
But.
Management Renegade witha lot to learn from them.
So if any listener, reader, likeget on the web there, a lot of
cases have written about Gore.
Some may be older, but they'refilled with kind of wisdom and I
would really go check that out.
(13:48):
Great memory, man.
You covered lots of that chapter there.
There was one thing Ifound really interesting.
And, and like you, and you've writtenabout this DNA and nature and how
nature mirrors organizations, eventhe structure of an organization
can look essentially like the nonhierarchy of the worldwide web.
One of the things I discovered was ants.
(14:08):
Certain species of ants will havean ant that's almost like a stem
cell that will change role asit goes through its lifecycle.
And I loved what you said about gore.
You said people havesponsors instead of bosses.
And I thought here about howdetrimental or productive it can be.
For you with your firstexperience of your first boss.
(14:29):
So if you went into Gore and then leftand went to a traditional organization,
you'd really, really struggle.
And this little excerpt.
I'd love you to expand upon, you said,new recruits are hired into broad roles
as HR generalists, business developmentleaders, or r and d engineers, rather
than into narrowly defined jobs.
And to help newcomers navigate theorganization and find their niche,
(14:53):
each is assigned a starting sponsor.
The sponsor's not your boss.
The sponsor is somebody who's, who'sactually responsible for trying to find
the best fit between your capabilitiesand the needs of the organization.
And so often now.
Occasionally people do get hiredinto very specific roles, but often
it's not, they see somebody as a setof technical abilities or marketing
(15:16):
abilities that I that this person'sclearly world class could be useful to us.
And so again, one, I, I had this earlyin my career, I'm sure other people
have if, if you report to a boss whodoesn't really appreciate your talents
or, or, or is working on something thatyou're simply not, like, you just feel
like completely stuck that your life is.
Under the control of this boss whoprobably doesn't wanna give you up and
(15:40):
but, but, but the, the, the sponsoris somebody says, like, Gary, you,
I know you're doing a great job andthey love you, but I think you should
go check this thing out over here.
So they're looking out for you andlooking out for the organization, right?
They're trying to find.
A role where you're, the marginalreturn on your talents is the highest.
Rather than just get stuck somewhere.
And , so a new employee, at least atthe time I was doing this research.
(16:04):
Would often audition inseveral different teams.
They'd be there for two or three or fourweeks and the team had to say, yeah,
this, like, Gary's great, we'd really likeGary to be part of our team, or, or not.
And again, back to, I talked about thatexample Whole Foods, I, it's like, to
me it's like so essential to have anorganization where your peers choose you.
(16:24):
Right?
Many, many decades ago when Iinterviewed at the London Business
School and a few other schools.
The choice of hiring meis not made by some dean
somewhere, , or the, the principal.
The choice was made by mypeers a majority of them.
Now, they still wanna hire me 40years later, you have to ask them,
but at the time, a majority said,yeah, Gary would be a good addition.
(16:46):
And you find the same thing at , at Gore.
It can be so detrimental.
And if you're a truth speaker, ifyou speak truth to power or you
call out the inefficiency of anorganization, you can just be turfed
out and even what you said there was.
For example, you're in a team.
You call out these problems andyour boss is, becomes a ceiling,
(17:08):
and then your choice is, well,I've got these golden handcuffs.
I better shut my mouth here andput my brain in my drawer and
just do what everybody does.
And then you wonder why theorganization's not innovative.
I think there's a bigpoint there too, Aidan
that kind of multilayertop down power structure.
I. That creates these large asymmetriesin, in, in form of power, I just
(17:34):
think has so many negative sideeffects that we typically just ignore.
And you just mentioned one, right?
It's very hard.
If I'm sitting on a team at Gore,and this was also, at least when I
did my research at Google's througha Google, you, if you'll find there
where there's very little, there arevery few stat status differentiators.
Very little hierarchy.
There's a lot of hierarchynow in Google, by the way.
(17:54):
But at the time.
People are quite free to just like argueand have a different opinion and say
like, no, I don't think that's true.
But if you're in a meeting wheresomebody else is controlling your
career, the ability to dissent orargue or be honest, just like people
start to self edit like crazy.
I think , that's one thing.
The second thing which you werementioning a little bit of gore.
(18:17):
You start to have people who are justdoing what the manager asked them,
rather than maximizing their potentialimpact because that they're in that power
relationship with that particular person.
