Get to Work!

All the maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice.

Blaise Pascal

The agile transformation of BMW Group IT triggered this Manifesto and its principles, but much of it had been known for decades. Agility and the associated trend toward more self-organization and leadership at eye level are only a welcome opportunity to demand once again a more “species-appropriate keeping” of knowledge workers and to finally implement Peter Drucker’s postulates (see Section “Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers”). If these insights on new leadership are not so new, what blocks us from implementing them? What do we need to make this change happen? Where should we start?

Leading by Example

Albert Schweitzer convincingly embodied the principle of leading by example throughout his life: “Leading by example is not only the best way to influence others, it is the only way.” True authority is not a question of position but of exemplary behavior. Leadership rests more on imitation than on submission. We could spare ourselves much resistance, fighting, and suffering in our organizations and families if we first truly embodied the change we want to see around us. Only those who lead themselves with sincerity and authenticity will gain the trust to lead others by example.

The following story about Mahatma Gandhi is not proven, but it is no less inspiring. A woman came from far away with her son to see Gandhi. She was worried because her son ate too much sugar and was in danger of getting sick.

So she waited patiently for many hours, and when it was finally her turn, she said, “Please, Master, tell my son to stop eating sugar.” Gandhi looked into the boy’s eyes and replied to his mother: “Bring him back to me in two weeks.”

Dissatisfied, the woman traveled home and returned two weeks later. This time, Gandhi said: “Boy, you must stop eating sugar.” Out of respect for Gandhi and his wisdom, the boy promised to stop eating sugar and has led a healthy life ever since.

But the mother was confused and asked Gandhi: “Why didn’t you tell my son this two weeks ago?” Gandhi replied: “Two weeks ago, I still ate a lot of sugar myself. I had to stop first.”

Who would have acted like Gandhi in this story? Who would not have fallen into the trap of “working off” the petitioners? Who would not have given powerless, inauthentic advice without consciously reflecting on their own behavior? How do we behave day in and day out when working through our emails, in meetings, or with our children? How does this behavior match our beliefs, intentions, and words?

Major disruptions and transformations characterize our times. For them to succeed and not fizzle out as ineffective change theater, leadership by example is the key. No one should believe that change is only about others–primarily the “subordinates”–while their own role remains untouched. Worse still, no one should use these changes mainly to expand their position of power. Behavior leads far more effectively than language, or in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”¹ So let’s lead courageously and authentically and embody the change we want to see in the world.

Incitement to Rebellion

Winston Churchill was unambiguous: “Without courage, all virtues lose their meaning.” We need courage more urgently than we have for a long time, and not only socially and politically; our companies and the people who work there would also benefit from an extra dose of it. A network based on meritocracy increasingly complements and replaces hierarchy as the dominant building principle, with its absolutist power of position holders (see Section “Network and Hierarchy”). Our companies therefore need a new enlightenment with a more consistent separation of powers. Immanuel Kant’s motto should stand above every gate: “Have the courage to use your own intellect!”

It takes courage to let go and lead indirectly, as a gardener. The perceived loss of control will, and should, make you nervous; otherwise, to quote Laszlo Bock again, you haven’t given enough trust (see Section “Principles Not Rules”). Conversely, it takes courage to use the new freedom: making your own decisions means taking responsibility and risks. In a culture of psychological safety, this can unleash unimagined potential. The new freedom is certainly motivating, but passing responsibility on to the “stupid boss” was more comfortable and less risky.

It is hardly surprising that courage is one of the nine (quite interestingly formulated) values in the Netflix Culture Statement mentioned before, and that it holds a distinctive position there as a corrective. The courage to address inconsistencies between postulated and practiced values openly is essential:²

We work hard to keep each other accountable for upholding these standards, especially our leaders, because excellence and honesty go hand in hand. It’s why we invest in strong professional relationships that build trust and help people assume good intent. This, in turn, enables us to practice extraordinary candor—ensuring constructive feedback is part of our everyday work (like brushing your teeth). It takes courage and vulnerability to ask someone how you could do better, or to seek alternative opinions, and integrity only to say things about a colleague you’re willing to share with them directly.

This permission to address deviations from the desired culture courageously gives all Netflix employees the proverbial “fool’s freedom” that court jesters had in the Middle Ages to address the moral failings of leaders. This corrective keeps leaders accountable. It makes the decisive difference to the glorious formulations in many organizations’ canons of values, which people often perceive as empty or unrealistic because they are at odds with actual behavior.

