History Is Our Best Educator: Why the Current State of Work Is Suffering

Before the light bulb. Before the telephone. Before the automobile — three giants from three different centuries saw exactly what's happening in today's workforce and said so clearly, publicly, on the record. John Ruskin in 1860. Louis Brandeis in 1912. Dallas Willard in the twentieth century. Three disciplines, one pattern, one question that keeps getting answered wrong. This episode is the historical context for everything that follows — and a warning that what Gallup is now measuring shouldn't surprise anyone who's been paying attention.

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Transcript

0:00

There might be a little dust on the bottle, but don't be fooled because what's inside is wisdom. I'm Jeff Wells, and this is on the shoulders of giants. Hey, if you're a business leader and this podcast episode doesn't actually haunt you, you might be part of the problem. Check this out. We have more management training programs, more leadership frameworks, more HR technology, more employee wellness initiatives, more culture consultants, more engagement surveys, more DEI task forces, and more cheap people officers than at any point in the history of organized work. And yet, people have never been more checked out. Gallup's last report confirms it. And if the trends hold true, the 2026 numbers aren't going to be any prettier. Keep in mind this is a $438 billion a year problem. And that's not even the real story. What's hidden in plain sight is the human carnage that comes with it. And keep in mind this didn't happen to us. We did it. Not the economy, not the pandemic, not remote work. We did this by getting the answer to a very old question, catastrophically raw, for a very long time. Now to ponder the question, we need to go back in history. And I want to start in 1860 with a guy by the name of John Ruskin. John Ruskin watched the Industrial Revolution turn human beings into inputs. And what he said was you cannot produce beautiful work from degraded people. Fifty years later, Lewis Brandeis stood before the graduating class at Brown University and said that in the field of modern business, mere money making cannot be regarded as a legitimate end. And then there's Dallas Willard. Dallas asked what he called the great question, the question that every society, every economy, and every organization eventually has to answer. And the question he asked was this: What is the resource that will enable human beings to live and work together in community with dignity, love, and provision for everyone? Three different giants, three centuries, three disciplines, one pattern, one question that keeps getting answered wrong. And now, Gallup is doing a fantastic job of measuring the wreckage. And that's where we're going today. I want to introduce you to these three giants. None of them were alive to see what's happening in the workforce today. None of them ever ran a company in the modern sense. But if you sat them down with today's data, not one of them would be surprised because they saw it coming from completely different directions, and they said so, clearly, publicly, on the record. The challenge is, I think we stopped listening. So let's dive into more context around these three giants for the sake of what it might help us do about it as we move forward. John Ruskin in 1860, this is before the light bulb, before the telephone, before the automobile, the Industrial Revolution is turning human beings into inputs, units of productive capacity, and an art critic of all people decides he has to say something about it. Why an art critic? Well, because Ruskin spent his life studying beauty. What makes something worthy? What elevates the human spirit versus what degrades it? And he kept arriving at the same conclusion. You cannot separate the quality of what people make from the conditions under which they make it. You cannot produce beautiful work from degraded people. The two are simply incompatible. So we when he turned that lens on at the time what was the emerging merchant class, what he actually saw disgusted him. He identified five professions essential to any civilized society the soldier, the pastor, the physician, the lawyer, and the merchant. And of all five, he said the same thing. Their duty on due occasion, check this out. Their duty on due occasion is to die for their profession. The soldier dies rather than abandon his post. The physician dies rather than leave patients in a play. And the merchant, the businessman, what does the merchant die for? That's where people went quiet then, and it's where they go quiet now. Ruskin's answer The merchant's function is to provide for the community, not to extract from it, not to optimize it, not to scale it, to provide for it. Like the captain of a ship, duty bound to be the last one off when things go wrong. To absorb the suffering before it reaches the people working beneath him. The prophet, necessary, but never the point. I gotta tell you, nobody puts that in the pitch deck today. And quite honestly, I don't think there are very many leaders who are thinking about it the way Ruskin thought about it. And here's what's wild that was 1860. He was writing directly in response to what the Industrial Revolution was doing to people. Now, the irony is when we get to the Gallup data in the next episode, and we well, unfortunately, this isn't going to be a surprise to you. It's going to feel extremely familiar. Now let's talk about the second giant. Louis Brandei, 1912, 50 years later. Different man, different discipline. Same conclusion. Lewis Brandei wasn't an art critic. He was one of the sharpest legal minds in American history. He eventually appointed to the Supreme Court, a man who had spent his career inside the machinery of American commerce. And in 1912, standing before the graduating class at Brown University, he said something that should have permanently settled the debate about what business is for. Here's what he said: in the field of modern business, mere moneymaking cannot be regarded as the legitimate end. He