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.

  1. Clearly define what success looks like (and doesn’t) for your employees and projects.
  2. Establish frameworks that encourage bold ideas while maintaining focus.
  3. 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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We Are Starving Our Innovation Economy

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We Are Starving Our Innovation Economy

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The Cold War was fundamentally different from any conflict in history. It was, to be sure, less over land, blood and treasure than it was about ideas. Communist countries believed that their ideology would prevail. They were wrong. The Berlin Wall fell and capitalism, it seemed, was triumphant.

Today, however, capitalism is in real trouble. Besides the threat of a rising China, the system seems to be crumbling from within. Income inequality in developed countries is at 50-year highs. In the US, the bastion of capitalism, markets have weakened by almost every imaginable metric. This wasn’t what we imagined winning would look like.

Yet we can’t blame capitalism. The truth is that its earliest thinkers warned about the potential for excesses that lead to market failure. The fact is that we did this to ourselves. We believed that we could blindly leave our fates to market and technological forces. We were wrong. Prosperity doesn’t happen by itself. We need to invest in an innovation economy.

Capitalism’s (Seemingly) Fatal Contradiction

Anyone who’s taken an “Economics 101” course knows about Adam Smith and his invisible hand. Essentially, the forces of self-interest, by their very nature, work to identify the optimal price that attracts just enough supply of a particular good or service to satisfy demand. This magical equilibrium point creates prosperity through an optimal use of resources.

However, some argued that the story wasn’t necessarily a happy one. After all, equilibrium implies a lack of economic profit and certainly businesses would want to do better than that. They would seek to gain a competitive advantage and, in doing so, create surplus value, which would then be appropriated to accumulate power to rig the system further in their favor.

Indeed, Adam Smith himself was aware of this danger. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” he wrote. In fact, the preservation of free markets was a major concern that ran throughout his work.

Yet as the economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, with innovation the contradiction dissipates. As long as we have creative destruction, market equilibriums are constantly shifting and don’t require capitalists to employ extractive, anti-competitive practices in order to earn excellent profits.

Two Paths To Profit

Anyone who manages a business must pursue at least one of two paths to profit. The first is to innovate. By identifying and solving problems in a competitive marketplace, firms can find new ways to create, deliver and capture value. Everybody wins.

Google’s search engine improved our lives in countless ways. Amazon and Walmart have dramatically improved distribution of goods throughout the economy, making it possible for us to pay less and get more. Pfizer and Moderna invested in an unproven technology that uses mRNA to deliver life-saving molecules and saved us from a deadly pandemic.

Still, the truth is that the business reality is not, “innovate or die,” but rather “innovate or find ways to reduce competition.” There are some positive ways to tilt the playing field, such as building a strong brand or specializing in some niche market. However, other strategies are not so innocent. They seek to profit by imposing costs on the rest of us

The first, called rent seeking, involves businesses increasing profits through getting litigation passed in their favor, as when car dealerships in New Jersey sued against Tesla’s direct sales model. The second, regulatory capture, seeks to co-opt agencies that are supposed to govern industry, resulting in favorable implementation and enforcement of the legal code.

Why “Pro-Business” Often Means Anti-Market

Corporations lobby federal, state and local governments to advance their interests and there’s nothing wrong with that. Elected officials should be responsive to their constituents’ concerns. That is, after all, how democracy is supposed to work. However, very often business interests try to maintain that they are arguing for the public good rather than their own.

Consider the issue of a minimum wage. Businesses argue that government regulation of wages is an imposition on the free market and that, given the magical forces of the invisible hand, letting the market set the price for wages would produce optimal outcomes. Artificially increasing wages, on the other hand, would unduly raise prices on the public and reduce profits needed to invest in competitiveness.

