Tag Archives: collaboration

How to Design Offsites That Generate Revenue

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Corporate offsites – the phrase conjures images of everything from “mandatory fun” with colleagues to long and exhausting days debating strategy with peers. Rarely are the images something that entice people to sit up and shout, “YEA!” But what if the reality could be something YEA! worthy?

That’s exactly what the authors of the recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, “Why Offsites Work – and How to Get the Most Out of Them,” describe and offer a guide to accomplish.

Offsites May Be the Answer to the WFH vs. RTO Debate

Offsites aren’t new but they’ve taken on a new role and new significance as companies grapple with how to manage Work from Home (WFH) and Return To Office (RTO) policies.

As with most things in life, the pendulum swings from one extreme to another until eventually, finally, landing in a stable and neutral midpoint. When the pandemic hit, we swung from every day in the office to every day at home. Then society opened back up and corporate landlords came calling for rent, whether or not people were in the offices, so we swung back to Return to Office mandates.

Offsites, the authors suggest, may be the happy medium between the two extremes because offsites:

“give people opportunities for interactions that otherwise might not happen. Offsites create unique opportunities for employees to connect in person, forming new relationships and strengthening existing ones. As a result, offsites help people learn about others’ knowledge and build interpersonal trust, which are both critical ingredients for effective collaboration.”

Offsite Connections Lead to Collaborations that Generate ROI

After analyzing eight years of data from a global firm’s offsites and 350,000 “instances of formal working relationships” for 750 employees, the authors found that intentionally designed offsites (more on that in a moment) yield surprisingly measurable and lasting results:

24% more incoming requests for collaboration amongst attendees post vs. pre-offsite (silos busted!)
17% of new connections were still active two years after the offsite (lasting change!)
$180,000 in net new revenue from collaborations within the first two months post offsite (real results!)

The benefits event extended to non-attendees because they “seemed to get the message that collaboration is important and wanted to demonstrate their commitment to being collaborative team players” and “likely identified new collaborators after the offsite through referrals.”

How to Design Offsites That Get Results

Four key strategies emerged from the authors’ research and work with over 100 other organizations:

Design for the people in the audience, not the people on stage. Poll attendees to understand their specific needs and goals, then design collaborative activities, not management monologues.
Design for the new hires, not the tenured execs. Create opportunities for new hires to meet, connect with, and work alongside more experienced colleagues.
Set and communicate clear goals and expectations. Once the offsite is designed and before it happens, tell people what to expect (the agenda) and why to expect it (your design intentions and goals). Also, tell them how to make the most of the offsite opportunities by thinking about the skill and network gaps they want to fill.
Track activities to measure ROI. The connections, collaborations, and commitments that start at the offsite need to continue after it in the form of ongoing communication, greater collaboration, and talent engagement. Yes, conduct a post-event survey immediately after the event but keep measuring every 2-3 months until the next offsite. The data will reveal how well you performed against your goals and how to do even better the next time.

Offsites can be a powerful tool to build an organization’s culture and revenue, but only if they are thoughtfully designed to go beyond swanky settings, sermons from the stage, and dust-collecting swag and build the connections and collaborations that only start when people are together, in-person, outside of the office.

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Don’t ‘Follow the Science’, Follow the Scientific Method

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Don't 'Follow the Science', Follow the Scientific Method

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

The scientific method is probably the most useful thing I’ve learnt in my life. It is a near universal tool that can be used in so many ways and so many places. It unleashes a whole world of assisted critical thinking that is invaluable to innovators, but also in our personal lives. Teaching it to individuals or teams who are not trained as scientists is one of the most powerful and enabling things we can do for them. And teaching it to kids, as opposed to endless facts and data that they can easily access from the web is something we should do far more of.

Recruiting Skills not Expertise: When I was involved in recruiting, I always valued PhD’s and engineers. Sometimes that was for their unique, specialized knowledge. But more often than not it was more for the critical thinking skills they had acquired while gaining that specialized knowledge. In today’s rapidly evolving world, specific knowledge typically has a relatively short shelf-life. But the cognitive framework embodied by the scientific method is a tool for life, and one that can be reapplied in so many ways. .

Don’t Follow the Science, Follow the Process: All too often today the scientific method gets confused with ‘following the science’. The scientific process is almost infinitely useful, but blindly ‘following the science’ is often far less so, and can be counter productive. The scientific method is a process that helps us to evaluate information, challenge assumptions, and in so doing, get us closer to truth. Sometimes it confirms our existing ideas, sometimes it improves them, and sometimes it completely replaces them. But it is grounded in productive and informed skepticism, and this is at the heart of why science is constantly evolving.

