People still had specific goals they had to reach—for example, completing a project by a certain time or ringing up a particular number of sales. And if they needed help, Gunther was there to assist. But he decided against tying those goals to compensation. “That creates a culture that says it’s all about the money and not enough about the work.” Money, he believes, is only “a threshold motivator.” People must be paid well and be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don’t much affect performance and motivation. Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise—and employees’ spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE’s staunchest advocates.
“More companies will migrate to this as more business owners my age come up. My dad’s generation views human beings as human resources. They’re the two-by-fours you need to build your house,” he says. “For me, it’s a partnership between me and the employees. They’re not resources. They’re partners.” And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.
PLAYERS OR PAWNS?
We forget sometimes that “management” does not emanate from nature. It’s not like a tree or a river. It’s like a television or a bicycle. It’s something that humans invented. As the strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, management is a technology. And like Motivation 2.0, it’s a technology that has grown creaky. While some companies have oiled the gears a bit, and plenty more have paid lip service to the same, at its core management hasn’t changed much in a hundred years. Its central ethic remains control; its chief tools remain extrinsic motivators. That leaves it largely out of sync with the nonroutine, right-brain abilities on which many of the world’s economies now depend. But could its most glaring weakness run deeper? Is management, as it’s currently constituted, out of sync with human nature itself ?
The idea of management (that is, management of people rather than management of, say, supply chains) is built on certain assumptions about the basic natures of those being managed. It presumes that to take action or move forward, we need a prod—that absent a reward or punishment, we’d remain happily and inertly in place. It also presumes that once people do get moving, they need direction—that without a firm and reliable guide, they’d wander.
But is that really our fundamental nature? Or, to use yet another computer metaphor, is that our “default setting”? When we enter the world, are we wired to be passive and inert? Or are we wired to be active and engaged?
I’m convinced it’s the latter—that our basic nature is to be curious and self-directed. And I say that not because I’m a dewy-eyed idealist, but because I’ve been around young children and because my wife and I have three kids of our own. Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a one-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.
That something could well be management—not merely how bosses treat us at work, but also how the broader ethos has leeched into schools, families, and many other aspects of our lives. Perhaps management isn’t responding to our supposedly natural state of passive inertia. Perhaps management is one of the forces that’s switching our default setting and producing that state.
Now, that’s not as insidious as it sounds. Submerging part of our nature in the name of economic survival can be a sensible move. My ancestors did it; so did yours. And there are times, even now, when we have no other choice.
But today economic accomplishment, not to mention personal fulfillment, more often swings on a different hinge. It depends not on keeping our nature submerged but on allowing it to surface. It requires resisting the temptation to control people—and instead doing everything we can to reawaken their deep-seated sense of autonomy. This innate capacity for self-direction is at the heart of Motivation 3.0 and Type I behavior.
The fundamentally autonomous quality of human nature is central to self-determination theory (SDT). As I explained in the previous chapter, Deci and Ryan cite autonomy as one of three basic human needs. And of the three, it’s the most important—the sun around which SDT’s planets orbit. In the 1980s, as they progressed in their work, Deci and Ryan moved away from categorizing behavior as either extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated to categorizing it as either controlled or autonomous. “Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice,” they write, “whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.”1
“The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.”
TOM KELLEY
General Manager, IDEO
Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human concept rather than a western one. Researchers have found a link between autonomy and overall well-being not only in North America and Western Europe, but also in Russia, Turkey, and South Korea. Even in high-poverty non-Western locales like Bangladesh, social scientists have found that autonomy is something that people seek and that improves their lives.2
A sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude. According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.3 Those effects carry over to the workplace. In 2004, Deci and Ryan, along with Paul Baard of Fordham University, carried out a study of workers at an American investment bank. The three researchers found greater job satisfaction among employees whose bosses offered “autonomy support.” These bosses saw issues from the employee’s point of view, gave meaningful feedback and information, provided ample choice over what to do and how to do it, and encouraged employees to take on new projects. The resulting enhancement in job satisfaction, in turn, led to higher performance on the job. What’s more, the benefits that autonomy confers on individuals extend to their organizations. For example, researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.4
Yet too many businesses remain woefully behind the science. Most twenty-first-century notions of management presume that, in the end, people are pawns rather than players. British economist Francis Green, to cite just one example, points to the lack of individual discretion at work as the main explanation for declining productivity and job satisfaction in the UK.5 Management still revolves largely around supervision, “if-then” rewards, and other forms of control. That’s true even of the kinder, gentler Motivation 2.1 approach that whispers sweetly about things like “empowerment” and “flexibility.”