This line of argument is nothing new, of course. In fact, Adam Smith addressed it in The Wealth of Nations nearly 250 years ago:

Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

At the same time corporations have themselves been undermining the free market for wages through the abuse of non-compete agreements. Incredibly, 38% of American workers have signed some form of non-compete agreement. Of course, most of these are illegal and wouldn’t hold up in court, but serve to intimidate employees, especially low-wage workers.

That’s just for starters. Everywhere you look, free markets are under attack. Occupational licensing, often the result of lobbying by trade associations, has increased five-fold since the 1950s. Antitrust regulation has become virtually nonexistent, while competition has been reduced in the vast majority of American industries.

Perhaps not surprisingly, while all this lobbying has been going on, recent decades have seen business investment and innovation decline, and productivity growth falter while new business formation has fallen by 50%. Corporate profits, on the other hand, are at record highs.

Getting Back On Track

At the end of World War II, America made important investments to create the world’s greatest innovation economy. The GI Bill made what is perhaps the biggest investment ever in human capital, sending millions to college and creating a new middle class. Investments in institutions such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would create scientific capital that would fuel US industry.

Unfortunately, we abandoned that very successful playbook. Over the past 20 years, college tuition in the US has roughly doubled in the last 20 years. Perhaps not surprisingly, we’ve fallen to ninth among OECD countries for post-secondary education. The ones who do graduate are often forced into essentially decades of indentured servitude in the form of student loans.

At the same time, government investment in research as a percentage of GDP has been declining for decades, limiting our ability to produce the kinds of breakthrough discoveries that lead to exciting new industries. What passes for innovation these days displaces workers, but does not lead to significant productivity gains. Legislation designed to rectify the situation and increase our competitiveness stalled in the Senate.

So after 250 years, capitalism remains pretty much as Adam Smith first conceived, powerful yet fragile, always at risk of being undermined and corrupted by the same basic animal spirits that it depends on to set prices efficiently. He never wrote, nor is there any indication he ever intended, that markets should be left to their own devices. In fact, he and others warned us that markets need to be actively promoted and protected.

We are free to choose. We need to choose more wisely.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Microsoft CoPilot

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Does Diversity Increase Team Performance?

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Does Diversity Increase Team Performance?

GUEST POST from David Burkus

It’s often said by teams that “diversity is our strength.” We take for granted the idea that diverse teams bring more lived experiences, ideas, and solutions to the table. When asked, “How does diversity affect teamwork?” most leaders assume that teams composed of individuals from different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives are more likely to approach problems from various angles and come up with innovative solutions. And hence most leaders assume that diversity is a source of greater performance.

And while that’s true—it’s not as clear cut as we assume.

When you look at the research, the relationship between diversity and high-performing teams isn’t always a positive correlation. For diversity to truly enhance teamwork, teams need to establish psychological safety and build shared understanding. Otherwise, diverse ideas, perspectives, and experiences can cause more friction than innovation.

In this article, we will explore the importance of psychological safety and shared understanding in diverse teams. By understanding the impact of diversity on teamwork and implementing these practices, teams can harness the full potential of their diverse members and achieve better problem-solving and value creation.

Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is crucial for diverse teams to tap into the benefits of diversity. When team members feel psychologically safe, they are more likely to share their ideas, take risks, and engage in open and honest discussions. As a leader, it is essential to create an environment where team members feel comfortable expressing themselves without fear of judgment or negative consequences.

One way to build psychological safety is by demonstrating vulnerability as a leader. When leaders openly share their own challenges, mistakes, and uncertainties, it creates a safe space for team members to do the same. This builds trust and shows that it is acceptable to take risks and make mistakes. By embracing vulnerability, leaders can set the tone for open communication and encourage team members to bring their authentic selves to the discussion.

Another important aspect of psychological safety is teaching respectful dissent. Disagreements are inevitable in any team, but it is crucial to handle them in a productive and respectful manner. Encouraging team members to express their differing opinions and perspectives fosters a culture of healthy debate and prevents the formation of echo chambers. By establishing guidelines for respectful dissent, teams can ensure that disagreements are seen as opportunities for growth and learning rather than sources of conflict.