‘Follow the Science’ in many ways the opposite. It assumes someone in a position of power already has the right answer. At it’s best it means blindly follow the consensus of today’s experts. All too often it really means ‘do as you are told’. Frequently the people saying this are not the experts themselves, but are instead evoking third party expertise to support their viewpoint. That of course is the opposite of science. It’s often well intended, but not always good advice.

Science is not a Religion: At the heart of this is a fundamental misunderstanding of science, and scientists. In today’s media and social media, all too often science and scientists are presented with a quasi-religious reverence, and challenging the current view is framed as heretical. How often do you here the framing ‘scientists tell us… ‘ as a way of validating a position?

This is understandable. The sheer quantity and complexity of information we are faced with in our everyday lives is increasingly unmanageable, while big challenges like climate unimaginably complex. I find it almost impossible to keep up with my own interests, let alone everything that is happening. And some topics are so technical that they simply require translation by experts. When someone announces they’ve discovered the Higgs boson particle, it’s not really practical for any of us to pop over to the local particle accelerator and check for ourselves. So expertise is clearly an important part of any decision chain. But experts come with their own biases. An engineer naturally tends to see problems and through, an engineering lens, a chemist through a chemical one.

Science in Support of an Agenda: One danger with the ‘follow the science’ mantra is that it is often used to reinforce a belief, opinion, or even agenda. I’ve seen this all too often in my work life, with the question, ‘can you find me a paper that supports ‘x’. This is often benign, in that someone passionately believes something, and wants to find evidence to support it. But this is fundamentally the wrong question, and of course, completely ‘unscientific’.

The scientific literature is filled with competing theories, disproven or outdated ideas, and bad science. If you look for literature to support an idea you can usually find it, even if it’s wrong. Scientists are not gods. They make mistakes, they run poor experiments, and they are subject to confirmation biases, ego, and other human frailties. There is a good reason for the phrase that science evolves one death at a time. Science, like virtually every human organization is hierarchical, and a prestigious scientist can advance a discipline, but can also slow it down by holding onto a deeply held belief. And mea culpa, I know from personal experience that it’s all too easy to fall in love with a theory, and resist evidence to the contrary.

Of course, some theories are more robust than others. Both consensus and longevity are therefore important considerations. Some science is so well established, and supported by so much observation that it’s unlikely that it will fundamentally change. For example, we may still have a great deal to learn about gravity, but for practical purposes, apples will still drop from trees.

Peer Review: Policing the literature is hard. Consensus is right until its not. Another phrase I often hear is ‘peer reviewed’, in the context that this makes the paper ‘right’. Of course, peer review is valuable, part of the scientific process, and helps ensure that content has quality, and has been subject to a high level of rigor. If one person says it, it can be a breakthrough or utter nonsense. If a lot of smart people agree, it’s more likely to be ‘right’. But that is far from guaranteed, especially if they share the same ingoing assumptions. Scientific consensus has historically embraced many poor theories; a flat earth, or the sun revolving around the earth are early examples. More tragically, I grew up with the thalidomide generation in Europe. On an even bigger scale, the industrial revolution gave us so much, but also precipitated climate change. And on a personal level, I’ve just been told by my physician to take a statin, and I am in the process of fighting my way through rapidly growing and evolving literature in order to decide if that is the right decision. So next time you see a scientist, or worse, a politician, journalist, or a random poster on Twitter claim they own scientific truth, enjoin you to ‘follow the science’, or accuse someone else of being a science denier, treat it with a grain of sodium chloride.

They may of course be right, but the more strident they are, or the less qualified, the less likely they are to really understand science, and hence what they are asking you to follow. And the science they pick is quite possibly influenced by their own goals, biases or experience. Of course, practically we cannot challenge everything. We need to be selective, and the amount of personal effort we put into challenging an idea will depend upon how important it is to us as individuals.

Owning your Health: Take physicians as an example. At some time or other, we’ve all looked to a physician for expert advise. And there is a good reason to do so. They work very hard to secure deep knowledge of their chosen field, and the daily practice of medicine gives then a wealth of practical as well as well as theoretical knowledge. But physicians are not gods either. The human body is a very complex system, physicians have very little time with an individual patient (over the last 10 years, the average time a physician spends with a patient has shrunk to a little over 15 minutes), the field is vast and expanding, and our theories around how to diagnose and treat disease are constantly evolving. In that way, medicine is a great example of the scientific method in action, but also how transient ‘scientific truths’ can be.

I already mentioned my current dilemma with statins. But to give an even more deeply personal example, neither my wife or I would be alive today if we’d blindly followed a physicians diagnosis.

