005. The Hidden Spiritual Cost of How We Work ft. Gary Hamel

What does it mean to treat people as ends in themselves rather than instruments to get things done? Gary Hamel joins John for a conversation about work, dignity, and the quiet crisis inside most organizations. One of the world's most influential business thinkers, Gary has spent decades asking why so few workplaces actually unleash the people inside them, and what it would look like if they did. This is a conversation about agency, meaning, and why the biblical vision of every human being made to reign with God has profound implications for how we build institutions.

About Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel is one of the world's most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has worked with leading companies across the globe and is a dynamic and sought-after management speaker. Hamel has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years and is the director of the Management Lab.

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What this Conversation Explores

• Why most organizations treat people as semi-programmable robots and what we stand to lose if we don't change that 
• The only three reasons someone actually needs to be managed, and why none of them require layers of hierarchy to solve
• What a 16,000-person Dutch healthcare company with almost no managers can teach us about trust, accountability, and human potential
• The biblical vision of dominion and kingdom, and why John argues it is the deepest possible framework for thinking about work and dignity
• Why the question is not how to outperform your peers but how to outperform expectations, and what that shift does to a person over time
• The four force multipliers Gary has observed in ordinary people who do extraordinary things: courage, contrarianism, community, and compassion
• Dallas Willard's vision of job discipleship, and what it looks like to do your work together with Jesus rather than merely alongside him
• How Gary thinks about faith, suffering, and the preponderance of evidence for belief in a world that has grown increasingly nihilistic

Resources Mentioned

• The Death of Common Sense — Philip K. Howard
• The Utopia of Rules — David Graeber
• Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
• The Management Lab — mlabgroup.com

Connect with Gary Hamel

Website: garyhamel.com

About Formation

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Only one in five employees believe their ideas matter at work. Only one in eight say they can influence decisions that are important to their work. Only one in eleven have the ability to experiment or try something new. What is it about work that's so fundamental to people's identity? What distinguishes human beings and very much part of being made in the image of God is that we have that creative impulse. We want to do something, we want to make a difference.

SPEAKER_04 0:23

Frankel, in one of his books, he poses two questions and they remind me of your approach to work.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

People are not a means to an end, they're an end of themselves. Wow. And yet our organizations are still kind of administrative aristocracies, where the surest way at the top is to get one of those management jobs. Do you think you need managing?

SPEAKER_03 0:41

Who wants to be managed?

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Who needs to be managed? We have tried as much as possible to engineer judgment out of the system.

SPEAKER_04 0:47

The biblical language for what you're talking about, everybody has a kingdom. Your kingdom is the range of your effective will. So much of what work does is it violates people's kingdom.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

One of the scariest thoughts for any leader is that I think there's an inverse relationship between We need to fear robots taking over our jobs in direct proportion to our tendency to treat human beings as robots.

SPEAKER_04 1:12

Pretending like we all agree here's gotta be one of the biggest toxic choices churches make.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Doubt is the engine that drives us closer to God, not away.

SPEAKER_04 1:23

What does life expect of me? And that just leads to a whole different set of thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I think Christianity has succeeded because it had the best story. It just has the best story about who we are, what life is for, what is our responsibility to those around us, uh, and as you say, what does life expect of us?

SPEAKER_04 1:45

The most important process in the world is the formation of the human spirit. And it turns out that work is one of the most important places where that spirit gets formed. And it turns out that the person I'm talking to today, I would rather talk with than anybody else in the world about that subject. Gary Hamill is uh one of the most influential business strategy innovation leadership thinkers in the world. Um visiting professor at London Business School. You have been called by the Wall Street Journal, one of the world's most influential business thinkers. You were named by Fortune as the world's leading expert on business strategy. Um Harvard Business School taught there. You are or were at one point the most reprinted author for the Harvard Business Review. Um Gary, thank you so much for being willing to have a conversation.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Yeah, it's just so much fun to be here, John, and to talk to you.

SPEAKER_04 2:43

If you've ever had uh salad at McDonald's, Gary Hamill, you have tasted the influence of Gary Hamill. And uh if you've ever heard the phrase core competencies, I was back in Chicago several decades ago. I read this book, Competing for the Future, and uh it was a discussion, among other things, of core competency. I thought this is brilliant. Then I ended up at a church in Menlo Park, and I saw an email thread one time, and one of the names was Gary Hamill, the guy who I had read about core competencies. I thought, it can't be that Gary Hamill. And it turns out that it was. You're actually attending my church.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

I was, John, and I can tell you what, the pleasure was all mine. I learned so much. It was such a fantastic experience, and there's a lot of wisdom that I've taken from you and use every day in my life. So I'm really deeply grateful for that.