You also find, we've talked aboutthis, that then so much of the
energy becomes about climbing upthat pyramid rather than simply doing
the best thing or creating value.
So I have somewhere a longlist of these things, but we
(18:40):
just take those multi-layeredpower structures for granted.
But.
And most of us, we don't wannalive in an organization where you
just feel perpetually like you'repowerless, at least with respect to,
to your boss, the people around you.
But you know, many people,that's how they feel at work.
And man, what awful way to live.
(19:03):
And it's exhausting.
It's so exhausting.
It's like masking, if you'reneurodivergent masking and
how much energy that uses up.
I feel so sorry for, and I didwork in organizations like that.
I just couldn't drink the Kool-Aid.
I had to leave, but I feltso sorry for people who were.
Really good people, really greatideas, but just had to stay or felt
(19:23):
they had to compelled to stay becauseof those golden handcuffs again.
But I know Google, youmentioned it has changed a lot.
Even, for example, here in Ireland,we have a huge Google facility.
I. And it's massive now.
And you, you said, and I thought this agedquite well, you said the jury is still
out on whether Google's founders willsucceed in their quest to build a company
(19:45):
that can outrun the future as of writing.
So again, two decades ago, Google stillderives nearly a hundred percent of
its revenue from ad supported search.
With a few non-search products have,having made strong showings, Gmail,
Google News, and Google Maps forinstance, many others have received
a lukewarm reception from users.
(20:05):
They have managed to get afew new products out there.
Google Cloud being one that's huge forthem, and I thought that aged very well.
But I'm using it as a segue totalk a little bit about Google.
Yeah, well again, I haven't been closeto Google in a long time, but what,
what I think you see there though alittle bit what I said earlier, you
(20:27):
see people like, like Sergey Brin andLarry Page, the founders co-founders.
Who very much understood theenvironment that created Google, right?
Because in Silicon Valley, forevery Google, there's a hundred or a
thousand companies that never becamethat successful or successful at all.
And so they understand there's this,like, this ecosystem here where
(20:50):
you have to try a lot of things andnot all of them are gonna succeed.
And one of the, one of the folks Italked to early on then when I was
doing my research was Marissa Meyer,super smart woman, Stanford graduate
employee number 20 at at at Google.
Went on for somewhat ill-fatedrun at Yahoo as a CEO there.
I dunno what she's done since she had thesame spirit of we're gonna launch a lot
(21:17):
of things and most of 'em are gonna fail.
You find the same thing atAmazon where Jeff Bezos says.
If you call it an experiment,it means it's more likely
to fail than succeed, right?
It's not a pilot, it's an experiment,and we're gonna do thousands of them.
So they had that ethos, and I thinkit came out of that understanding
about just the ecology of innovation.
And you have to kiss a lot of frogsto find your prince or princess.
(21:40):
But again, when you have asuccess as, as large and as
singular as Google search became.
It's very hard to preserve thatspirit when everybody is just
like trying to grow the core asfast as possible, feed that beast.
I talked about something similarat Hewlett Packard when they became
(22:01):
lords of the printer business.
That kind of sucked all the innovationout of the rest of the company.
So it's super hard.
You, can start with.
With the right intentions, but it'ssuper hard to keep that as you scale up
and if you're not , very mindful of it.
, I think I mentioned we, I might mentionit again, , so forgive me, but I, I
(22:22):
think it was about 15 months , or so ago
mark Zuckerberg , at Meta at Facebook.
Was, he could see how thecompany become very bureaucratic,
10 or 11 management layers.
And he made this point, he said, youdon't want a company where you have
managers, managing managers, managingmanagers, managing managers, managing
the people who are doing the work.
I was like, yeah, no, that's a bad idea.
(22:44):
But what was very interesting issomething else he said a few years
earlier, about a decade earlier.
Where he admitted, he said,I know we're constantly at
risk from big company disease.
Maybe he didn't use that phrase, but hesaid most companies, they get big, like
they lose their mojo, and he said, Idon't think it's gonna happen at Facebook.
because we talk so much movingfast and breaking things.
(23:06):
I think there's enormous,naivety in that statement.
In that if we just keep talking aboutthese things, right then somehow they
will be embedded in the organization.
They're not, I. What gets embedded isthe systems, the processes, and so on.