I had two compounding and comparatively rare conditions that combined to appear like a more common one. The physician went with the high probability answer. I took time to dig deeper and incorporate more details. Together we got to the right answer, and I’m still around!

This is a personal and pragmatic example of how valuable the scientific process can be. My health is important, so I chose to invest considerable time in the diagnosis I was given, and challenge it productively, instead of blindly accepting an expert opinion. My physicians had far more expertise than I did, but I had far more time and motivation. We ultimately complemented each other by partnering, and using the scientific method both as a process, and as a way to communicate.

The Challenge of Science Communication: To be fair, science communication is hard. It requires communicating an often complex concept with sufficient simplicity for it to be understandable, often requires giving guidance, while also embracing appropriate uncertainty. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of Covid 19, where a lot of ‘follow the science’, and ‘science denier’ language came from. At the beginning of the pandemic, the science was understandably poorly developed, but we still had to make important decisions on often limited data. At first we simply didn’t understand even the basics like the transmission vectors (was it airborne or surface, how long did it survive outside of the body, etc). I find it almost surreal to think back to those early months, how little we knew, the now bizarre clean room protocols we used on our weekly shopping, and some of the fear that has now faded into the past.

But because we understood so little, we made a lot of mistakes. The over enthusiastic use of ventilators may have killed some patients, although that is still a hotly debated topic. Early in the pandemic masks, later to become a controversial and oddly politically charged topic, masks were specifically not recommended by the US government for the general public. Who knows how many people contracted the disease by following this advice? It was well intentioned, as authorities were trying to prevent a mask shortage for health workers. But it was also mechanistically completely wrong.

At the time I used simple scientific reasoning, and realized this made little sense. If the virus was transmitted via an airborne vector, a mask would help. If it wasn’t, it would do no harm, at least as long as I didn’t subtract from someone with greater need. By that time the government had complete control of the mask supply chain anyway, so that was largely a moot point. Instead I dug out a few old N95 masks that had been used for spray painting and DIY, and used them outside of the house (hospitals would not accept donations of used masks). I was lambasted with ‘follow the science’ by at least one friend for doing so, but followed an approach with high potential reward and virtually zero downside. I’ll never know if that specifically worked, but I didn’t get Covid, at least not until much later when it was far less dangerous.

Science doesn’t own truth: Unlike a religion, good science doesn’t pretend to own ultimate truths. But unfortunately it can get used that way. Journalists, politicians, technocrats and others sometimes weaponize (selective) science to support an opinion. Even s few scientists who have become frustrated with ‘science deniers’ can slip into this trap.

Science is a Journey: I should clarify that the scientific method is more of a journey, not so much a single process. To suggest is is a single ‘thing’ so is probably an unscientific simplification in its own right. It’s more a way of thinking that embraces empiricism, observation, description, productive skepticism, and the use of experimentation to test and challenge hypothesis. It also helps us to collaborate and communicate with experts in different areas, creating a common framework for collaboration, rather than blindly following directions or other expert opinions.

It can be taught, and is incredibly useful. But like any tool, it requires time and effort to become a skilled user. But if we invest in it, it can be extraordinarily valuable, both in innovation and life. It’s perhaps not for every situation, as that would mire us in unmanageable procrastination. But if something is important, it’s an invaluable tool.

Image credits: Pixabay

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You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong

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(According to Seth Godin)

You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s that time of year again – the annual ritual of strategic planning. But as Seth Godin points out in “How to Avoid Strategy Myopia,” we often mistake annual budgets and operational efficiency plans for true strategy. Strategies are not plans or guarantees; they’re informed choices to pursue possibilities that may or may not work.

Godin’s insights, while often associated with innovation, are fundamentally about strategy in its purest form. They challenge us to look beyond next quarter’s earnings and focus on transformative potential just beyond our current vision.

The Myth of “Strategic Planning”

Consider for a moment the last strategic planning session you attended. Was it dominated by discussions of cost-cutting measures, market share percentages, and incremental improvements? If so, you’re not alone. Many organizations focus on optimizing their current operations, behavior that is reinforced by the processes, templates, and forms required to secure next year’s funding.

However, as Godin warns, “When the boss demands a strategy that comes with certainty and proof, we’re likely to settle for a collection of chores, tasks, and tactics, which is not the same as an elegant, resilient strategy. To do strategy right, we need to lean into possibility.”

The Realities We Must Confront

Godin challenges us to confront several uncomfortable truths:

Today’s data doesn’t predict tomorrow: Executives rely heavily on easily measurable metrics based on false proxies when they make decisions. While these metrics provide a sense of control and comfort, they close our eyes to emerging opportunities and threats. When AT&T’s executives considered exiting the cell phone market in the 1980s, they turned to McKinsey to find data to inform their decision. Estimating that the total worldwide market for cell phones was 900,000, AT&T executives were comfortable exiting. It’s unknown if that comfort was worth the $11.5 billion AT&T spent to acquire McCaw Cellular in 1995.