SPEAKER_04 3:29

Well, uh I have been deeply impacted by you, including, and this is just coincidence, I actually have my Gary Hamill glasses with me.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

So that's a good imitation.

SPEAKER_04 3:38

I you know it's much cheaper, I'm sure. I don't yeah, yeah, fashion-wise, you're way past me. Um, but I thought we'd start here because this is a kind of a dramatic story when you first told me you were going to school, you're up in Michigan, and uh, you know, becoming a business guru uh is something that I don't know that there's a clear pathway through for, and you kind of got thrown into the deep end of the pool pretty quickly. Yeah, I did.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

In a couple of respects, John, I think for me, one of the formative things, you know, being at the University of Michigan in the late 70s and early 1980s, that was the first time American industry was really getting challenged by foreign competition. In that case, it was the Japanese car makers. And uh, you know, U.S. car makers are really slow to respond around quality in particular. And, you know, at that time, young person, business is theoretical, you know, I'm working on a PhD, but suddenly what I saw was the human consequences when leaders make the wrong decisions, when leaders are myopic, when they're slow to change, when they're in denial. And I could see friends losing their houses. You watch Detroit kind of get hollowed out. And so that was an early, really profound lesson that how we run our organizations has just such a big impact on people's lives, and we need leaders who are deeply committed to making the right decision and are in front of the curve and not behind it. So that invested all of what I've done thereafter with a certain kind of urgency, but also I hope a deep respect and understanding for the people who are doing the work. So that was one early experience. I I think another one was when I arrived at the London Business School, you know, now many decades ago, as a very young faculty, and they threw me in to lead an executive program with all these wizened senior executives that happen to be in the defense industry, which is a pretty hard-ass kind of you know industry to be in. And um, so I was just so eager to learn, and I can remember spending, you know, when we do a five-or-day program, being there till midnight or one in the morning, just talking to people, understanding what's your life like and what are you trying to accomplish. And I think um, and and trying to have a lot of empathy for what those individuals were going through. So I think that combination of experiences as young, very young in life, learning what it means to be a leader, what are the things, the problems these people wrestle with, what do their lives feel like, as well as what does it mean for the people kind of on the shop floor, as it were, those are really two fantastic kind of framing experiences that um have shaped a lot of my thinking and work since then.

SPEAKER_04 6:08

So let's talk about work a little bit. Um, one of the interesting things about the Bible, folks who study it will say is that in the ancient world, ancient Near East, the gods did not work. Um, work was not admired. So one of the reasons why human beings get created, like in Babylonian creation myths and so, is to be slaves for the gods, to make food. So that's what sacrifice is about. The God of the Bible, the God of Genesis, is actually a worker. Like from the beginning, he's creating the heavens and the earth. So there's a really interesting dynamic about work there. When you think about work, it seems to be so fundamental to our life, to our experience of joy or disappointment. What is it about work that's so fundamental to people's identity?

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Well, you know, again, I think if you go back into the Bible and you see God's work as, as you just said, as an essentially creative act. Um, I think what distinguishes human beings and and and very much part of being made in the image of God is that we have that creative impulse. We want to do something, we want to make a difference. And, you know, God commanded Adam and Eve to take care of the garden. And so I think work is, you know, it can become uh maybe too central to our identity, but it is certainly, for many people, it is a vehicle through which they make a difference in the world. And it is it is a satisfaction of accomplishing something, of solving problems, of hopefully doing something that might outlast you, contributing to an institution that is bigger than you are, that will carry on in time. Uh and so what we do through our work and the difference that makes, I think is just pretty fundamental to human identity. And and yet, you know, we know that a lot of people at work, um, that's not the case. You know, the work is drudgery, the work is disempowering, um, and there's there's an absence of dignity and opportunity and even equity in their workplace. And we have a lot of data on that. So it should be a source of meaning and of joy and of accomplishment and of contribution, but I can tell you there are many people who feel they're stuck in jobs where none of those things are are part of their life at work.

SPEAKER_04 8:18

I don't know if this is something you thought or studied much. I'll think sometimes just about through the vast history of the human race, most people farmed. And uh so they weren't asking a lot of questions about, you know, should I go into wheat farming or corn farming? It's just you do what your father did. Yeah. Um, do you think people have always wrestled with kind of meaning and work? Is that a modern thing? Or did people's lives make sense to them more in the ancient world?