(23:26):
And so unless you are super explicitabout thinking about what kind of
compensation structure what kind ofinternal network, lateral linkages how
how are we going to distribute power, whogets it, and under what circumstances?
Unless you're thinking like super,super thoughtfully about those things.
(23:48):
You just end up being overtaken bybureaucracy because it's a default
setting so you don't it's talking aboutrhetoric and culture and exhortation
not gonna protect you from those things.
You have to be super explicit about it.
And I think that's probablywhere Google missed it.
I think they had the rightimpulses, the right instincts.
And some of it for surestill exist there, but
(24:13):
they probably mistook talking aboutit for actually really thinking hard
about what kind of architecture,systems, processes will make this
capability of being fast and innovative,something that's truly in our DNA.
As opposed to a distant memory thatwe bring out once in a while to
(24:34):
remind ourselves what we used to be.
I mean,, I saw something similar when,when Carly Fiorina, who had ultimately
run for president in the United States.
I think when she was CEO , atHP at Packer, he'd come
from a telecommunicationsmanufacturer, Lucent, I believe.
But she sent around like
(24:56):
a little document on the rules forthe garage because HP famously was
invented in a garage in Silicon Valley.
And and so this was like lovelyrhetoric, the same kind of thing
be small, be fast, whatever.
But you don't change anything by sendingaround a little memento to the past.
(25:16):
What they never did was like the hardwork of, okay, let's re-engineer our
whole management model in a way thatkind of allows us to do things to
harness those advantages at scale.
The ones we had when we werea few hundred people, rather
than a hundred thousand people.
I. I'm always so disappointed when youhear these stories 'cause it's everywhere.
(25:37):
I mean, working in organizationsand having the courage to actually
go and here's a new product for us.
I believe this is a placewhere the company can win and
then you're punished for that.
Or worst you're jettisoned for that.
It what happens.
A lot of people or you're frustratedoutta the company and as you said, in.
(25:58):
Competence paced competition when wetalked about that, that most companies
are developed by a disgruntledemployee from a different company,
so why not engage those people?
And I just think that's thebiggest cruelty of all of this.
I.
Well it is, but it's, it's just.
It's not inevitable because you, wecan find organizations of large scale
(26:22):
who haven't fallen into those traps.
Not very many, but someof them are out there.
It's not inevitable in some cosmicsense, but it's inevitable if you don't
really take this work of managementinnovation super, super seriously.
Let me share, I just pulled up a quote.
This is a very interesting quote.
From a guy named Praveen Seshadri, I'mmis mispronouncing it, but he was an
(26:45):
entrepreneur who had built an interestingbusiness that he sold to Google.
And he sold it to Google in 2020.
And he stayed on, I think for three years.
But when his retention agreementexpired, he left , this was
what he found in Google in 2020.
He said like mice, like mice,Google's employees are trapped
and a maze of approvals.
(27:06):
Launch processes, legal reviews,performance reviews, exec reviews,
documents, meetings, bug reports, triage,OKRs H one plans followed by H two
plans, all hands summits and in Venable.
Reorgs, he said Very few googs.
Come to work thinking theyserve a customer or a user.
It's a closed world where almosteveryone is working for other
(27:28):
Googlers, and the feedback loopis based on what your colleagues
and managers think of your work.
Hmm.
know, I don't know if that's true maybehe was just disenchanted or frustrated
or wanted a crap on them on the way outthe door, like all that others like, but.
But it doesn't sound unusual to me forwhat you'd see in a large organization.
(27:51):
And I wanted to pull somethingthat they had strived for because.
This is the problem is that as you go upthat S-curve, you become more like , that
quote, rather than actually what youtalked about and what you had found there.
When you interviewed people in Google,you talked about their desire to have
a continuous company-wide conversation.
(28:12):
So I'd love you to share withabout this, regardless of Google.
I'll use Google and thequote here to get us started.
But you said in hierarchical companies,communication pathways are primarily
ver vertical rather than horizontal.
And information systems are built firstand foremost to move data from the front
lines to the top level decision makers.
Google's executives don't lackfor data yet the lateral flow of
(28:36):
communication within the company iseven denser than the vertical flow.
This is no accident Google.
Has invested heavily in building ahighly networked organization that
makes it easy for employer employeesto share ideas, poll peers, recruit
volunteers, and build constituenciesfor change, all of which require a
lot more than a good email system.