Where this explicit permission is lacking, we may still use our intellect in the spirit of Kant’s motto. Aristotle said, “A good person is not always a good citizen.” The same applies today: a good employee is not always a conformist or obsequious employee. Change needs disturbance by people who critically question the status quo. They can rely on the concept of civil disobedience, as many self-proclaimed organizational rebels do. They identify with their organization and its actual purpose, but not with incoherent rules and patterns of behavior or an organizational culture that obstructs this purpose. They do not work against the organization; their rule-breaking and constructive questioning aim to improve it. By thinking and acting differently, they protect organizations from complacency and inertia (see Section “Disturbing the Comfort Zone”).

Leaders who want to encourage rebels consciously promote diversity and dissent and create a safe space in which questioning the status quo is wanted and appreciated. This space extends beyond the manager’s own area of responsibility. The jungle of corporate politics holds enough pitfalls that trigger an immediate and more or less harsh immune reaction of the system against troublemakers. The leader’s job is to recognize and avoid these pitfalls and so protect their rebels, which makes the leader a rebel too.

Rebels need freedom to question the status quo and try out something new. Things get even better when as many people as possible, not just a few select rebels, have this freedom, so that rebellious ideas can resonate in the organization. Everyone should be free to try things out and learn without getting lost in the mills of politics. Everyone should be free to think outside the box and question the status quo. And everyone should feel empowered and encouraged to use this freedom.

Set Priorities

Evolution has endowed humans with the astonishing ability to anticipate future states in our minds, commonly known as planning. Together with our linguistic skills, which let us plan and execute things together, this ability is a great blessing for humanity. For the individual, it can also be a curse. The ability to think in scenarios gives rise to a plethora of demands, wishes, and conflicts. It is never enough; there is always more to try and achieve. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal summed up this tragedy of human existence aptly and somewhat resignedly: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”³

The complaint about life’s brevity against the backdrop of our endless possibilities, wishes, and demands is as old as humanity. Thinkers and philosophers seem particularly affected. Seneca, for example, opens his book “On the Shortness of Life”⁴ with this complaint:

Most human beings complain about the meanness of nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, and because this spell of time that has been given to us rushes by so swiftly and rapidly that with very few exceptions life ceases for the rest of us just when we are getting ready for it.

Since ancient times, the gap between conceivable possibilities and the time available for them has widened for more and more people. Modern and post-modern humans face almost infinite possibilities and are entrusted with the once divine task of giving meaning to their bare existence. At first glance, the roughly 4,000 weeks available to each of us on average seem like a bad joke from a cruel creator, as Oliver Burkeman pointedly stated:⁵ “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”

We can envision a lot in theory and hope for a lot, but we can put only a little of it into practice. No matter how well we organize ourselves, how perfectly our time management systems work, how early we get up, or which morning routine we use, we can implement only a tiny fraction of the possibilities. Yet exactly this natural limit on our capacity makes our decisions meaningful; with infinite time, our choices wouldn’t matter much. The chosen option gains significance only because the one yes inevitably means a multitude of no’s. “The quality of our yeses is dictated by the quantity of our noes,” Greg McKeown aptly put it in his podcast.⁶

Time management and productivity therefore cannot aim at getting everything done. They must be about making deliberate decisions. A decision to do something confronts us with opportunity costs and ultimately with our finiteness, so we make it only when it has become inevitable. We fill our days until it hurts, and only in this overload do we dare to turn down tasks and opportunities. This is why Cal Newport sees most knowledge workers permanently in a borderline area of overload:⁷ “They instead exist in a liminal zone: a place where they toil, say, for the sake of fixing a specific number, twenty per cent more than they really have time for. This extra twenty per cent provides just enough overload to generate persistent stress. There’s always something late, always a message that can’t wait until the next morning, and always a nagging sense of irresponsibility during any moment of downtime. Yet the work remains below unsustainable pain that would force a change.”

So we can say no, but we dare to with a clear conscience only when overloaded. In light of Oliver Burkeman’s liberating thought that we won’t get the vast majority of things done in our lives anyway, twenty percent more or less makes no significant difference in the long term, even more so when we spend it as indiscriminately as we do every day in our calendars and mailboxes. What makes a difference is choosing wisely, and that takes some space and buffer. If we begin to select only when we are already on the verge of painful overload, the choice is arbitrary: priorities don’t guide us; we simply reject options because we are overflowing.

Our optimal utilization is therefore not twenty percent overload, however pleasingly “busy” that feels, but rather eighty or eighty-five percent. The mathematician Gunter Dueck derives this limit from queueing theory and summarizes his recommendation:⁸ “Anything over eighty-five percent utilization leads to chaos and even disaster. This is because such a high workload generates new work through nuisance and changes in priorities due to waiting emergencies so that the workload rises above one hundred percent and causes the system to collapse.”