SPEAKER_01 8:46

Where's I think it's probably I think those both of those things can be true. I think probably we do perhaps vest more meaning and work now simply because we have more choices, and and it has, and and I think in in you know, much of the ancient world, your path was kind of decided for you, you know, whatever your parents did or or so on. And so perhaps you had less choice. Having said that, you know, I have a lot of farmers back in my family tree, and they took just so enormous pride in bringing something out of the ground and of feeding others. And uh and I think again, today we live in a world where a lot of time we spend our life manipulating symbols and words and so on, it can all feel a little bit ethereal. Uh so you do need to connect people to whatever you're doing to. What is the difference you're making in somebody's life? And how is that important to them? Uh, and I think perhaps that was, you know, that it was easier to accomplish that in a world if you were a small merchant, you know, in a tan, you know, a leather shop or a blacksmith shop or and people came in over the threshold every day, and every everybody there, those three or four people, you saw the customer, you interacted with them, you knew whether you were, you know, doing the right thing or not. And now you can be inside of a large organization where many people never meet the customer, and your work is embedded in a much bigger set of projects. And in that sense, you know, it can be hard to connect people back to making a real difference in somebody's life. And I think I think there are ways of doing that, and I think that's one of the challenges of making work more meaningful to people is making sure that every single employee in an organization feels a direct connection to somebody there that they are they are serving. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_04 10:16

Say that last sentence one more, making sure every employee.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Every single employee feels they have a direct connection to somebody they are serving. So I'll give I'll give you an example. A big drug company uh that went through a big uh transformation recently. As you can imagine, a large company, there are plenty of people working in staff roles and internal functions who don't see a customer. Um and you know that can be a problem because you can you can end up doing a lot of work that actually doesn't create much value, it's work for work's sake. And they asked every single individual in the organization to be to think about how does my work make a difference in the lives of patients? And if it doesn't, maybe we need to rethink that, or maybe you need to get closer to the patient and understand their needs. So creating organizations where you have that kind of you know, one of my uh executive colleagues calls it zero distance, but zero distance between individuals and the difference they're making, that brings a lot of meaning back into work. It's you know, it's the experience you have when you stand in front of people and you immediately see whether they're responding or not. When I'm in a in the classroom with students and I can see kind of light bulbs hopefully uh go on.

SPEAKER_04 11:17

Or eyes closing.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Yeah, or eyes closing or you know, back on on TikTok. But um I think that's the idea. Ideal is to create organizations where people have that connection to those they're serving, have the feedback, have the sense that they are important to to that outcome. And again, in a large organization, you have to work pretty hard to make that happen.

SPEAKER_04 11:36

Yeah. Um you deal a lot with um what's actually real. One of the big questions is how happy are people in their work or not happy? And in country Western music, nobody is. You know, there the songs are all take this job and shove it, or um, you know, Thank God it's Friday. Um we have a newsletter where recently we were talking about the role of joy and happiness in life and in spiritual life, and it's so fundamental to life. So, what have you been learning or are you learning about for the typical person at work, if it's possible to generalize like that? Are people basically happy in their work and and to what extent are they not? And what burden does that put on you?

SPEAKER_01 12:19

You know, it's it's it's a quite interesting and somewhat subtle answer to that question. So if you ask, and Gallup has done an enormous amount of research here, so let me let me use a little of their data, the the the polling company. So if you ask people, do you enjoy the work? What you're doing every day, about 89% say, yeah, it's okay. Which is kind of stunning because you know, most of us, you know, in a given day, we'll see a lot of people, to be honest, we're kind of glad we don't have their jobs, right? Yeah. You know, and whoever that you know, the person who brings your DoorDash order or somebody else, or you know, and and and yet if you ask people, you know, the work is okay. Having said that, um, what we know from Gallup is that only about 20% of employees globally are engaged in their work, meaning they they they they love showing up, they're excited about their job and so on. And so I when I first saw that data, I said, like, that's kind of like there's a conundrum there. Like the the the work is okay, but they're disengaged at work. And as you dig into that, what you find is it's not about the activity so much as it is about the way people are managed and the way they're treated. Um, so you know, you can be doing an interesting piece of work, but if you're an organization that's disempowering, that treats you kind of like crap, that you know, you have a boss who's a bit of a a tyrant, you're not gonna have a very, you know, very happy life. And some years ago, I was writing a piece uh for the Wall Street Journal around all of this, and the sentence I wanted to put in at the end, and they cut it out, I I I want to say it turns out um that um uh it's not so much that work sucks, but management blows. I don't know why they didn't want to put that in, but Wall Street Journal is so stodgy.