(28:58):
And you talked about some of thesystems that they had in place there.
I know you've worked massively withHaier to implement some of this.
We'll talk about that againlater, in Humanocracy.. But for
a Google perspective, what didyou find then compared to what
you found with that quote today?
Well, of course, I don't know what existstoday, but I think Aiden, the critical
(29:24):
thing is not just whether you havelateral technology and lateral systems.
Most organizations today, they have slack.
they may have some kind of idea marketsthey have chat functions across the
company, so, you can reach anybody in thecompany probably fairly easily and so on.
(29:44):
So I think at the time Google wasinvesting in that probably ahead of a
lot of competitors today, I think mostorganizations have something like that.
Probably the deeper question is,what do you think that thing is for.
What do you use that technology for?
And a lot of it is just a search function.
People are saying, Hey, is there anybodyout there who can help me with X?
So you're trying to find aparticular kind of expertise.
(30:06):
It's often used to problemsolve, Hey, I've run up against
something who can help me?
Who can help me with this?
It can be a bitch session where.
There's maybe a lot ofwhining and so on going on.
And then a huge amount of it today isjust using project work where you got a
team of people maybe co-located aroundthe world and they're just constantly
on Slack or something else, and that'sjust the way the work gets done.
(30:29):
So the questions, are you actuallyusing that in a discipline way?
To track what's changingin the world, right?
You, think of how easy it is todayto tag something and how you can
share things and you can, I, Ithink they call it taxonomy, right?
Where you can people tag things and thisis interesting, and then it becomes viral.
(30:51):
You think about a large organization,we have people around the world
often the people at the centerdon't know what's going on.
having a system where somebody atthe others says, say, I saw a new
release from a competitor in China.
This is what it is, and they tagit and then that's available.
Every employee acrossthe world can see that.
So you build a collective intelligencesystem that can monitor the entire world,
(31:13):
where everybody can see what's happening,where you can put that picture together.
There are ways of doing that today thatyou couldn't have done 20 years ago Now.
How many companies have that?
I don't know.
Not very many.
Probably similarly todaywe can do open strategy.
We've talked about this before.
I won't go here deep now, but Google hadsome processes , led by the CEO and others
where you'd bring young people in andyou'd have these really robust debates
(31:36):
about what else should we be doing?
They would occasionally kindof crowdsource big questions
down to the organization.
One of 'em at one point was like.
How do we catalog and givepeople access to uploaded video.
I, that was probablybefore YouTube was a thing.
I don't know.
But, and so, they were trying to engagethe periphery of the organization, the
core and these kind of conversations.
(31:58):
But at some point, if you're doing that.
With old technology, yousimply can't scale that, right?
It's like you, youcan't get enough people.
But we have a lot of experience ofdoing that at scale and bringing tens
of thousands of people together andgetting the best ideas to the fore.
So it's not, the technology isusually not the limiting factor here.
I. The limiting factor is either asenior group that's not very curious
(32:21):
or one that wants to hold onto theirpower and doesn't want to admit that
there are a lot of people out therewho may have better ideas than they do.
Or who frankly just don't know how youuse online tools to do things at scale.
Variety of reasons, but yeah, the toolsare not really it's the spirit behind
(32:41):
them and this idea we have to have.
The best insights from the best peoplewherever they are, and we need to
make sure those are getting to thefore that other people can corroborate
or not based on their own evidence.
The things that we see collectivelyas emerging and gaining speed.
We need to be able topay attention to those.
We need to be able to interrogatethe entire organization.
(33:01):
What do we do about that?
What, how do we turnthis into an opportunity?
It's just like shocking tome that so few organizations.
Yet are using the tools in that way.
'cause you clearly can.
You then move to solution mode andyou highlight a couple of things.
And I thought was really interesting whereyou talked about the limits of language
(33:22):
and how innovation or reinvention needsnew language, and it reminded me of that
Wittgenstein quote, the limits of mylanguage mean the limits of my world.
And what you said was even ourlanguages held hostage by our paradigms.
Consider, for example, how thoroughly thenotion of hierarchy has infiltrated the
lexicon of management, chain of command.
(33:44):
Pyramid, boss, subordinate, directreports, organizational levels,
top down, bottom up, cascade.
All these terms connote a formalscale of power and authority.
Indeed, managers have as many waysof talking about hierarchy as Eskimos
have about talking about snow.