Yet the 4,000 weeks allotted to us are not nothing; they are a miracle in themselves, and if used wisely, we can achieve a great deal within them. Time management does not mean squeezing as much as possible into the available time (efficiency) but saying yes to the right things and consequently no to many others (effectiveness). Unfortunately, our ability to anticipate future conditions mentally makes many things seem attractive and desirable, so every choice has high opportunity costs. But precisely because our time is so frustratingly limited, we must not sit paralyzed, like a rabbit in front of a snake; we must choose well.

To choose amid the daily chaos, we should heed the practical advice that Warren Buffett is said to have given his pilot on setting priorities in life. Buffett advised him to list twenty-five things he wanted to achieve and rank them in descending order of importance. The top five would then form the priorities by which he should organize his life. The other twenty, however, were not subordinate priorities to tackle when the opportunity arose; he should avoid them at all costs. These other ambitions are not important enough to form the core of his life, yet they are seductive enough to distract him from the essential things.⁹

Enduring Dissonance

A few years ago, a CIO told me in passing that he also saw himself as a middle manager. He headed a corporate IT department with around 5,000 employees worldwide and was responsible for an annual budget of hundreds of millions of euros for external services. His remark may have been his justification for why he could not take any further action in the matter I had presented to him (supporting the Working Out Loud movement). But it also shows the tension between aspiration and reality in which many leaders find themselves today.

On the one hand, they have found a suitable leadership philosophy for themselves, or are actively working on one, and strive to lead their area of responsibility accordingly. On the other hand, they are part of a larger system and thus embedded in structures and processes that are less modern or at least differently shaped. In many cases, their dreary everyday life in the company will remind them of this sobering summary by the German economist Knut Bleicher:¹⁰

We work in yesterday’s structures with today’s methods on strategies for tomorrow, mainly with people who created yesterday’s structures and who will not experience the day after tomorrow in the company.

Developing a coherent modern leadership philosophy for oneself is one thing. Enduring the tension between this aspiration and the harsh reality of day-to-day management in mostly traditional structures is something completely different. This cognitive dissonance, the incongruence of beliefs and reality, was described in Section “He Who Says A Does Not Have to Say B.” We tend to resolve such conflicts like the fox in Aesop’s famous fable, who doesn’t want to admit that he can’t reach the grapes, so he claims they are sour anyway and he doesn’t want them. Problem solved.

For modern leadership, the cognitive dissonance between aspiration and reality arises in two directions. First, there is the tension between the gardener’s attitude, which provides the framework conditions for developing human potential, and the often conflicting demands of the organization, for which good leadership primarily means keeping a firm grip on one’s shop like a chess master. Second, not all people are immediately willing and able to accept the newly granted freedom and the responsibility that comes with it. To the gardener’s embarrassment, the garden often produces more weeds than fruit at first.

To make matters worse, the two tensions reinforce each other. The initial disappointment with employees who don’t pull their weight as expected is exacerbated by other managers’ malevolence and the boss’s demand to finally get one’s shop in order. This dissonance is hard to bear, and it is not uncommon for initially ambitious leaders to resign themselves to their fate and lead people as they seem to deserve and as the organization expects them to manage their shop.

Correcting one’s convictions and aspirations, and ultimately distorting oneself, is only one way to mitigate the dissonance–certainly not the most fulfilling or healthy one. A better way is to add new consonant cognitions. The factual day-to-day management experience may be disappointing and frustrating at first, but not always and everywhere. Yet these rays of hope are easily buried under the avalanche of all the things that don’t work as desired. It helps immensely to recognize these bright spots, highlight them consciously, and celebrate them. Sometimes it is also worth looking over the fence of your own organization into the gardens of other companies and leaders, through personal exchange or at least by reading the relevant literature.¹¹

Doing Your Best

Perhaps the Stoics’ philosophy of life is being rediscovered because the turbulent times we live in leave us feeling powerless. Stoicism differs from many other schools of philosophy in being very close to life and practical. The Stoics were always concerned with leading a good and meaningful life, and Stoicism offers numerous timeless considerations and practical guidance to that end.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” In this well-known Serenity Prayer, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asks above all for the wisdom to distinguish between things within our control and those over which we have no power, a central practice of the Stoics. Epictetus, for example, writes right at the beginning of his famous handbook: “Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.”¹² As a Stoic philosopher, he sought to distinguish clearly between the two categories so that we can focus our attention on the things over which we truly have power. He then gives examples of both: “Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions—in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing.”