SPEAKER_04 13:57

So stodgy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

But but it's it's kind of true. And and so if you unpack that data, like why are people disenchanted at work? Why why are they showing up physically, but they're not bringing their initiative, their ingenuity, and their passion, which are you know what make us human. Uh and therefore, for many people, work is a very kind of inhuman uh uh thing. So you dig deeper and you look into the data, the Gallup data, and here's what you find that only one in five employees believe their ideas matter at work. One in five. One in five. Only one in eight say they can influence decisions that are important to their work. And uh only one in eleven have the ability to experiment or try something new. And it's easy to think, well, that's you know, primarily like maybe blue-collar jobs and so on, but it's not. If you look, for example, at physicians, vast majority of physicians today, and and most of whom are now working in big healthcare, you know, integrated healthcare systems, a vast majority say they no longer have uh influence over uh uh uh care management. A vast majority of teachers will tell you they don't have any influence over curriculum. A vast majority of PhD researchers will tell you that they're in an environment that doesn't use their gifts very well. So it's not really related so much to you know the nature of the work. I think it's related much more, John, to this tendency in our highly you know, hierarchical pyramidal organizations to kind of have a caste system between the thinkers and the doers, the credentialed, maybe the uncredentialed. And so um you you you rob people of agency and uh therefore the chance to feel my decisions are important, you disconnect them from the impact they're having in the environment around them, um, yeah, they're gonna end up, you know, kind of going through the motions every day, and that's that's what the data says.

SPEAKER_04 15:42

My wife, Nancy, who you know, um had to drive a rental car from Santa Barbara up to the Bay Area recently. A tire blew out, so she had to call AAA, and in the trunk they only had one of the little donut tires. So to come back home, she had to get a different car. She went to the rental car agency. And first the guy behind the counter said, Oh, yeah, you can drive that car all the way home on that little donut tire. She said, No, I can't drive that car 300 miles on that. And then he said, Okay, well, the only other car we have is an electric car, and it doesn't have enough charge to get you home, so you'll have to get it recharged. And she said, I don't know how to do that. He said, You could Google it and learn something. And as you might imagine, Nance did not respond to that. Not so much, no. She actually then Googled a little donut tire and saw someplace that said, No, you can only go for a few miles on that, and said, Oh, I Googled and learned this. So it was a uh non-faith-based conversation with the guy there. It seems like like customer service, being empowered to make a decision, um, wanting to be helpful to somebody, just anecdotally, it feels like it's not present in our culture the way that we want to be. And I know that's a lot of what you think about.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

You know, uh let me give you an anecdote on that, which again, I'll I'll try to get this as close to exactly right as I can. I might miss up a word or two, but as I'm trying to remember a particular quote. But some of some of the folks listening or watching, they may remember some years ago, I think it's probably a decade ago, United Airlines had this huge PR disaster where they uh were short of space in first class. They they needed to transition some pilots from one airport to another, and so they wanted people to you know get off and give up their seat, and nobody was willing to do it. They offered you know the usual inducements, uh, whatever those were, and nobody were so finally they sent in security people and they took a 70-year-old physician off the aircraft. The guy got bloodied up, it became like a viral media thing, millions and millions. So the the CEO at the time, uh Oscar Munaz, um, you know, obviously got a lot of heat. Like, how could that happen, right? Like, that's not the way to treat passengers. So, you know, they did kind of an internal study, and and somebody asked them, well, what did you learn like in your after-action review of all of that? And he said, What we learned was that we hadn't given our uh staff the training, the the the the policies, uh uh the rules, and so on to deal with the situation. And I thought, no, that's exactly the wrong lesson. No, that that was an unusual situation. What you didn't have is the trust in their judgment to come up with a good solution. If $1,000 wasn't enough to get somebody to give a seat, why don't you try $2,000? It's gonna be a number. And so I think what uh one of the scariest thoughts for any leader is that your organization's success depends on the judgment of ordinary people every day and their ability to do the right thing. And so we have tried as much as possible to engineer judgment out of the system. And anybody who's ever had any interaction with customer service knows that to be true, right? That uh, you know, they have almost no discretion and whatever. So, yeah, I think, and and and the organizations that I that I admire are are quite the opposite of that, where they have trained people on the front lines, they've given them deep knowledge about the business, about the economics, about you know their brand and what they're trying to accomplish, and then you give them a fair amount of discretion to solve problems. And that, you know, has better outcomes for everybody. But yes, I think um I think many companies, and the data says this. I don't think I'm exaggerating. They look at human beings as kind of semi-programmable robots or meatware to replace by real robots or AI as soon as possible. And so, you know, I I I I once said we need to fear robots taking over our jobs in direct proportion to our tendency to treat human beings as robots. So if if you think of it, say that one more time we we need to fear that robots will take over our jobs in exact proportion to our propensity to treat human beings like robots. Because real robots are better than human robots. But if you actually will invest in the capabilities, invest in the learning, uh, there's all kinds of ways of unleashing that that in in in in in you know that that intuition that people have, that ingenuity, and still keeping a company on the rails. But uh I think it's a fear that many executives have and a kind of, as I say, a kind of prejudice that you really can't trust people to do the right thing.