Yeah, I think and obviously the language.
(34:07):
Is just a reflection of theunderlying kind of architecture
belief system that we have.
And I think I, I spend an entire chapterin this book basically saying and we
talked about this a little bit withrespect to maybe orthodoxy or dogma
with respect to products and technology.
But it's equally important when youthink about how we manage right there.
(34:29):
I, I just hear over and over again, Ihear people say things in organizations.
As if, like aphorisms and , they take asif like they're, they, they're written on
commandments like in stone somewhere, andthat they exist independent of just the
way we chose to build our organizations.
(34:49):
I think one, one of the examplesI took, and we did this as an
experiment in, in a bunch oforganizations , where I'd ask people.
What, what are the 10 things you believemost deeply about, let's say change,
or you could say strategy, you couldsay employee motivation or something.
And by the way, this is a really, interesting exercise to do , and
maybe an important one to do.
Ask your colleagues, okay, picksome important topic and ask them
(35:10):
like, what are the things youbelieve most deeply about this?
So when we'd ask this about change,the typical kinds of things that would
come up is somebody would say, well,it typically takes a crisis to provoke.
Like real deep change.
Okay.
Or you need a strongleader to drive change.
Okay.
Or change starts at the topand you go like, well, okay.
(35:31):
All of those things are true in the sensethat they accord , with our reality.
Yeah.
Most organizations don't change untilthey've had a long period of substandard
performance, a crisis of some sort, andthen you do a strategy reboot often.
The only way to get deep change is youbring in a strong leader, a new leader
who has no loyalty to the past and feelsfree to like, do really hard things.
(35:56):
And yet it, it tends we thinkthat until the guys at the top
get it, nothing else can be done.
And then you go like, okay.
None of those things are truein any absolute sense, right?
They're simply true of hierarchicalorganizations where the power to
initiate change is at the top andwhere there's a lot of learned
helplessness everywhere else.
I. And where there are poor systemsfor understanding how the world
(36:17):
is changing and responding to it.
Yeah.
Then you're gonna end up with a crisis.
Only somebody at the top is gonnabe able to get this thing done.
And so once, you find somethingthat's true, you have to say, is
this inevitably true in every contextforever and in every system, biological,
human, physical that we can imagine?
Or is this just something that we've that.
(36:39):
That we've inherited.
And I think just very seldom, know,are we thoughtful in that way?
And I will tell you one of the thingsI learned, and maybe we'll come back
to this in a different context Aiden,but, and forgive me again if this is
something I've said in another way,but in a world of AI and instantly
accessible knowledge and information,it is impossible to know more.
(37:02):
there's always somebody whohas better information can know
more about any topic than I can.
But the value comes not from knowingmore, but from knowing different.
The value comes from when you canstep outside the dominant paradigm
and go like, why the hell is that?
Is it that way?
one of the examples I have in the book,which is really quite a fun one, it's
an older one, but quite a fun one is 2,researchers at a hospital in Perth, which
(37:27):
literally is like the end of the world.
Were both frustrated.
One I think was a hospital one,one was an internal medicine
guy other one, a pathologist.
And they were frustrated at theirpatients suffering from ulcers.
And of course, the received wisdom amonggastroenterologists were ulcers are the
(37:48):
product of stress and booze and so on.
And these guys just said, really,it's, it is like that all there is.
So they started a culture take culturesoutta the guts of their patients.
And to see if anything wouldgrow in those cultures.
And and the answer was apparently no.
But then over one long weekend oneof these cultures is left unattended
and the guy comes back Barry Marshalland Robin Warren, what are the names?
(38:12):
It comes back over a long weekend andthere's something growing and they
find this little ew shaped bacteria.
So like, could that, that be the culprit?
So these guys like hatch a brewof this and drink it themselves,
and then become quickly be like.
Very unwell and so they said, yeah,this is, and so they started to treat
this in a different way and theycould watch these ulcers disappeared.
(38:35):
Well they went to, to present this ata big conference and they basically got
pulled from the stage, like that theexisting mental models were so out of
sync with what they were found, findingthat people literally, you couldn't see
the data that was just in front of you.
The good news is ultimately thischanges the practice of medicine and
(38:56):
these two guys win the Nobel Prize.
But it just
it tells us how much work I. We have toput in to challenging what we already
believe our own confirmation biases.
