Linchpin, p.6
Linchpin, page 6
It’s difficult to train people to be Mark Cuban or Richard Branson or Madeleine Albright. It’s easy to train people to do the slog stuff because there’s a clear process and a manual. It’s work. Any single person might not want to do it, but finding people who will do it isn’t really a problem.
Inventing Twitter or Digg or 1-800-GOT-JUNK or Flatiron Partners, though, that takes something else. In 1996, Fred Wilson and Jerry Colonna founded a venture capital firm in New York City. Flatiron was the largest and most important Internet investment firm in New York, and for five years, they returned profits and created companies like few other funds in history. After the fact, it seems obvious that this was a special moment in time, and that taking advantage of it was smart. But right there, right then, it wasn’t obvious, it wasn’t easy, and there certainly wasn’t a manual. Anyone could have done it, but anyone didn’t. They did.
It takes art. Our economy now rewards artists far more than any other economy in history ever has.
People who tell you that they don’t have any good ideas are selling themselves short. They don’t have ideas that are valued because they’re not investing in their art.
People who tell you that “I could paint a painting like that” are missing the point. The craft of the painting, the craft of writing that e-mail, the craft of building that PowerPoint presentation—those are the easy parts. It’s the art and the insight and the bravery of value creation that are rewarded.
Massive Shift in the Leverage of Productivity
In a rigid, mechanized system (a factory!), the difference between a pretty good employee and a great employee is small.
A punch press operator might have a range of twenty to twenty-four units made in an hour. The best punch press operator in the world delivers about 20 percent more output than a pretty good punch press operator does.
On the other hand, the freestyle world of idea creation and idea manipulation offers dramatic differences between the merely good and the truly great. A great designer like Jonathan Ive is worth a hundred times as much as a good one. Where does Apple add value? If all MP3 players play the same music, why is an iPod worth so much more than a generic one? It’s the breakthrough design that Ive pushed through at Apple. In fact, if you consider the relative stock prices and profits of Apple versus companies that hire standard designers to do ordinary work, there’s really no comparison.
A great salesperson might deliver a thousand times as much productivity as a mediocre one. It’s the great salesperson who opens an entire region or an account in a new industry, while the ordinary one merely goes down the call list, doing quite average work.
This is an astonishing piece of news. A very good senior programmer (who might get paid $200,000) gets paid about the same as a great programmer, who delivers $5 million worth of value for the same price. That’s enough of a difference to build an entire company’s profit around. Do it with ten programmers and you’re rich.
Organizing around the average, then, is too expensive. Organizing around average means that the organization has exchanged the high productivity of exceptional performance for the ease and security of an endless parade of average performers.
The Tedium, Pain, and Insecurity of Being Mediocre
Not only do organizations benefit from linchpin employees, but employees also benefit once they become linchpins.
Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You can work only so many hours, fret only so much. Being a slightly better typist or a slightly faster coder is insufficient. You’re always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. It wears you out.
It’s impossible to do the work at the same time you’re in pain. The moment-to-moment insecurity of so many jobs robs you of the confidence you need to actually do great work.
On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.
Does Every Organization Need Linchpins?
Do I want airline pilots and air traffic controllers making up new policies on the fly?
Do we want the hamburger flippers at McDonald’s demanding more pay because their unique talents make them indispensable?
Should every interaction with the IRS be a freestyle improvisation?
Probably not.
Organizations that are centralized, monopolistic, static, safe, cost-sensitive, and far-flung should hire drones, as cheaply as possible.
Commodity producers in highly competitive businesses should do the same. If you’re producing tires for Hyundai or light-bulb filaments for Sylvania, most of the people in your company need to be inexpensive first, reliable second, and present, third.
Hire cheap drones that you can scale, replace, and disrespect.
I have no issue at all with this as a business strategy. But I don’t expect that it will lead to growth or significant customer loyalty, particularly in times of change.
More important, if you’re looking for a job, I have no idea why you’d want to work in a company like this. Let someone else have that job. You deserve better.
Depth of Knowledge Alone Is Not Enough
Wikipedia and the shared knowledge of the Internet make domain knowledge on its own worth significantly less than it used to be. Today, if all you have to offer is that you know a lot of reference book information, you lose, because the Internet knows more than you do.
Depth of knowledge combined with good judgment is worth a lot. Depth of knowledge combined with diagnostic skills or nuanced insight is worth a lot, too. Knowledge alone, though, I’d rather get faster and cheaper from an expert I find online. If I need a great direct mail letter, it’s far cheaper and faster to hire a great direct mail writer to write me a letter than it is to hire someone and have him on staff for the one letter I need every month, right?