Shared Understanding

Shared understanding is important for diverse teams to work together effectively. When team members have a clear understanding of each other’s work preferences, strengths, and weaknesses, they can collaborate more efficiently and leverage each other’s skills and expertise. Building shared understanding requires intentional efforts to create an environment where team members can openly discuss their working styles and expectations.

One strategy for building shared understanding is to use exercises like the “manual of me.” This exercise involves team members sharing information about their preferred communication styles, work habits, and personal preferences. By understanding each other’s preferences, team members can adapt their communication and collaboration approaches to accommodate different working styles.

Creating a team working agreement is another effective way to establish shared understanding. This agreement outlines the team’s norms and expectations, addressing questions about how the team wants to work together. It can cover topics such as communication channels, decision-making processes, and conflict resolution strategies. By collectively defining these guidelines, teams can ensure that everyone is on the same page and reduce misunderstandings or conflicts that may arise due to differences in working styles or expectations.

Diversity, when combined with psychological safety and shared understanding, enhances teamwork, and leads to improved performance. By creating an environment where team members feel safe to express themselves and fostering shared understanding, teams can tap into the full potential of their diverse members. Embracing diversity as a strength allows teams to approach problems from various perspectives, leading to better problem-solving and value creation. And that helps everyone on the team do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on September 11, 2023

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28 Things I Learned the Hard Way

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28 Things I Learned the Hard Way

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

  1. If you want to have an IoT (Internet of Things) program, you’ve got to connect your products.
  2. If you want to build trust, give without getting.
  3. If you need someone with experience in manufacturing automation, hire a pro.
  4. If the engineering team wants to spend a year playing with a new technology, before the bell rings for recess ask them what solution they’ll provide and then go ask customers how much they’ll pay and how many they’ll buy.
  5. If you don’t have the resources, you don’t have a project.
  6. If you know how it will turn out, let someone else do it.
  7. If you want to make a friend, help them.
  8. If your products are not connected, you may think you have an IoT program, but you have something else.
  9. If you don’t have trust, you have just what you earned.
  10. If you hire a pro in manufacturing automation, listen to them.
  11. If Marketing has an optimistic sales forecast for the yet-to-be-launched product, go ask customers how much they’ll pay and how many they’ll buy.
  12. If you don’t have a project manager, you don’t have a project.
  13. If you know how it will turn out, teach someone else how to do it.
  14. If a friend needs help, help them.
  15. If you want to connect your products at a rate faster than you sell them, connect the products you’ve already sold.
  16. If you haven’t started building trust, you started too late.
  17. If you want to pull in the delivery date for your new manufacturing automation, instead, tell your customers you’ve pushed out the launch date.
  18. If the VP knows it’s a great idea, go ask customers how much they’ll pay and how many they’ll buy.
  19. If you can’t commercialize, you don’t have a project.
  20. If you know how it will turn out, do something else.
  21. If a friend asks you twice for help, drop what you’re doing and help them immediately.
  22. If you can’t figure out how to make money with IoT, it’s because you’re focusing on how to make money at the expense of delivering value to customers.
  23. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have much.
  24. If you don’t like extreme lead times and exorbitant capital costs, manufacturing automation is not for you.
  25. If the management team doesn’t like the idea, go ask customers how much they’ll pay and how many they’ll buy.
  26. If you’re not willing to finish a project, you shouldn’t be willing to start.
  27. If you know how it will turn out, it’s not innovation.
  28. If you see a friend that needs help, help them ask you for help.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Airlines Are Soaring to New Heights in Passenger Satisfaction

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Airlines Are Soaring to New Heights in Passenger Satisfaction

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

There’s good news for those who fly the friendly skies. The experience is getting better.

