Brave New Work

“This is the management book of the year. Clear, powerful and urgent, it's a must read for anyone who cares about where they work and how they work.” --Seth Godin, author of This is Marketing “This book is a breath of fresh air. Read it now, and make sure your boss does too.” --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take , Originals , and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg When fast-scaling startups and global organizations get stuck, they call Aaron Dignan. In this book, he reveals his proven approach for eliminating red tape, dissolving bureaucracy, and doing the best work of your life. He’s found that nearly everyone, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, points to the same frustrations: lack of trust, bottlenecks in decision making, siloed functions and teams, meeting and email overload, tiresome budgeting, short-term thinking, and more. Is there any hope for a solution? Haven’t countless business gurus promised the answer, yet changed almost nothing about the way we work? That’s because we fail to recognize that organizations aren’t machines to be predicted and controlled. They’re complex human systems full of potential waiting to be released. Dignan says you can’t fix a team, department, or organization by tinkering around the edges. Over the years, he has helped his clients completely reinvent their operating systems--the fundamental principles and practices that shape their culture--with extraordinary success. Imagine a bank that abandoned traditional budgeting, only to outperform its competition for decades. An appliance manufacturer that divided itself into 2,000 autonomous teams, resulting not in chaos but rapid growth. A healthcare provider with an HQ of just 50 people supporting over 14,000 people in the field--that is named the “best place to work” year after year. And even a team that saved $3 million per year by cancelling one monthly meeting. Their stories may sound improbable, but in Brave New Work you’ll learn exactly how they and other organizations are inventing a smarter, healthier, and more effective way to work. Not through top down mandates, but through a groundswell of autonomy, trust, and transparency. Whether you lead a team of ten or ten thousand, improving your operating system is the single most powerful thing you can do. The only question is, are you ready?...

Autorentext

Aaron Dignan

Leseprobe
PART TWO: THE OPERATING SYSTEM

94% of problems in business are systems-driven and only 6% are people-driven.
 
—W. Edwards Deming
 
Becoming a people positive and complexity conscious organization can be overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to begin, or what matters most. But through the careful collection and tagging of hundreds of unconventional practices from around the world, I found that Evolutionary Organizations are converging on twelve domains as the proving ground for the future of work. It is in these spaces that the courageous few are taking risks. And it is in these spaces that struggling enterprises will likely find their faults. Together they form a canvas—an Operating System Canvas—through which we can see and shift our organizational identity.

THE OS CANVAS
 
PURPOSE
How we orient and steer

AUTHORITY
How we share power and make decisons

STRUCTURE
How we organize and team
 
STRATEGY
How we plan and prioritize
 
RESOURCES
How we invest our time and money
 
INNOVATION
How we learn and evolve
 
WORKFLOW
How we divide and do the work
 
MEETINGS
How we convene and coordinate
 
INFORMATION
How we share and use data
 
MEMBERSHIP
How we define and cultivate relationships
 
MASTERY
How we grow and mature
 
COMPENSATION
How we pay and provide
 

THE OPERATING SYSTEM
  
Each domain of the OS Canvas asks us to consider an aspect of our organization more deeply than we typically would. For example, what is authority? How should it be distributed? And how does that manifest (or not) in your culture? How do you make decisions? How should you? Is your approach to authority a signal-controlled intersection or a roundabout? Is it People Positive and Complexity Conscious? The canvas forces us to confront the deltas between our assumptions, our beliefs, and our reality. If we say we want to hear every voice but spend most of the day talking over others, that tells us something. If we say we value agility, but every decision requires a dozen approvals, the opportunity is clear.

In the pages ahead, we’ll explore how each of these domains is changing, the provocateurs that are shaping them, and the emerging principles and practices they’re pioneering. Each domain is broken into five parts: an overview that introduces the concept, thought starters designed to challenge your assumptions, ways to take action and try something new, insights on navigating the domain in change, and questions to consider as you reflect on and reinvent your own OS.

You may have noticed that the domains of the canvas are generic and value agnostic. That’s intentional. We want to ensure that any organization can leverage the canvas regardless of its organizational philosophy. The Morning Star Company, for example, has found huge success in the domain of structure by revolutionizing traditional job titles and roles. Every year, four hundred full-time employees at the world’s largest tomato processor write their own job descriptions. They do this by authoring a Colleague Letter of Understanding, or CLOU, that contains their commitments to and agreements with one another. CLOUs are reviewed and challenged by colleagues who offer advice, not mandates, about what should change. Since this document changes every year, there’s no need for traditional job titles or promotions. But that’s okay, because everyone adjusts their own salary as they learn and grow. The math works out. While their industry grows around 1 percent a year, Morning Star has averaged double-digit revenue and profit growth for the past twenty years. Today it generates more than $700 million in revenue. In an industry that normally treats workers as expendable, it has managed to create a way of working that rivals any unicorn for innovative and human-centric design principles.

But this approach to structure may not be right for your context and culture. Your approach may be more or less radical or aligned in spirit but different in practice. That’s fine. My only ideological prescription is that People Positive and Complexity Conscious mindsets have the power to reshape these spaces for the better. Every culture has elements of the traditional, the contemporary, and the idiosyncratic. The canvas is a tool for reflection and sensemaking, not judgment.

Further, this canvas is not intended to be mutually exclusive or comprehensively exhaustive. From a complexity perspective, reducing an organization to its independent parts is folly. The canvas simply highlights the areas that our research tells us are most in flux. Better to start in these dynamic spaces than to remain immobilized by the sheer intractable nature of it all.

At some point in this tour of the OS you’re going to start to wonder, How the hell do I lead my organization through a change as profound as these cases and stories suggest? And what if it doesn’t work? Don’t let that slow you down. The remainder of the book is dedicated to sharing all the lessons my colleagues and I have learned in the trenches with organizations…