Serving everyone serves no one: “Strategy myopia occurs when we fail to identify who we seek to serve and focus on what we seek to produce instead.” AMEN! True strategy begins with a deep understanding of our customers’ evolving needs, not just their current preferences. This requires empathy, foresight, and a willingness to challenge our assumptions. It also requires us to listen and act on what we hear from customers and not just from our bosses.

“All of the Above” is not an option: Strategy requires that we make choices and is as much about what we choose not to do as what we commit to doing. It requires the courage to say no to good opportunities in service of great ones. It requires facing your FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), loss aversion bias, and finding the courage to keep going.

5 Practical Steps You Can Take

If any of these sound familiar, it’s because they’re also innovation best practices.

Dedicate One Day per Month for Strategic Thinking: Set aside one full day each month for long-term strategic questions, free from the “Tyranny of Now.”
Cultivate Diverse Perspectives: Invite and listen to voices from different backgrounds, disciplines, and levels within the organization.
Embrace Small-Scale Experimentation: Run a series of small, low-cost, low-profile experiments instead of betting everything on a single initiative.
Redefine Success Metrics: Move beyond traditional financial metrics to include indicators of future potential, such as customer lifetime value and adaptability to change.
Foster a Culture of Questioning: Channel your inner two-year-old and ask “why” with genuine curiosity. Encourage your team to challenge assumptions because the most transformative strategies often emerge from questioning the status quo.

As we continue through this season of strategic planning, let’s challenge ourselves to think beyond the annual budget. Let’s envision the future we want to create and chart a course to get there. After all, in the words of Godin himself, “It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.”

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Why Reason Matters

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Why Reason Matters

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

How many times a day do you ask someone to do something? If you total all the requests you make of coworkers, family members, friends, people at restaurants and shops, and even strangers, the total is somewhere between 100 and 1 bazillion. Now, what if I told you that by including just one word in your request, the odds of receiving a positive response increase by 50%?

And no, that word is not “please.”

The real magic word

Harvard 1978. Decades before everyone had access to computer labs, home computers, and personal printers, students had to line up at the copy machine to make copies. You could easily spend hours in line, even if you only had a few copies to make. It was an inefficient and infuriating problem for students.

It was also a perfect research opportunity for Ellen Langer, a professor in Harvard’s Psychology Department.

Prof. Langer and her colleagues asked students to break into the line using one of three phrases:

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine?”
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”

The results were definitive and surprising. Students who used the first phrase were successful 60% of the time, but those who used the phrases with “because” were successful 93% and 94% of the time.

“Because” matters. The reason does not.

Note that in phrases two and three, the reason the student is asking to cut in line isn’t very good. You can practically hear the snarky responses, “Of course, you have to make copies; why else would you be at the copy machine?” or “We’re all in a rush,” and the request is denied.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, the research (and hundreds of subsequent studies) showed that when the ask is simple or familiar, people tend to follow instructions or respond positively to requests without paying attention to what’s said, even if the instructions don’t make sense or the request disadvantages them in some way. Essentially, people hear “because,” assume it’s followed by a good reason and comply.

“Because” matters. How you use it matters more.

The power of “because” isn’t about manipulation or coercion. It’s about fostering a culture of transparency, critical thinking, and effective communication.

Taking the time to think about when and how to communicate the Why behind your requests increases your odds of success and establishes you as a strategic and thoughtful leader. But building your “Because’ habit takes time, so consider starting here:

Conduct a “Because” Audit: For one day, track your use of “because.” How many times do you make a request? How many times to you explain your requests with “because?” How many times do you receive a request, and how many of those include “because?” Simply noticing when “because” is used and whether it works provides incredible insights into the impact it can have in your work.

Connect your “Becauses” As leaders, we often focus on the “what” and “how” of directives, but the “why” is equally crucial. Take your top three strategic priorities for the quarter and craft a compelling “because” statement that clearly articulates the reasoning behind it. For instance, “We’re expanding into the Asian market because it represents a $50 billion opportunity that aligns perfectly with our core competencies.” This approach not only provides clarity but also helps in rallying your team around a common purpose.

Cascade the “Because” Habit: Great leaders don’t just adopt best practices; they institutionalize them. Challenge your direct reports to incorporate “because” into their communications. When they bring you requests, ask them for the “because” if they don’t offer it. Make it a friendly competition and celebrate people who use this technique to drive better outcomes.

