If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Enough said.
Enough said.
...and after that:
- give them clear, measurable objectives.
- provide concrete feedback on performance.
- plan, update & communicate
only setting wishy washy north stars and visions is a fantastic way to drive your company into an unguided chaos.
> Imagine joining an engineering team. You’re excited and full of ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works with wood, so you ask why he’s involved because this bridge is supposed to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a 200-foot drop over rapids. Don’t worry, says Mary, Fred’s going to handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for walkways and they’re going to add to the bridge’s appeal. Of course, they’ll have to be built without railings, because there’s a strict no railings rule enforced by Phil, who’s not an engineer. Nobody’s sure what Phil does, but it’s definitely full of synergy and has to do with upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge design, so you’ll have to build around each one as the bridge progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.” This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things together, they’ve given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts.
> After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don’t have any because you’re a propulsion engineer and don’t know anything about bridges.
"Make humans an interplanetary species" "Accelerate the adoption of sustainable energy"
These tag lines are much more aspirational than the actual things the companies are currently building (rockets and cars).
Those things have worked for some Japanese companies with a very different culture around collective work, but they don't really work as well applied in the West, IMO.
Now at the middle management to immediate supervisor level, there's a huge boost to morale, and I believe ultimately productivity & innovation that happens when you include employees in your own thinking and motivations. It's a lot easier to please someone when you know how they think and why they want certain aspects of a project to go the way they want, and allows you to better predict when it might be appropriate to go off script a little or make a perpendicular suggestion. Otherwise, when you treat a human like a machine, and dissuade them from any bigger picture thinking, you can get all sorts of problems. Micromanagement, malicious compliance, and most importantly: you are isolating them from the natural group dynamics and teamwork that humans do well under.
The strength of this approach is that things can change between the issue of tasks and the completion of those tasks. Instead of having the subordinate leader wait for additional guidance or confirmation they are allowed to adjust their approach immediately without permission to meet the demands of the changing environment.
And then ask them to build the ship for free in exchange for being able to sail the endless sea on it.
But he did make a fundamental scientific discovery. He proved that snakes and elephants cause Gaussian distribution.
It could be that his goal was to get people to repeat his quote about building ships. And he did it by selling some dream about being motivational by telling a grand story.