Indeed, just consider the very notion of “empowerment.” It presumes that the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the waiting bowls of grateful employees. But that’s not autonomy. That’s just a slightly more civilized form of control. Or take management’s embrace of “flex time.” Ressler and Thompson call it a “con game,” and they’re right. Flexibility simply widens the fences and occasionally opens the gates. I
t, too, is little more than control in sheep’s clothing. The words themselves reflect presumptions that run against both the texture of the times and the nature of the human condition. In short, management isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.
Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word “management” onto the linguistic ash heap alongside “icebox” and “horseless carriage.” This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.
THE FOUR ESSENTIALS
In 2002, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, two wet-behind-the-ears Australians just out of university, borrowed $10,000 on their credit cards to start a software company. They anointed their venture with a bold name—Atlassian, after the Greek titan Atlas, who bore the world on his shoulders. And they set about creating a company to compete against some of the big names in enterprise software. At the time, their venture seemed loony. Today, it seems inspired. Through its combination of great computer code and smart business practices, Atlassian now rakes in about $35 million per year—and employs nearly two hundred people in offices in Sydney, Amsterdam, and San Francisco.
But like any good entrepreneur, Cannon-Brookes walks through life beneath a cloud of perpetual dissatisfaction. He’d seen successful companies stagnate and wished to avoid that fate for his. So to spark even greater creativity among his team, and to make sure Atlassian’s programmers were having fun at work, he decided to encourage them to spend a day working on any problem they wanted, even if it wasn’t part of their regular job.
This offbeat off-day gave birth to several ideas for new products and plenty of repairs and patches on existing ones. So Cannon-Brookes decided to make the practice a permanent part of the Atlassian culture. Now, once a quarter, the company sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want—only this time, “to get them out of the day to day,” it must be something that’s not part of their regular job.
At two P.M. on a Thursday, the day begins. Engineers, including Cannon-Brookes himself, crash out new code or an elegant hack—any way they want, with anyone they want. Many work through the night. Then, at four P.M. on Friday, they show the results to the rest of the company in a wild-and-woolly all-hands meeting stocked with ample quantities of cold beer and chocolate cake. Atlassian calls these twenty-four-hour bursts of freedom and creativity “FedEx Days”—because people have to deliver something overnight. And deliver Atlassians have. Over the years, this odd little exercise has produced an array of software fixes that might otherwise never have emerged. Says one engineer, “Some of the coolest stuff we have in our product today has come from FedEx Days.”
This isn’t a pay-for-performance plan, grounded in the mechanistic assumptions of Motivation 2.0. It’s an autonomy plan, nicely tuned to the alternate strains of Motivation 3.0. “We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features.” And what a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of these essential features is autonomy—in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian’s experience shows, Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
Task
Cannon-Brookes was still dissatisfied. FedEx Days were working fine, but they had an inherent weakness. “You built something in twenty-four hours, but you didn’t get any more time to work on it,” he says. So he and cofounder Farquhar decided to double-down their bet on employee autonomy. In the spring of 2008, they announced that for the next six months, Atlassian developers could spend 20 percent of their time—rather than just one intense day—working on any project they wanted. As Cannon-Brookes explained in a blog post to employees:A startup engineer must be all things—he (or she) is a full time software developer and a part time product manager/ customer support guru/internal systems maven. As a company grows, an engineer spends less time building the things he personally wants in the product. Our hope is that 20% time gives engineers back dedicated stack time—of their own direction—to spend on product innovation, features, plugins, fixes or additions that they think are the most important.6
This practice has a sturdy tradition and a well-known modern expression. Its pioneer was the American company 3M. In the 1930s and 1940s, 3M’s president and chairman was William McKnight, a fellow who was as unassuming in his manner as he was visionary in his thinking. McKnight believed in a simple, and at the time, subversive, credo: “Hire good people, and leave them alone.” Well before it was fashionable for managers to flap on about “empowerment,” he made a more vigorous case for autonomy. “Those men and women to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way,” he wrote in 1948.7 McKnight even encouraged employees to engage in what he called “experimental doodling.”