Tell me how you’ll start because then you’re more likely to succeed.

(see what I did there?)

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An Innovation Leadership Fable

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Wisdom from the Waters

An Innovation Leadership Fable

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Once upon a time, in a lush forest, there lived a colony of industrious beavers known far and wide for their magnificent dams, which provided shelter and sustenance for many.

One day, the wise old owl who governed the forest decreed that all dams must be rebuilt to withstand the increasingly fierce storms that plagued their land. She gave the beavers two seasons to complete it, or they would lose half their territory to the otters.

The Grand Design: Blueprints and Blind Spots

The beaver chief, a kind fellow named Oakchew, called the colony together, inviting both the elder beavers, known for their experience and sage advice and the young beavers who would do the actual building.

Months passed as the elders debated how to build the new dams. They argued about mud quantities, branch angles, and even which mix of grass and leaves would provide structural benefit and aesthetic beauty. The young beavers sat silently, too intimidated by their elders’ status to speak up.

Work Begins: Dams and Discord

As autumn leaves began to fall, Oakchew realized they had yet to start building. Panicked, he ordered work to commence immediately.

The young beavers set to work but found the new method confusing and impractical. As time passed, progress slowed, panic set in, arguments broke out, and the once-harmonious colony fractured.

One group insisted on precisely following the new process even as it became obvious that they would not meet the deadline. Another reverted to their old ways, believing that a substandard something was better than nothing. And one small group went rogue, retreating to the smallest stream to figure it out for themselves.

As the deadline grew closer, the beavers worked day and night, but progress was slow and flawed. In desperation, Oakchew called upon the squirrels to help, promising half the colony’s winter food stores.

Just as the first storm clouds gathered, Oakchew surveyed the completed dams. Many were built as instructed, but the rushed work was evident and showed signs of weakness. Most dams were built with the strength and craftsmanship of old but were likely to fail as the storms’ intensity increased. One stood alone and firm, roughly constructed with a mix of old and new methods.

Wisdom from the Waters: Experiments and Openness

Oakchew’s heart sank as he realized the true cost of their efforts. The beavers had met their deadline but at a great cost. Many were exhausted and resentful, some had left the colony altogether, and their once-proud craftsmanship was now shoddy and unreliable.

He called a final meeting to reflect on what had happened. Before the elders could speak, Oakchew asked the young beavers for their thoughts. The colony listened in silent awe as the young builders explained the flaws in the “perfect” process. The rogue group explained that they had started building immediately, learning from each failure, and continuously improving their design.

“We wasted so much time trying to plan the perfect dam,” Oakchew admitted to the colony. “If we had started building sooner and learned from our mistakes, we would not have paid such a high cost for success. We would not have suffered and lost so much if we had worked to ensure every beaver was heard, not just invited.”

From that day forward, the beaver colony adopted a new approach of experimentation, prototyping, and creating space for all voices to be heard and valued. While it took many more seasons of working together to improve their dams, replenish their food stores, and rebuild their common bonds, the colony eventually flourished once more.

The Moral of the Story – (just in case it isn’t obvious)

The path to success is paved not with perfect plans but with the courage to act, the wisdom to learn from failures, and the openness to embrace diverse ideas. True innovation arises when we combine the best of tradition with the boldness of experimentation.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Collaboration Being Killed by Collaboration Software

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Collaboration Being Killed by Collaboration Software

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In our race to enable and support hybrid teams, our reliance on collaboration software has inadvertently caused us to forget the art of true collaboration.

The pandemic forced us to rely on digital platforms for communication and creativity. But as we embraced these tools, something essential was lost in translation. Last week, I watched team members sitting elbow-to-elbow spend two hours synthesizing discovery interviews and debating opportunity areas entirely by chat.

What collaboration is

“Collaboration” seems to have joined the ranks of meaningless corporate buzzwords. In an analysis of 1001 values from 172 businesses, “collaboration” was the #2 most common value (integrity was #1), appearing in 23% of the companies’ value statements.

What it means in those companies’ statements is anyone’s guess (we’ve all been in situations where stated values and lived values are two different things). But according to the dictionary, collaboration is “the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing.”

That’s a short definition with a lot of depth.

“The same thing” means that the people working together are working towards a shared goal in which they have a stake in the outcome (not just the completion).
“Working together” points towards interdependence, that everyone brings something unique to the work and that shared goal cannot be achieved without each person’s unique contribution.
“Two or more people” needing each other to achieve a shared outcome requires a shared sense of respect, deep trust, and vulnerability.

It’s easy to forget what “collaboration” means. But we seem to have forgotten how to do it.

What collaboration is not

As people grow more comfortable “collaborating” online, it seems that fewer people are actually collaborating.