described real success in business as comparable to the scientists, the inventors, the statesmans, measured not by financial return, but by excellence of performance and service to the community. The income, he said, is the ordinary incident of success, not the definition of it. He went on to say this, and I quote, big business will then mean business, big not in bulk or power, but great in service and grand in manner. Wow. I don't think that's what we see today. I don't think we see anything but what we said to what we sit to what we see today is companies that are often poor in service and crude in manner. It's the unspoken mantra of too many organizations. Tim Ferris called it out. I love what Tim said. Tim Serris, we're in the middle of a mediocrity epidemic. Tim's not wrong. Ruskis and Brandei were spot on. And yet here we are in the 21st century repeating the same conditions that have formed their perspective back then. Keep in mind, these weren't fringe voices. They were giants of their era, widely read, widely respected. The ideals didn't lose the argument. We just stopped teaching them. First principles have left not only the building, but the workforce. Giant number three, Dallas Willard, my favorite. Philosopher, theologian, one of the most penetrating minds of the 20th century on the nature of the human soul. And he gave us what I believe to be the simplest and most accurate definition of work that I've encountered. Dallas said, work is the production of value by the actions of our thoughts and bodily efforts upon available resources. Work is simply human creativity. It is a special type of causation through which goodness and blessing can be promoted in our surroundings. Wow. Not productivity, not output, not ebna. Goodness and blessing. Really? I don't know about you, but that's not a framework most leaders are thinking or talking about, at least openly. And yet I would argue that what Dallas captured was the original intent of work. Dallas went further. He asked what he called the great question, the one every society, every economy, and every organization eventually has the answer. It was this What is the resource that will enable human beings to live and work together in community with dignity, love, and provision for everyone? Now, when Willard uses the word resource, he doesn't mean money or technology programs. He means something far more human than that. He asked the question, and we'll get to the answer. But first, let's talk about what happens every time history gets this wrong. There's a pattern, and once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it. Go back to Rome. Rome didn't fall because of the barbarians at the gate. It rotted from the inside, in part because the citizen class stopped working and started consuming, leaving labor to slaves and meaning to no one. When work lost its dignity, the culture lost its coherence. The Gilded Age, the era Ruskin and Brandeis were writing directly in response to, gave us child labor, company towns, 16-hour days, and the systemic reduction of human beings to their productive capacity. The backlash was inevitable and violent because the provocation was total. The 20th century ran two grand ideological experiments on the nature of work, capitalism and communism, and both failed, the human being at the center of it. Willard identified the fatal flaw in both with surgical precision. Here's what Dallas said. None of them deal with the fine texture of human motivation, with what men and women actually care about and live for. They are a form of brain surgery with a meat cleaver. Wow. And then in 1970, Milton Friedman published an essay in the New York Times that quietly became the operating system of modern business. His argument, the sole social responsibility in business is to increase its profit. Shareholder primacy as moral philosophy. And the idea won. It became doctrine in our business schools, our boardrooms, our compensation structures, and our promotion decisions. I'll tell you something. I've spent 35 years walking into companies, and in eight years of running high achiever, it's the rare CEO whose understanding of the state of their culture actually matches what I find when I get into the gears of the business. Now, the question we should be asking is how can that be rare? Because what it shows is that we have lost sight of what matters most. In most cases, our priorities are upside down. We're not thinking about people. We're thinking about profit. The gap between what leaders believe is happening and what is actually happening, that gap is the wreckage that Gallup is speaking to. Every single time, Rome, the Gilded Age, the Soviet experiment, Friedman's shareholder doctrine, same answer, same pattern, same wreckage. We are at that point again. And this time, the evidence isn't theoretical. It isn't historical. It's current. It's being measured, and the numbers are going to make the case that we are running out of time. Stick with that for a minute because it's meaningful. Three giants, three centuries, three disciplines, one pattern. Ruskin saw it in 1860. Brandeis restated it in 1912. Willard distilled it to its essence, and all three of them were pointing at the same thing. A question that every society, every organization, and every leader eventually has to answer. What is the resource that will enable human beings to live and work together with dignity, love, and provision for everyone? They all knew what it was. History has shown us what happens when we get it wrong repeatedly at great human cost. In our next episode, we're going to show you what getting it wrong looks like right now in the data, in the companies, in the people sitting in your meetings and on your Zoom calls. And then we're going to answer the question. Hey, listen, keep in mind that no matter what, poor leaders hurt people and great leaders change lives. If you find value in the podcast, would you share it with a friend? Hit subscribe, tell somebody else about it, and uh let's get the message out. Because getting the message out is where change happens. We'll see you in the next pod.