“As an entrepreneur, I’m blessed with 100% autonomy over task, time, technique and team. Here’s the thing: If I maintain that autonomy, I fail. I fail to ship. I fail to excel. I fail to focus. I inevitably end up either with no product or a product the market rejects. The art of the art is picking your limits. That’s the autonomy I most cherish. The freedom to pick my boundaries.”
SETH GODIN, Author of Tribes, Purple Cow, and the world’s most popular marketing blog
With these unorthodox ideas percolating in his mind, this unlikely corporate heretic established a new policy: 3M’s technical staff could spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects of their choosing. The initiative felt so counter to the mores of Motivation 2.0, so seemingly illicit, that inside the company, it was known as the “bootlegging policy.” And yet it worked. These walled gardens of autonomy soon became fertile fields for a harvest of innovations—including Post-it notes. Scientist Art Fry came up with his idea for the ubiquitous stickie not in one of his regular assignments, but during his 15 percent time. Today, Post-its are a monumental business: 3M offers more than six hundred Post-it products in more than one hundred countries. (And their cultural impact might be even greater. Consider: But for McKnight’s early push for autonomy, we’d be living in a world without any small yellow squares stuck to our computer monitors. A chilling thought indeed.) According to 3M’s former head of research and development, most of the inventions that the company relies on even today emerged from those periods of bootlegging and experimental doodling.8
McKnight’s innovation remains in place at 3M. But only a surprisingly small number of other companies have moved in this direction, despite its proven results. The best-known company to embrace it is Google, which has long encouraged engineers to spend one day a week working on a side project. Some Googlers use their “20 percent time” to fix an existing product, but most use it to develop something entirely new. Of course, Google doesn’t sign away the intellectual property rights to what’s created during that 20 percent—which is wise. In a typical year, more than half of Google’s new offerings are birthed during this period of pure autonomy. For example, scientist Krishna Bharat, frustrated by how difficult it was to find news stories online, created Google News in his 20 percent time. The site now receives millions of visitors every day. Former Google engineer Paul Bucheit created Gmail, now one of the world’s most popular e-mail programs, as his 20 percent project. Many other Google products share similar creation stories—among them Orkut (Google’s social networking software), Google Talk (its instant message application), Google Sky (which allows astronomically inclined users to browse pictures of the universe), and Google Translate (its translation software for mobile devices). As Google engineer Alec Proudfoot, whose own 20 percent project aimed at boosting the efficiency of hybrid cars, put it in a television interview: “Just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time.”9
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bsp; Back at Atlassian, the experiment in 20 percent time seemed to work. In what turned out to be a yearlong trial, developers launched forty-eight new projects. So in 2009, Cannon-Brookes decided to make this dose of task autonomy a permanent feature of Atlassian work life. The decision didn’t sit well with everyone. By Cannon-Brookes’s back-of-the-blog calculations, seventy engineers, spending 20 percent of their time over just a six-month period, amounted to an investment of $1 million. The company’s chief financial officer was aghast. Some project managers—despite Atlassian’s forward-thinking ways, the company still uses the m-word—weren’t happy, because it meant ceding some of their control over employees. When a few wanted to track employees’ time to make sure they didn’t abuse the privilege, Cannon-Brookes said no. “That was too controlling. I wanted to back our engineers and take it on faith that they’ll do good things.” Besides, he says, “People are way more efficient about 20 percent time than regular work time. They say, ‘I’m not going to [expletive]ing do anything like read newsfeeds or do Facebook.’ ”
These days, when a finance guy, pearls of sweat rolling from his green eyeshades, objects to the price tag, Cannon-Brookes has a ready response: “I show him a long list of things we’ve delivered. I show him that we have zero turnover in engineering. And I show him that we have highly motivated engineers who are always trying to perfect and improve our product.”