Instead, they’re:

Transacting: There is nothing wrong with email, texts, or messaging someone on your platform of choice. But for the love of goodness, don’t tell me our exchange was a collaboration. If it were, every trip to the ATM would be a team-building exercise.
Offering choices: When you go out to eat at a fast-food restaurant, do you collaborate with the employee to design your meal? No. You order off a menu. Offering a choice between two or three options (without the opportunity to edit or customize the options), isn’t collaboration. It’s taking an order.
Complying: Compliance is “the act of obeying a law or rule, especially one that controls a particular industry or type of work.” Following rules isn’t collaboration, it’s following a recipe
Cooperating: Cooperation is when two or more people work together independently or interdependently to achieve someone else’s goal. Collaboration requires shared objectives and ownership, not just shared tasks and timelines.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these activities. Just don’t confuse them with collaboration because it sends the wrong message to your people.

Why this matters

This isn’t an ivory-tower debate about semantics.

When people believe that simple Q&A, giving limited and unalterable options, following rules, and delivering requests are collaboration, they stop thinking. Curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving give way to efficiency and box-checking. Organizations stop exploring, developing, and innovating and start doing the same thing better, faster, and cheaper.

So, if you truly want your organization to grow because it’s filled with creative and empathetic problem-solvers, invest in reclaiming the true spirit of collaboration. After all, the next big idea isn’t hiding in a chat log—it’s waiting to be born in the spark of genuine collaboration.

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What We Can Learn from MrBeast’s Onboarding

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Lessons from a Leaked Document

What We Can Learn From MrBeast's Onboarding

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In the often murky world of corporate communication, a leaked MrBeast document has emerged as a beacon of clarity. Far from being your typical vague, jargon-filled memo, this onboarding document is a crystal-clear recipe for success that’s as refreshing as it is rare.

But first, let’s address the elephant in the room. MrBeast’s empire isn’t without its share of controversy. Reports of toxic work environments, unsafe conditions for contestants, and allegations of rigged games cast a shadow over his content creation machine and his leadership capabilities. These are serious issues that merit investigation and discussion. As a result, this post isn’t an endorsement of MrBeast as a leader, it’s an endorsement of an onboarding document that he wrote.

The Secret Sauce: Clarity Meets Innovation

What sets this document apart is its razor-sharp clarity and relentless focus on creativity. Unlike the vague platitudes that plague many corporate communications, job descriptions, and performance matrixes, this document clearly outlines expectations, success metrics, and the strategies and tactics to fuel continuous innovation.

This clarity is transformative for people and organizations. When team members understand both the guardrails and the goals, they channel their creative energy into groundbreaking ideas rather than second-guessing their approach and worrying about repercussions.

Expectations: Always Be Learning

The first principle is a clear directive: always be learning. In MrBeast’s world, this isn’t just about personal growth—it’s about staying ahead in a rapidly changing digital landscape. This commitment to continuous learning fuels innovation by ensuring the team is constantly exploring new technologies, trends, and creative techniques.

While some see the definition of A, B, and C-players as evidence of a toxic workplace, the fact is that it’s the reality in most workplaces. It’s the absence of clarity, usually disguised by claims of family-like cultures that value diversity, that makes workplaces toxic.

Metrics: The Start of a Feedback Loop

The focus on specific success metrics like Click-Through Rate and Average View Duration isn’t just about measurement—it’s about creating a feedback loop for innovation. Clear benchmarks developed over time allow teams to quickly assess the impact of new ideas and iterate accordingly. It also removes the temptation and ability to “move the goalposts” to create the appearance of success.

Strategy: Structure Meets Creativity

After describing what success looks like for employees and how they’ll be measured, the document outlines a structured content formula akin to an innovation strategy. It provides a clear framework of priorities, goals, and boundaries while encouraging creative experimentation within those boundaries.

Starting with a step-by-step guide to making videos with a “wow” factor, the document also emphasizes the criticality of focusing on “critical components” and managing dependencies and

Far from the usual corporate claims that direction and “how to’s” constrain creativity and disempower employees, this approach creates a safety net that allows employees to be successful while still pushing the envelope of what’s possible in content creation.

How to Become Your Version of (a non-controversial) Mr. Beast

You don’t have to be a content creator, social media savant, or company founder to follow MrBeast’s lead. You have to do something much more difficult – communicate clearly and consistently.

Clearly define what success looks like (and doesn’t) for your employees and projects.
Establish frameworks that encourage bold ideas while maintaining focus.
Define objective success metrics and consistently measure, track, and use them.

This leaked MrBeast document offers more than just a glimpse into a YouTube empire; it’s a masterclass in leadership in the era of hybrid workplaces, geographically dispersed teams, and emerging cultures and norms.