If you think about it, airlines have a simple product experience. It’s a plane that moves people. Safety is the number one priority. Beyond that, get the passengers to the destination on time. Passengers have choices in airlines. Some are more cost-efficient, such as Frontier and Spirit; or for more money, others, like American and Delta, offer higher service levels, such as first-class cabins. The passenger gets to choose.

Beyond the amenities of the major airlines, one of the most important criteria for customer satisfaction is on-time performance. Not long ago, the public’s confidence in the airlines’ ability to get people to their destinations on time was so low that I joked, “You can treat passengers terribly, but just get them to their destinations safely and on time, and they will fly you again and again.”

Yes, it’s a joke until you are the one experiencing an airline’s electronic breakdown or you’re on the wrong side of a bad storm. Consider that on-time performance can be impacted by three main factors: weather, mechanical issues and operational execution.

Safety is first, and bad weather is a legitimate reason for delays and cancellations. Mechanical issues also fall into that category. Passengers should be happy when an airline finds out about a mechanical issue while the plane is on the ground rather than in the air. However, operational execution is not a good excuse for delays and cancellations. This is what passengers are paying for. For example, a plane that lands on time but ends up delayed because there wasn’t an open gate or a ground crew available to bring the plane in and open the doors is frustrating and stressful to passengers trying to make a connection.

Good News

Aviation analytics company Cirium’s annual On-Time Performance Review has tracked on-time performance for over 15 years. In 2023, the average on-time performance for North American airlines was 74.45%. That means one out of every four flights was either delayed or canceled.

Certain airlines have a better track record than others. In North America, Delta (84.72%), Alaska Airlines (82.25%), American (80.61%) and United (80.04%) are the top on-time performers. Delta and American Airlines also ranked in the top 10 of all global airlines.

More Good News

During the pandemic, airline travel dropped to incredible lows. The return of people flying for vacation and business travel indicated that the pandemic was in the rearview mirror. However, the industry struggled as it worked out how to safely bring back employees and put planes back in the air. But that, too, is in the rearview mirror.

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the airlines’ customer satisfaction levels are at an all-time high. Passengers are rating airlines high for experiences such as check-in, boarding, cabin cleanliness and general courteous customer service. Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and research emeritus at the ACSI, says, “Airline customer satisfaction has climbed to new heights, reaching scores not seen even before the pandemic disrupted travel.”

A Brighter Horizon for Air Travel

While airlines offer a straightforward service—a safe and on-time flight—there is plenty that happens behind the scenes to make an airline run smoothly. What looks simple on the surface is actually very complicated. Safety, maintenance, scheduling, weather patterns, proper staffing and much more go into running a successful airline. Outside of weather and mechanical issues, operational execution is expected and is essential to maintaining the customer’s confidence in the airline.

Data from Cirium’s annual On-Time Performance Review and the recent results from the ACSI indicate that the airlines are on track. Ongoing improvements in airline customer service and operational efficiency show that the airlines are doing their best to provide a better experience, and exercising caution for weather and maintenance issues continues to make airlines one of the safest ways to travel.

Image Credits: misterinnovation.com, Delta Airlines

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

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The Keys to Successfully Leading Change

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The Keys to Successfully Leading Change

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

In the infographic below from Justin Mecham you’ll see a comprehensive overview that serves as a source of inspiration for leading change. Regarding this, I have a question for you:

Which three aspects of this overview do you find most compelling, and why?

My top three:

  1. Motivating and persuading others, as it is crucial for everyone to understand why change is personally beneficial.
  2. The emphasis on team dynamics, acknowledging that lasting and sustainable change is achieved more effectively through collective learning and scaling rather than on an individual basis.
  3. Communicating the vision, recognizing that without a clear and well-executed communication strategy, much can be lost in translation.

I am curious on your perspectives on this.

Please leave your thoughts as a comment below.

EDITOR’S NOTE: While executing the change plan is mentioned as number eight in the infographic, the building of a change plan is completely missing. While Change Leadership is one of the Five Keys to Successful Change in the Human-Centered Change methodology, it is in the use of the Change Planning Toolkit where the magic happens. Click the link to find out more.