Beginning of the “Handbook” by Epictetus

Beginning of the “Handbook” by Epictetus, Greek-Latin edition with commentaries by Abraham Berkel, 1683.

Modern, career-oriented people tend to disagree with Epictetus reflexively and intuitively see wealth, prestige, and office as within their power. After all, that is what our meritocracy is about. But are these things entirely within our control? This may be the flaw in thinking that leaves many people dissatisfied or even burned out.

The dichotomy Epictetus suggests is in fact a trichotomy. Besides the things entirely under our control, we must distinguish between things over which we have no control and those over which we have at least partial control.¹³ It is pointless and detrimental to our peace of mind to get worked up about things we cannot influence. The weather is a popular, albeit harmless, example. More worrying are things like the outbreak of a pandemic or war. The Stoic art is to face these uncontrollable circumstances calmly, to accept them in retrospect, and yet to shape life, society, and the future actively.

The Stoics were not lethargic hermits without worldly ambitions; they were often intensely and successfully involved in society and politics. Marcus Aurelius, the most important representative of the younger Stoics, was one of the most influential Roman emperors. Cato the Younger’s inclination to Stoicism did not stop him from “fighting bravely to restore the Roman Republic.” The pattern is clearer still with Seneca: “Besides being a philosopher, he was a successful playwright, an advisor to an emperor, and the first-century equivalent of an investment banker.”¹⁴

How does it fit into the Stoic worldview to concentrate on the things over which we have power and yet be highly successful in areas beyond our control? The answer lies in the third category: things over which we have some influence. The outcome of a tennis match is not entirely within our control, but we are not completely powerless either. We can train to the best of our ability, and we can influence the outcome positively by trying to perform at our best. If we still lose the match, our peace of mind is not threatened, because we have nothing to blame ourselves for.

The goals we set ourselves make all the difference. Training to the best of our ability and playing as well as possible are entirely within our control, but winning the match is not. Training, motivation, and concentration during the game will help us win, but many other factors outside our control stand in the way. The same applies to the things Epictetus lists: “our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices.” We can and should choose goals that are entirely within our control and thereby positively influence the aspirations outside it.

“By internalizing his goals in daily life, the Stoic is able to preserve his tranquility while dealing with things over which he has only partial control.”¹⁵ This wise focus on goals within our power is the crucial link between ambition and serenity. It is particularly helpful for enduring the tension described in the previous section between our own aspirations and values and those of the surrounding organization and its culture. Much of that is beyond our direct control and influence as leaders. To aim for it would be to tilt at windmills like Don Quixote. We can, however, set ourselves goals within our power and do our best to embody the change we want to see in the organization with sincerity and courage.

“What You Do Speaks So Loudly That I Cannot Hear What You Say – Quote Investigator®,” January 27, 2011, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/01/27/what-you-do-speaks/. ↩
Netflix, “Netflix Culture,” accessed March 20, 2022, https://jobs.netflix.com/culture. ↩
Blaise Pascal, Gedanken Paskals, ed. J. F. Kleuker (Bremen: Johann Heinrich Cramer, 1777), 221. ↩
Lucius Annaeus Seneca and Charles D. N. Costa, On the Shortness of Life, Great Ideas 1 (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 1. ↩
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It (Random House, 2021), 3. ↩
Greg McKeown, “Identifying Your Circle of Competence with Kyle Westaway (Part 2),” The Greg McKeown Podcast, accessed September 1, 2023, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/163-identifying-your-circle-of-competence-with/id1513285647?i=1000595386497. ↩
Cal Newport, “Why Do We Work Too Much?,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/office-space/why-do-we-work-too-much. ↩
Gunter Dueck, Schwarmdumm: so blöd sind wir nur gemeinsam (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verl, 2015), 61. ↩
Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks, 77f. ↩
St. Gallen Business School, “Knut Bleicher - St. Galler Business School,” 2017, https://sgbs.ch/ueber-uns/management-valley-st-gallen/knut-bleicher/. ↩
Frédéric Laloux and Ken Wilber, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, First edition (Brussels: Nelson Parker, 2014); Bodo Janssen, Die stille Revolution: Führen mit Sinn und Menschlichkeit, 7. Auflage (München: Ariston, 2016); Laszlo Bock, Work Rules! Insights from inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, First published in paperback (London: John Murray, 2016); Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever (London: Vermilion, 2010). ↩
Epictetus, Handbook of Epictetus, trans. Nicolas White (Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1983). ↩
William Braxton Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Kindle-Edition, 85ff. ↩
Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life. ↩
Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life. ↩