The document’s approach shows that innovation doesn’t have to be chaotic. By providing clear expectations and frameworks, leaders can create an environment where creativity thrives, and groundbreaking ideas can be rapidly developed and implemented.

When viewed in the bigger context of the MrBeast organization, however, the document is also a reminder that no matter how clear you think your communication is, you must be vigilant for those who claim that bad behavior is just a “misunderstanding.” Leaders know that no amount of views, clicks, or revenue is worth sacrificing the well-being of their teams.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Why Small Innovations Matter Now More Than Ever

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Searching for Silver Linings

Why Small Innovations Matter Now More Than Ever

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Do you feel like you’re drowning in a sea of bad news? You’re not alone. We’re standing in the eye of a storm of war, political division, and endless layoffs. In times like these, why bother with innovation when we’re using all our energy to survive and make sense of things?

I’ve asked myself this question with increasing frequency over the past months. After hours of searching, querying, and reading to understand why you, me, or any other individual should bother with innovation, I can tell you two things:

There’s no logical, data-backed reason why any individual should bother innovating (there are many logical, data-backed reasons why companies should innovate)
Innovation is the only life raft that’s ever carried us from merely surviving to thriving.

If that seems like a big, overwhelming, and exhausting expectation to place on innovators, you’re right. But it doesn’t have to be because innovation is also small things that make you smile, spark your curiosity, and prompt you to ask, “How might we…?”

Here are three small innovations that broke through the dark clouds of the news cycle, made me smile, and started a domino effect of questions and wonder.

LEGO Braille Bricks: Building a More Inclusive World

You know them, and you love them (unless you’ve stepped on one), and somehow, they got even better. In 2023, LEGO released Braille Bricks to the public.

By modifying the studs (those bumps on the top of the brick) to correspond with the braille alphabet, numbers, and symbols and complementing the toy with a website offering a range of activities, educator resources, and community support, LEGO built a bridge between sighted and visually impaired worlds, one tiny brick at a time.

How might a small change build empathy and connect people?

The Open Book: Fulfilling a Dream by Working on Vacation

Have you ever dreamed of going on vacation so that you could work an hourly job without pay? Would you believe there is a two-year waitlist of people willing to pay for such an experience?

Welcome to The Open Book, a second-hand bookstore in Wigtown, Scotland, that offers “bibliophiles, avid readers, kindred book lovers, and adventure seekers” the opportunity to live out their dreams of running the bookstore by day and living above it in a tiny apartment by night. The bookstore is owned and operated by a local nonprofit, and all proceeds, about $10,000 per year, go to supporting the Wigtown Book Festival.

How might you turn your passion into an experience others would pay for?

The Human Library: Checking Out Books That Talk Back

If used books aren’t your thing, consider going to The Human Library. This innovative concept started in Copenhagen in 2000 and has spread to over 80 countries, offering a unique twist on traditional libraries. Readers “borrow” individuals from all walks of life – from refugees to rockstars refugees, from people with disabilities to those with unusual occupations – to hear their stories, ask difficult questions, and engage in open dialogue.

How might you create opportunities for dialogue and challenge your preconceptions?

Small Things Make a Big Difference

In a world that often feels dark, these small innovations are helpful reminders that if you are curious, creative, and just a bit brave, you can spark joy, wonder, and change.

How will you innovate, no matter how small, to brighten your corner of the world?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Don’t Listen to the ‘We Can’t Do That’ Lie

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These Are the Truths

Don't Listen to the 'We Can't Do That' Lie

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

How many times have you proposed a new idea and been told, “We can’t do that?” Probably quite a few. My favorite memory of being told, “We can’t do that,” happened many years ago while working with a client in the publishing industry:

Client: We can’t do that.

Me: Why?

Client: Because we already tried it, and it didn’t work.

Me: When did you try it?

Client: 1972

Me: Well, things certainly haven’t changed since 1972, so you’re right, we definitely shouldn’t try again.

I can only assume they appreciated my sarcasm as much as the idea because we eventually did try the idea, and, 30+ years later, it did work. But the client never would have enjoyed that success if my team and I had not seen through “we can’t do that” and helped them admit (confess) what they really meant.

Quick acknowledgment

Yes, sometimes “We can’t do that” is true. Laws and regulations define what can and can’t be done. But they are rarely as binary as people make them out to be. In those gray areas, the lie of “we can’t do that” obscures the truth of won’t, not able to, and don’t care.

“I won’t do it.”