Depth of knowledge is rarely sufficient, all by itself, to turn someone into a linchpin.
There are three situations where an organization will reward and embrace someone with extraordinary depth of knowledge:
1. When the knowledge is needed on a moment’s notice and bringing in an outside source is too risky or time consuming.
2. When the knowledge is needed on a constant basis and the cost of bringing in an outside source is too high.
3. When depth of knowledge is also involved in decision making, and internal credibility and organizational knowledge go hand in hand with knowing the right answer.
It’s easy for an outside source to be seen, in artist Julian Schnabel’s words, as a “tourist.” A tourist may have significant technical skill, but if she doesn’t know the territory—your territory—then the skill isn’t worthwhile.
On the other hand, as we have seen in the divergent paths of Rick Wagoner, the insider with domain knowledge who bankrupted General Motors, and Alan Mulally, the outsider with only clear vision, leadership skills, and a good posture who saved Ford, depth of knowledge alone is enough to get you into serious trouble.
A few years before Detroit’s meltdown, Bill Ford knew his company was in jeopardy, so he went outside to hire a new CEO.
His biggest concern? “Ford is a place where they wait for the leader to tell them what to do.”
Perhaps the biggest shift Alan Mulally made when he arrived from Boeing was changing that. Instead of hiring someone with deep domain knowledge who knew exactly what to do, Bill Ford hired someone who knew how to train people to live without a map.
Rick Wagoner lost his job at GM because he told everyone what to do (and he was wrong). Far better to build a team that figures out what to do instead.
The Best Reason to Be an Expert in Your Field
Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth.
Sure, it’s possible to randomly challenge the conventions of your field and luckily find a breakthrough. It’s far more likely, though, that you will design a great Web site or direct a powerful movie or lead a breakthrough product development if you understand the status quo better than anyone else.
Beginner’s luck is dramatically overrated.
Emotional Labor and Making Maps
“Emotional labor” was a term first coined forty years ago by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart. She described it as the “management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.” In other words, it’s work you do with your feelings, not your body.
Emotional labor is the hard work of making art, producing generosity, and exposing creativity. Working without a map involves both vision and the willingness to do something about what you see.
Emotional labor is what you get paid to do, and one of the most difficult types of emotional labor is staring into the abyss of choice and picking a path.
Your Job Is a Platform
You get paid to go to work and do something of value. But your job is also a platform for generosity, for expression, for art.
Every interaction you have with a coworker or customer is an opportunity to practice the art of interaction. Every product you make represents an opportunity to design something that has never been designed, to create an interaction unlike any other.
For a long time, few people were fired for refusing to understand that previous paragraph. Now, though, it’s not an option. It’s the only reason you got paid to go to work today.
Degrees of Freedom
This is important.
One of the easy things about riding the train is that there aren’t many choices. The track goes where the track goes. Sure, sometimes there are junctions and various routes, but generally speaking, there are only two choices—go or don’t go.
Driving is a little more complicated. In a car you can choose from literally millions of destinations.
Organizations are far more complex. There are essentially an infinite number of choices, endless degrees of freedom. Your marketing can be free or expensive, online or offline, funny or sad. It can be truthful, emotional, boring, or bland. In fact, every marketing campaign ever done has been at least a little different from every other one.
The same choices exist in even greater number when you look at the microdecisions that go on every day. Should you go to a meeting or not? Shake hands with each person or just start? Order in fancy food for your guests or go for a walk together because the weather is sunny. . . .
In the face of an infinite sea of choices, it’s natural to put blinders on, to ask for a map, to beg for instructions, or failing that, to do exactly what you did last time, even if it didn’t work.
Linchpins are able to embrace the lack of structure and find a new path, one that works.
Marissa Mayer
What can she do that you can’t?
Marissa has created billions of dollars’ worth of value in her time at Google. Yet she’s not the key brain in the programming department, nor is she responsible for finance or even public relations.
Marissa is a linchpin. She applies artistic judgment combined with emotional labor. She makes the interfaces work (the user interface and the interface between the engineers and the rest of the world) and leads the people who get things done.
Google works because the way the site takes your query and returns your results has such discipline and a clarity of vision that people prefer it even when the search results aren’t any better than those provided by Yahoo or Microsoft. Google’s now-cherished user interface is actually more valuable than their search technology. Marissa led the way in forcing Google’s start page to be as spare as it is. She counts the number of words on that page and fights to keep the number as low as possible.
Google also works because the interface between the engineers and what the public wants and needs is so tight. Someone at Google has figured out how to help the company solve our problems (problems we didn’t even know we had). Marissa is often in the position of being that interface.
