Week 35, 2023—Issue #271
WFH Innovation, Reframing Feynman, and Incentives at Scale
Successful organizations do three things: they create value for customers, they optimize for personal fulfillment, and they continuously adapt to changing circumstances.
Here are three ideas to help you do the same:
#customervalue
WFH Innovation
Zoom thinks in-person trust is a prerequisite for remote innovation
Zoom is asking its workforce to return to the office. No joke. But surprisingly, it’s not about productivity. It’s about trust and innovation. The issue, according to Zoom, is that people are too polite in virtual meetings, stifling the kind of debate that is essential for innovation. If that seems strange given that social media is filled with acerbic debate, keep in mind that this is about constructive dialogue and that constructive dialogue requires trust. This is Zoom’s assertion: in order to have constructive debates remotely, we must first build trust face-to-face. It kind of makes sense, but I’m personally not convinced that a mandate is the right solution. In fact, I agree with Brad Slingerlend in calling that mandate a failure to innovate. After all, you’d think Zoom would be the company best positioned to crack remote innovation!
#personalfulfillment
Reframing Feynman
Mix reverence with disrespect for fresh new perspectives
I’ve been reading Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces. The introduction, penned by physicist Paul Davies, delineates Feynman’s approach as follows: “The Feynman style can best be described as a mixture of reverence and disrespect for received wisdom. Physics is an exact science, and the existing body of knowledge, while incomplete, can’t simply be shrugged aside. Feynman acquired a formidable grasp of the accepted principles of physics at a very young age, and he chose to work almost entirely on conventional problems…His special talent was to approach essentially mainstream topics in an idiosyncratic way.” Feynman is often described as a genius, and by all accounts, he was brilliant. But perhaps his greatest talent was reframing, a tool available to all of us.
#businessagility
Incentives at Scale
Rendanheyi aligns customer and employee incentives at scale
“Who does the work? Who bears the consequences? Who reaps the rewards? When the incentives are aligned, it’s the same person.” This quote from James Clear’s 3–2–1 newsletter perfectly captures the essence of Haier’s Rendanheyi model. The model’s central tenet is to directly link customer value creation with employee remuneration. While this principle might seem self-evident in the startup world, it is far from the norm in multinational corporations. In such settings, low-level employees often find their bonuses linked to metrics like company stock prices — figures they have no control over. What makes Rendanheyi so interesting is that it provides systems and structures that maintain a “zero distance” between customers and employees, even as the organization scales.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter.
/Andreas
How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly newsletter called WorkMatters. Back-issues are published to Medium after three months. Get early access by subscribing. This article was originally published on Friday, Sep 1, 2023.