When you hear “can’t,” it usually means “won’t.” Sometimes, the “won’t” is for a good reason – “I won’t do the dishes tonight because I have an urgent deadline, and if I don’t deliver, my job is at risk.” Sometimes, the “won’t” isn’t for a good reason – “I won’t do the dishes because I don’t want to.” When that’s the case, “won’t” becomes “can’t” in the hope that the person making the request backs off and finds another solution.

For my client, “We can’t do that” actually meant, “I won’t do that because it failed before and, even though that was thirty years ago, I’m afraid it will fail again, and I will be embarrassed, and it may impact my reputation and job security.”

You can’t work with “can’t.” You can work with “won’t.” When someone “won’t” do something, it’s because there’s a barrier, real or perceived. By understanding the barrier, you can work together to understand, remove, or find a way around it.

“I’m not able to do it.”

“Can’t” may also come with unspoken caveats. We can’t do that because we’ve never done it before and are scared. We can’t do that because it is outside the scope of our work. We can’t do that because we don’t know how.

Like “won’t,” you can work with “not able to” to understand the gap between where you are now and where you want to go. If it’s because you’re scared of doing something new, you can have conversations to get smarter about the topic or run small experiments to get real-world learnings. If you’re not able to do something because it’s not within your scope of work, you can expand your scope or work with people who have it in their scope. If you don’t know how, you can talk to people, take classes, and watch videos to learn how.

“I don’t care.”

As brave as it is devastating, “we can’t do that” can mean “I don’t care enough to do that.”

Executives rarely admit to not caring, but you see it in their actions. When they say that innovation and growth are important but don’t fund them or pull resources at the first sign of a wobble in the business, they don’t care. If they did care, they would try to find a way to keep investing and supporting the things they say are priorities.

Exploring options, trying, making an effort—that’s the difference between “I won’t do it” and “I don’t care.” “I won’t do that” is overcome through logic and action because the executive is intellectually and practically open to options. “I don’t care” requires someone to change their priorities, beliefs, and self-perception, changes that require major personal, societal, or economic events.

Now it’s your turn to tell the truth

Are you willing to ask the questions to find them?

Image credit: Unsplash

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False Choice – Founder versus Manager

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False Choice - Founder versus Manager

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, was so inspired by a speech by Airbnb cofounder and CEO that he wrote an essay about well-intentioned advice that, to scale a business, founders must shift modes and become managers.

It went viral.

In the essay, he argued that:

In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who’ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.

With curiosity and an open mind, I read on.

I finished with a deep sigh and an eye roll.

This is why.

Manager Mode: The realm of liars and professional fakers

On the off chance that you thought Graham’s essay would be a balanced and reflective examination of management styles in different corporate contexts, his description of Manager Mode should relieve you of that thought:

The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it’s up to them to figure out how. But you don’t get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

Later, he writes about how founders are gaslit into adopting Manager Mode from every angle, including by “VCs who haven’t been founders themselves don’t know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.”

Founder Mode: A meritocracy of lifelong learners

For Graham, Founder Mode boils down to two things:

Sweating the details
Engaging with employees throughout the organization beyond just direct reports. He cites Steve Jobs’ practice of holding “an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart.”

To his credit, Graham acknowledges that getting involved in the details is micromanaging, “which is bad,” and that delegation is required because “founders can’t keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20.” A week later, he acknowledged that female founders “don’t have permission to run their companies in Founder Mode the same way men can.”

Yet he persists in believing that Founder, not Manager, Mode is critical to success,

“Look at what founders have achieved already, and yet they’ve achieved this against a headwind of bad advice. Imagine what they’ll do once we can tell them how to run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.”

Leader Mode: Manager Mode + Founder Mode

The essay is interesting, but I have real issues with two of his key points:

Professional managers are disconnected from the people and businesses they manage, and as a result, their practices and behaviors are inconsistent with startup success.
Founders should ignore conventional wisdom and micromanage to their heart’s content.

Most “professional managers” I’ve met are deeply connected to the people they manage, committed to the businesses they operate, and act with integrity and authenticity. They are a far cry from the “professional fakers” and “skillful liars” Graham describes.

Most founders I’ve met should not be allowed near the details once they have a team in place. Their meddling, need for control, and soul-crushing FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) lead to chaos, burnout, and failure.

The truth is, it’s contextual. The leaders I know switch between Founder and Manager mode based on the context. They work with the passion of founders, trust with the confidence of managers, and are smart and humble enough to accept feedback when they go too far in one direction or the other.

Being both manager and founder isn’t just the essence of being a leader. It’s the essence of being a successful corporate innovator. You are a founder, investing in, advocating for, and sweating the details of ambiguous and risky work. And you are a manager navigating the economic, operational, and political minefields that govern the core business and fund your paycheck and your team.

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