She didn’t get assigned either of those jobs. She just did them.
If you could write Marissa’s duties into a manual, you wouldn’t need her. But the minute you wrote it down, it wouldn’t be accurate anyway. That’s the key. She solves problems that people haven’t predicted, sees things people haven’t seen, and connects people who need to be connected.
Give Yourself a D
The A paper is banal.
Hand in a paper with perfect grammar but no heart or soul, and you’re sure to get an A from the stereotypical teacher. That’s because this teacher was trained to grade you on your ability to fit in. He’s checking to see if you spelled “ubiquitous” properly and used it correctly. Whether or not your short story made him cry is irrelevant. And that’s how school stamps out (as opposed to bakes in) insight and creativity.
My heroes Roz and Ben Zander wrote an incredible book called The Art of Possibility. One of the most powerful essays in the book describes how Ben changes the lives of his hyperstressed music students by challenging each of them to “give yourself an A.” His point is that announcing in advance that you’re going to do great—embracing your effort and visualizing an outcome—is far more productive than struggling to beat the curve.
I want to go farther than that.
I say you should give yourself a D (unless you’re lucky enough to be in Ben’s class). Assume before you start that you’re going to create something that the teacher, the boss, or some other nitpicking critic is going to dislike. Of course, they need to dislike it for all the wrong reasons. You can’t abandon technique merely because you’re not good at it or unwilling to do the work. But if the reason you’re going to get a D is that you’re challenging structure and expectation and the status quo, then YES! Give yourself a D.
A well-earned D.
Who Are You Trying to Please?
If you seek out critics, bureaucrats, gatekeepers, form-fillers, and by-the-book bosses when you’re looking for feedback, should you be surprised that you end up doing the things that please them?
They have the attitude that there is an endless line of cogs just like you, and you better fit in, bow down, and do what you’re told, or they’ll just go to the next person in line.
Without your consent, they can’t hold on to the status quo, can’t make you miserable, can’t maintain their hold on power. It’s up to you. You can spend your time on stage pleasing the heckler in the back, or you can devote it to the audience that came to hear you perform.
The Troubleshooter
Your restaurant has four waiters, and tough times require you to lay someone off.
Three of the waiters work hard. The other one is good, but is also a master at solving problems. He can placate an angry customer, finesse the balky computer system, and mollify the chef when he’s had too much to drink.
Any idea who has the most secure job?
Troubleshooting is never part of a job description, because if you could describe the steps needed to shoot trouble, there wouldn’t be trouble in the first place, right? Troubleshooting is an art, and it’s a gift from the troubleshooter to the person in trouble. The troubleshooter steps in when everyone else has given up, puts himself on the line, and donates the energy and the risk to the cause.
Krulak’s Law: Linchpins Whether You Want Them or Not
Jeff Sexton points out that ten years ago, General Charles Krulak theorized that in an age of always-on cameras, cell phones, and social networks, the lowly corporal in the field would have far more leverage and impact than ever before. He wrote, “In many cases, the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and will potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well.”
Krulak’s law is simple: The closer you get to the front, the more power you have over the brand.
One errant minimum-wage cog in the machine can cripple an entire brand, or at the very least, wreck the lifetime value of a customer. The two kids at Domino’s who made a YouTube sensation out of cruelty to pizza (and customers) did more damage to the Domino’s brand than any vice president ever could.
If you think the solution is more rules and less humanity, I fear you will be disappointed by the results. Organizations that can bring humanity and flexibility to their interactions with other human beings will thrive.
Why We Started to Care
Of course, for decades, companies have been mechanizing production so that the opportunity for making a career out of following instructions and lifting heavy objects has gotten smaller and smaller. Of course, you didn’t care so much, but the number of good jobs for manual laborers has been dropping for years. We’ve been eliminating machine operators and paint sprayers and other trades in order to lower costs.
The key is “we.” The jobs being eliminated belonged to a class of people that was easy to ignore. We rationalized, because we were not being affected. It was efficient to eliminate blue-collar jobs; it made us competitive; it was progress.
Now, thanks to the information revolution and the law of the Mechanical Turk, the jobs that are disappearing belong to us, not those other people. Suddenly, we care a great deal about the jobs that have disappeared, probably forever. It bothers us because the jobs of people who followed the same rules we did are now in jeopardy.
A League of Your Own
Donald Bradman was an Australian cricket player. He was also the best athlete who ever lived. By any statistical measure, he was comparatively the best at what he did. He was far better at cricket than Michael Jordan was at basketball or Jack Nicklaus was at golf.