Image Credits: Pixabay, Justin Mecham

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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:

  1. There’s no logical, data-backed reason why any individual should bother innovating (there are many logical, data-backed reasons why companies should innovate)
  2. 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

Lego Braille

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

The Open Book

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

Human Library

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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We Must Unlearn These Three Management Myths

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We Must Unlearn These Three Management Myths

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Mark Twain is reported to have said, “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” Ignorance of facts is easily remedied. We can read books, watch documentaries or simply do a quick Google search. Yet our misapprehensions and biases endure, even in the face of contradicting facts.

The truth is that much of what we believe has less to do with how we weigh evidence than how we see ourselves. In fact, fMRI studies have suggested have shown that evidence which contradicts our firmly held beliefs violates our sense of identity. Instead of adapting our views, we double down and lash out at those who criticize them.

This can be problematic in our personal lives, but in business it can be fatal. There is a reason that even prominent CEOs can pursue failed strategies and sophisticated investors will back hucksters to the hilt. Yet as Adam Grant points out in Think Again, we can make the effort to reexamine and alter our beliefs. Here are three myths that we need to watch out for.

Myth #1: The “Global Village” Will Be A Nice Place

Marshal McLuhan, in Understanding Media, one of the most influential books of the 20th century, described media as “extensions of man” and predicted that electronic media would eventually lead to a global village. Communities would no longer be tied to a single, isolated physical space but connect and interact with others on a world stage.

To many, the rise of the Internet confirmed McLuhan’s prophecy and, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, digital entrepreneurs saw their work elevated to a sacred mission. In Facebook’s IPO filing, Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

Yet, importantly, McLuhan did not see the global village as a peaceful place. In fact, he predicted it would lead to a new form of tribalism and result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in human history, as long separated—and emotionally charged—cultural norms would now constantly intermingle, clash and explode.

For many, if not most, people on earth, the world is often a dark and dangerous place. When your world is not secure, “open” is less of an opportunity to connect than it is a vulnerability to exploit. Things can look fundamentally different from the vantage point of, say, a tech company in Menlo Park, California then it does from, say, a dacha outside Moscow.

Context matters. Our most lethal failures are less often those of planning, logic or execution than they are that of imagination. Chances are, most of the world does not see things the way we do. We need to avoid strategic solipsism and constantly question our own assumptions.

Myth #2: Winning The “War For Talent” Will Make You More Competitive

In 1997, three McKinsey consultants published a popular book titled The War for Talent, which argued that due to demographic shifts, recruiting the “best and the brightest” was even more important than “capital, strategy, or R&D.” The idea made a lot of sense. What could be more important for a company than its people?

Yet as Malcolm Gladwell explained in an article about Enron, strict adherence to the talent rule contributed to the firm’s downfall. Executives that were perceived to be talented moved up fast. So fast, in fact, that it became impossible to evaluate their performance. People began to worry more about impressing their boss and appearing to be clever than doing their jobs.

The culture became increasingly toxic and management continued to bet on the same failed platitude until the only way to move up in the organization was to undermine others. As we now know, it didn’t end well. Enron went bankrupt in 2001, just four years after The War for Talent highlighted it as a model for others to follow.

The simple truth is that talent isn’t what you win in a battle. It’s what you build by actualizing the potential of those in your organization and throughout your ecosystem, including partners, customers and the communities in which you operate. In the final analysis, Enron didn’t fail because it lost the war for talent, it failed because it was at war with itself.

Myth #3: We Can “Engineer” Management

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, based on his experience as a manager in a steel factory. It took aim at traditional management methods and suggested a more disciplined approach. Rather than have workers pursue tasks in their own manner, he sought to find “the one best way” and train accordingly.