And , I always tell people when youhear something that you literally
think , this is crazy, I disagree with,and some of it is like, so obvious, you
(39:19):
can just say, okay, that's like nuts.
But take some time to ask like, underwhat circumstances might this be true?
Or what evidence is here.
But the tendency we all have just as like,well, that doesn't fit with my worldview.
Like, I'm just gonna dismissthat is like so high and so deep.
And that's that's theprimary reason we're stuck.
(39:40):
We're all drinking the samebureaucratic bath water.
We're not drinking the ulcer juice.
I, I was, man, I was telling you beforewe came on air, I went down so many
rabbit holes based on stuff like this.
So I went then reading.
I like, I don't have any extra time toread the patterns of military revolutions,
(40:02):
the book that you mentioned in there,and how about the long bow and how the
technology changes, but that doesn'tchange how you go into war and how when
lives depend on it, we still cling tothese old orthodoxies based on power
and status quo, et cetera, that it'sso pervasive and that's what I, just
want people to listen to this becauseyou don't spot it when it's you.
(40:25):
I mean, that's the problem when it's you.
And, and, and the other thing youhave to ask, and it's hard, is like,
does, does this belief that I'veheld onto for a while, does it
serve my self-interest in some way?
Because that's when you reallyhave to be careful, right?
So if you assume that , I'm in myposition because I'm the smartest person
(40:51):
and I'm the best qualified, and so on.
And that's why we have a hierarchy, thatit's a reflection of who really has the
skills, the expertise, and they get ahead.
Like if you hang on that belief, wellit might be true, but you may believe it
simply because it makes you feel good.
So we have a lot of self-soothingassumptions in our organizations.
, And the higher you are in theorganization, the more likely
(41:13):
to fall prey to those things.
'cause they are, they are beliefsthat reinforce your position,
your privilege, and so on.
So you gotta be.
You gotta be particularly careful whenyou see a belief that, that that makes
you feel good to believe it or makesyou feel more important to believe it.
Those are the ones you have tobe particularly suspicious about.
(41:35):
Gary, there was a table I wanted toshare because you move on to when
you're in solution mode there, butjust a nod of the hat to a couple of
the case studies you cover in there.
There was a, a company calledRite-Solutions and Jim Lavoie,
and what I loved about that casestudy was the language he changed.
So he brought in.
Systems for Innovation.
(41:56):
One he called, he used the marketplacebasically to, in, to change the language
about how people thought about innovation,the spas deck, the Bio Jones and
savings bonds within the organization.
There's a great case study inthere and, and I encourage people
to get the book to read aboutthat, but I wanted to share this
diagram this table that you share inthe book because it's the principles
(42:21):
of modern management and you look atdifferent elements here and maybe we
don't have to go through them all, butmaybe pick and choose at a couple of them
here for, and we'll have a little bit ofempathy for people who are just listening,
which is the majority of the show.
we'll get at this, I think much deeperwhen we talk about human ocracy, and
I'll try to explain a little bit why,if you want to do anything, if you
(42:43):
want to build an organization that'sin any way fundamentally better than
the one you have now, I. You have tostart , with new principles, not new
practices, not new structures, notnew processes, but you have to go
like very deep back to principles.
again, this is kind of part of ourinheritance, a set of principles
that developed in the industrial age.
Again, with the purpose ofproducing very compliant employees
(43:05):
and very efficient organizations.
But principles like specializationyou put like with like in an
organization and you disaggregate jobsinto small, repeatable components.
Standardization that you just put ahigh premium on doing the same things
over and over again on, on perfectreplicability alignment, where you
(43:26):
know, you want everybody with the sametargets pushing in the same direction.
Hierarchy that, you know, theway you manage complexity is you
simply have a hierarchy of managerswith ascending decision rights.
Elaborate systems forplanning and control.
So control is a hugelyimportant principle.
Control over tasks, over budgeting,over resource allocation regularity
(43:49):
and predictability and operations.
And then finally, this belief that we'remostly motivated by extrinsic rewards.
Pay for performance.
None of these things are wrong, right?
Like, none of those are all likereally, really good principles.
And we'll talk about this again, I'm sure.
Collectively though, they createan ideology and that really
(44:11):
has control at its center.
And the dilemma with any ideology isif you're not careful, at some point
it slips the balance of common sense.
Or you just take it pastthe point of like logic.
And I think that's what's happened.
And so my view is you only beatone set of principles by having
a better set of principles.
(44:33):
we'll come back to this, but you haveto understand that those principles of
specialization, standardization, control,goal alignment, they are deeply marbled
into every system and every process.
In fact.
If you look at the processes of mostorganizations, they are built on and
serve those principles, those goals, andtrying to find systems or processes that
serve any other goal or be somethingis like really hard, they simply don't
(44:56):
exist, which is why we end up with thesevery lopsided organizations that are very
good at discipline, control, alignmentand not very good at anything else.
Those principles, they're like DNA, right?
Or they're like, the water youdrink, they're just everywhere.
Mostly unnoticed with nopowerful ideological rivals.
And so they just predominate and ourorganizations therefore, are very
(45:19):
unbalanced and highly capable in someways, and entirely incompetent in others.
When I was looking at them,I, I thought about stuff like,
regardless of the workplace.
We, start this socialization in school.
Parents do it, we do itas parents done it myself.
I'm guilty of some of those thingswhere you're forming the mindset of
(45:42):
this is how it's done in the world.
This is how you operate in the world.
And then we wonder why ourorganizations are like that.
And again, so pervasive.
.People track like creativity and basically it falls off a cliff once you start
school because when your child preschool,whatever, there are no stupid questions.
(46:03):
Dad, why is this sky blue?
Well, let's think about that, right?
But you go to school and there're stupidquestions and there's stupid answers,
and nobody wants to be humiliated.
And I think it's thesame in organizations.
There's this pervasive fear thatthere, if I ask the question that's
a little weird or a little strange,like, somebody's gonna have an
(46:25):
answer and make me look stupid.
And so people do notchallenge these old beliefs.
Like, why do we let managersassess , the performance of employees?
there's a lot of good reasons notto do that, but it can be very
intimidating to ask that question.
'cause you just assume, well,somebody's really thought
this through and No, no, no.
Most of the things that are thereare not very thought through.
(46:46):
And, and if you look atall , these elaborate corporate
processes, we've scoured theliterature, we know the research.
There's almost no corporate process wherea majority of people think it adds value.
And yet we keep like out there likedancing naked around the campfire,
hoping something's gonna happen, right?
again, it's, it goes back to,well, if you are a. Rabble rouser.
(47:08):
If you're the person who thinksdifferently, it doesn't often
end well for the whistleblowerand it's so, so difficult.
I thought I'd share, share one lastdiagram and I'll just highlight one
thing, which is so so important.
And again, even as a parent, I see this,that if your child has a purpose, if
they feel they have a purpose that theyown, they don't wonder, they don't then
(47:30):
do things you don't want them doing.
And you talk about the importance of this.
From change initiatives, you saypeople change for what they care
about in the final analysis.
There are no adaptableorganizations, only adaptable people.
While a company's management processes caneither imp plead or encourage adaptation,
it's the willingness of individualsto change that ultimately matters.
(47:52):
Most books on change start from thepremise that people reflexively resist
change and have to be manipulated,browbeat or cajoled into abandoning
the serenity of the status quo.
Gary has a different view.
He believes most people, mosthuman beings, welcome change for
all our reactionary tendencies.
We are always looking for newexperiences and new challenge, but
(48:15):
purpose is at the heart of that.
Yeah.
Somebody gave me a good analogy oncethey said, Gary, when you talk about the
purpose, it's about like having a son thatpulls the little shoots out of the ground.
Right.
And nourishes them and whatever.
And I think again, there's been alot of talk about purpose over the
(48:37):
last few years and became kind of.
fairly politicized, I think, andit got merged with all the ESG
stuff and stakeholder capitalism.
But, and some of thoseideas have a lot of merit.
But I think I. You put, putting somevague social do-gooder thing on top
(48:58):
of a corporate's purpose is not, Imean, it's something that has to come
from inside and has to be deeply felt.
I I talked about Whole Foods.
I don't know if they still have thatpurpose, but they used to talk about whole
Foods, whole people, and whole planet andso we wanna create foods that like your
grandmother would recognize and are not.
Now I think, what do we call 'em now?
We don't call 'em engineeredfoods, highly processed foods.
(49:18):
Right.
Which we're learning arelike super bad for us.
So, no, no, we're not gonna do that.
We want whole people.