Before long, Taylor’s ideas became gospel, spawning offshoots such as scientific marketing, financial engineering and the six sigma movement. It was no longer enough to simply work hard, you had to measure, analyze and optimize everything. Over the years these ideas became so central to business thinking that they were rarely questioned.

Yet they should have been. The truth is that this engineering mindset is a zombie idea, a remnant of the logical positivism that was discredited way back in the 1930s and more recent versions haven’t fared any better. To take just one example, a study found that of 58 large companies that announced Six Sigma programs, 91 percent trailed the S&P 500 in stock performance. Yet that didn’t stop the endless parade of false promises.

At the root of the problem is a simple fact: We don’t manage machines, we manage ecosystems and we need to think more about networks and less about nodes. Our success or failure depend less on individual entities, than the connections between them. We need to think less like engineers and more like gardeners.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

At any given time, there are any number of clever people saying clever things. When you invoke a legendary icon like Marshall McLuhan and say “Global Village,” the concept acquires the glow of some historical, unalterable destiny. But that’s an illusion, just like the “War for Talent” and the idea of “engineering” your way out of managing a business and making wise choices.

Yet notice the trap. None of these things were put forward as mere opinions or perspectives. The McKinsey consultants who declared the “War for Talent” weren’t just expressing an opinion, but revealing the results of a “yearlong study…involving 77 companies and almost 6,000 managers and executives.” (And presumably, they sold the study right back to every one of those 77 companies).

The truth is that an idea can never be validated backward, only forward. No amount of analysis can shape reality. We need to continually test our ideas, reconsider them and adapt them to ever-changing conditions. The problem with concepts like six sigma isn’t necessarily in their design, but that they become elevated something approaching the sublime.

That’s why we shouldn’t believe everything we think. There are simply too many ways to get things wrong, while getting them right is always a relatively narrow path. Or, as Richard Feynman put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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Everyone Clear Now on What ChatGPT is Doing?

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Everyone Clear Now on What ChatGPT is Doing?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Almost a year and a half ago I read Stephen Wolfram’s very approachable introduction to ChatGPT, What is ChatGPT Doing . . . And Why Does It Work?, and I encourage you to do the same. It has sparked a number of thoughts that I want to share in this post.

First, if I have understood Wolfram correctly, what ChatGPT does can be summarized as follows:

  1. Ingest an enormous corpus of text from every available digitized source.
  2. While so doing, assign to each unique word a unique identifier, a number that will serve as a token to represent that word.
  3. Within the confines of each text, record the location of every token relative to every other token.
  4. Using just these two elements—token and location—determine for every word in the entire corpus the probability of it being adjacent to, or in the vicinity of, every other word.
  5. Feed these probabilities into a neural network to cluster words and build a map of relationships.
  6. Leveraging this map, given any string of words as a prompt, use the neural network to predict the next word (just like AutoCorrect).
  7. Based on feedback from so doing, adjust the internal parameters of the neural network to improve its performance.
  8. As performance improves, extend the reach of prediction from the next word to the next phrase, then to the next clause, the next sentence, the next paragraph, and so on, improving performance at each stage by using feedback to further adjust its internal parameters.
  9. Based on all of the above, generate text responses to user questions and prompts that reviewers agree are appropriate and useful.

OK, I concede this is a radical oversimplification, but for the purposes of this post, I do not think I am misrepresenting what is going on, specifically when it comes to making what I think is the most important point to register when it comes to understanding ChatGPT. That point is a simple one. ChatGPT has no idea what it is talking about.

Indeed, ChatGPT has no ideas of any kind — no knowledge or expertise — because it has no semantic information. It is all math. Math has been used to strip words of their meaning, and that meaning is not restored until a reader or user engages with the output to do so, using their own brain, not ChatGPT’s. ChatGPT is operating entirely on form and not a whit on content. By processing the entirety of its corpus, it can generate the most probable sequence of words that correlates with the input prompt it had been fed. Additionally, it can modify that sequence based on subsequent interactions with an end user. As human beings participating in that interaction, we process these interactions as a natural language conversation with an intelligent agent, but that is not what is happening at all. ChatGPT is using our prompts to initiate a mathematical exercise using tokens and locations as its sole variables.

OK, so what? I mean, if it works, isn’t that all that matters? Not really. Here are some key concerns.

First, and most importantly, ChatGPT cannot be expected to be self-governing when it comes to content. It has no knowledge of content. So, whatever guardrails one has in mind would have to be put in place either before the data gets into ChatGPT or afterward to intercept its answers prior to passing them along to users. The latter approach, however, would defeat the whole purpose of using it in the first place by undermining one of ChatGPT’s most attractive attributes—namely, its extraordinary scalability. So, if guardrails are required, they need to be put in place at the input end of the funnel, not the output end. That is, by restricting the datasets to trustworthy sources, one can ensure that the output will be trustworthy, or at least not malicious. Fortunately, this is a practical solution for a reasonably large set of use cases. To be fair, reducing the size of the input dataset diminishes the number of examples ChatGPT can draw upon, so its output is likely to be a little less polished from a rhetorical point of view. Still, for many use cases, this is a small price to pay.

Second, we need to stop thinking of ChatGPT as artificial intelligence. It creates the illusion of intelligence, but it has no semantic component. It is all form and no content. It is a like a spider that can spin an amazing web, but it has no knowledge of what it is doing. As a consequence, while its artifacts have authority, based on their roots in authoritative texts in the data corpus validated by an extraordinary amount of cross-checking computing, the engine itself has none. ChatGPT is a vehicle for transmitting the wisdom of crowds, but it has no wisdom itself.

Third, we need to fully appreciate why interacting with ChatGPT is so seductive. To do so, understand that because it constructs its replies based solely on formal properties, it is selecting for rhetoric, not logic. It is delivering the optimal rhetorical answer to your prompt, not the most expert one. It is the one that is the most popular, not the one that is the most profound. In short, it has a great bedside manner, and that is why we feel so comfortable engaging with it.

Now, given all of the above, it is clear that for any form of user support services, ChatGPT is nothing less than a godsend, especially where people need help learning how to do something. It is the most patient of teachers, and it is incredibly well-informed. As such, it can revolutionize technical support, patient care, claims processing, social services, language learning, and a host of other disciplines where users are engaging with a technical corpus of information or a system of regulated procedures. In all such domains, enterprises should pursue its deployment as fast as possible.

Conversely, wherever ambiguity is paramount, wherever judgment is required, or wherever moral values are at stake, one must not expect ChatGPT to be the final arbiter. That is simply not what it is designed to do. It can be an input, but it cannot be trusted to be the final output.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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What Are the Toughest Words to Say?

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What Are the Toughest Words to Say?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

As the world becomes more connected, it becomes smaller. And as it becomes smaller, competition becomes more severe. And as competition increases, work becomes more stressful. We live in a world where workloads increase, timelines get pulled in, metrics multiply and “accountability” is always the word of the day. And in these trying times, the most important word to say is also the toughest.

When your plate is full and someone tries to pile on more work, what’s the toughest word to say?

When the project is late and you’re told to pull in the schedule and you don’t get any more resources, what’s the toughest word to say?

When the technology you’re trying to develop is new-to-world and you’re told you must have it ready in three months, what’s the toughest word to say?

When another team can’t fill an open position and they ask you to fill in temporarily while you do your regular job, what’s the toughest word to say?

When you’re asked to do something that will increase sales numbers this quarter at the expense of someone else’s sales next quarter, what’s the toughest word to say?

When you’re told to use a best practice that isn’t best for the situation at hand, what’s the toughest word to say?

When you’re told to do something and how to do it, what’s the toughest word to say?

When your boss asks you something that you know is clearly their responsibility, what’s the toughest word to say?

Sometimes the toughest word is the right word.

Image credit: Pixabay

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