We wanna worry about your nutrition andhow that affects all of your health.
we eat, super powerful drug.
then finally a whole planettake care of the planet.
And they didn't do that kind ofbelatedly as a, so to some outside
(49:39):
pressure group, they did that becauseJohn Mackey co-founder and those early
employees, this is what they believed.
And so, and, and they attractedpeople who cared about that.
And I think.
As we've talked about before, youhave to have a purpose that has enough
stretch in it, that it continues toencourage you to change and do more.
And again, that purpose is not shareholderwealth, and it's not some vague thing
(50:03):
about making the world a better place.
It has to be specific and
yeah.
And the reason I would say thisAidan, is maybe a final thought.
You'll know if your organization hasa purpose, partly by whether they can
articulate it or not, and by the way,whether people can articulate it without
having to go back and look at something.
If you just ask people likewhat are we here to do?
(50:26):
And everybody has the sameanswer, that's a pretty good sign.
The other way you'll know if it'sreal is if you can say, where have
we done something really hard?
Or sacrifice something forthe sake of that purpose.
And that's where you find that mostorganizations, they haven't done that.
They have something that is out theresomewhere often about customers, but
then you find they're only too happyto screw the customer over if so yeah,
(50:50):
I mean, again, you shouldn't haveto say any of this, but again, it's
a testament, but in, in fact, letme go back one little, an anecdote.
Frederick Winslow Tayloroften gets a bad rap.
The father of scientific management and.
Spent a lot of time, as youmight say, de-skilling work, but
also trying to make it better.
He would study for hours, somebodyshoveling coal to understand like,
(51:13):
what's the best way to do this?
But but he thought in a kind of lovelypuritan way, he said, to waste an
hour of human labor is iniquitous.
Like, if you couldn't find a simpler,easier way for human beings to do
something, why wouldn't you do that?
And so we can look at that and maybethere was some self rationalization
(51:35):
going on there, but you can look at itand go like, yeah, this is the guy who
like turned everybody into automatons.
But you can also look at it, say,here's a guy who said like we want
human work to make a differenceand to raise our productivity.
And the fact today that we'reproducing 20, 40, 60 times more
output per hour than we did a centuryago is like un flipping believable.
(51:58):
a lot of his work had adeep purpose behind it.
And today we live in a disenchanted world.
I. Where very few peoplereally have a purpose and very
few people think about it.
'cause why would you think aboutit when you spend all of your
time entertaining yourself todeath with your smartphone, right?
Why think about anything moreimportant or bigger or anything else
because you always have somethingat hand to distract you from hard
(52:20):
questions and metaphysical concerns.
But the end, we end up livingin impoverished lives and
impoverished organizations.
It's massive and we will get to it.
I wanted to share more, but I'mgonna, I'm gonna leave it there.
'cause Gary beautifully finishesthe book and I pulled out a little
excerpt just to tail the book.
'cause we started with this, the bookstarts with the end of management and I,
(52:45):
I pulled a little line just from chapterseven where you said, it turns out we
haven't reached the end of management.
We really can reinvent the way bigcompanies are structured and run.
There isn't any law that preventslarge organizations from being
engaging, innovative, and adaptable,and mostly bureaucracy free.
Even better.
It really is possible to set the humanspirit free at work, so no more excuses.
(53:08):
It's time for you to buckle down andstart inventing the future of management.
Beautiful lines, Gary, and it'sa brilliant book and again.
Beautifully fits in, and it's a pleasureto go through chronologically how your
own ideas formed, how you studied.
'cause there was just so muchresearch in all these books, the
interviews that you did, et cetera.
And there's tons, by the way, forpeople interested of articles.
(53:31):
Gary wrote from FortuneHBR, still writing for HBR.
There's tons and tonsof articles out there.
You can find them all.
I highly, highly recommend them.
Gary, for people who wannafind you and find some of those
articles, where's the best place?
LinkedIn is a pretty good place.
Just put up an article there on,elon Musk and Doge and what they
(53:52):
may be doing right and wrong.
So please find me on LinkedIn, ask aquestion, connect I'll occasionally
post on x as well, so you can find methere under prof, hamel, and emails.
I'm just gary gary hamel.com.
So yeah, if something sparks yourinterest, you wanna go deeper
you want some more resources,always happy to help out.
(54:13):
Author of the Future ofManagement, Gary Hamel.
Thank you for joining us.
A pleasure, Aiden.
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