SPEAKER_04 20:12

There was a book written years ago. You might have read it, I think it was called The Death of Common Sense. And the thesis kind of was that the author was looking at how, you know, the Declaration of Independence you can have on a couple of pages. Now the OSHA handbook is like inches and inches thick. And his point was that one of the dynamics at work was precisely what you're talking about: an unwillingness or a fear of trusting in judgment. What would a reasonable person do? Because it might not be fair. So the alternative is we have to anticipate every single possible contingency and make a rule that covers that so that nothing is ever left up to somebody's judgment. And then we will achieve perfect fairness.

SPEAKER_01 20:59

And is uh you know, I think perfect predictability and perfect control.

SPEAKER_04 21:05

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

I think I I it was a guy named Grabe who wrote a book called The Utopia of Rules. And I think that's kind of what you're describing. Yeah. But again, I think I think it comes back to a lack of trust, uh, a lack of training. And also, you know, historically, being a manager, being somebody, you know, at the top of an organization meant being in control. And I think the fear of of many, many senior people, uh, not entirely irrational, but the fear is like somehow something may go wrong and I'm gonna be held accountable. I should have known about that, I should have preempted that, there should have been a policy there. And so, and here's the interesting, I think, uh, paradox in all of that, John. As the world becomes more and more complex and less predicta less predictable, it's harder and harder to be in control in that old top-down panoptic. I know everything that's going on, we have a policy for everything. So, as new problems continue to present themselves, we just keep creating more and more policy to to deal with those and more CXOs to oversee that. And so at the very time, you know, with with with this hyperkinetic world, at the very time you need to be pushing power down and creating more agility and resilience and decision making at the edges, the executive urge is, my gosh, I gotta make sure nothing goes wrong. And so you're still you're, you know, it's it's almost like you know, your children go up and you you want to exert the same kind of control over them when they're 23 that you did with them when they were, you know, 12. And and and and hence that engagement data. You know, if 13-year-olds don't like having a parent, I can tell you that 23-year-olds are 30 or 40, you know, they but but I think that's the situation we've gotten into, which is why our organizations are not very good at changing and why so many people feel disempowered. But the good news is there there are examples that are very, very different from that typical reality. So I, you know, that's it's not inevitable.

SPEAKER_04 22:48

Can you think of an example that's different?

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Yeah, one that I find really intriguing, uh, kind of very much in edge case, John, is a healthcare company, uh, which, by the way, you know, they have plenty of rules and policies in healthcare. This is a Dutch company started in the Netherlands by a nurse to deliver home care. So nurses who go in and deal with people after surgery or people with Alzheimer's or other kinds of difficulties. And so this is now, they're the largest home health provider in the Netherlands, and their model is now spreading around the world. But the chap, Josta Black, who started that, he said, My goal is to create an organization that's humanity over bureaucracy. And the way they did that, they divided, they have about 16,000 nurses and caregivers. They divided them into 12-person teams. Every little team operates in a part of the Netherlands, a community, and really is their own business. They have to find their office space, they hire nurses, they do professional development, then and they they run it like their own little business. Which, by the way, we know that about 70% of all people at work would rather be working for themselves or 70% or at a small company. Wow. So now I am working in this, it feels like mine, my my set of colleagues, a community where people know me and we're working together, and there's very little status differentiator. So they they have now about a thousand of those 12-person teams more working across the Netherlands. And everyone in those teams has been trained to think like a business person. Not only are they have their professional thing, but they understand how to deliver care, they understand utilization numbers, they understand the economics of it, and they have almost complete discretion over that business. A couple of things are critical in that. One is the performance of every team is visible to everybody else across the institution. So there's no place for mediocrity to hide. So if my little team is not getting good patient scores or we're not utilizing our, you know, we're uh, you know, as you know, we have a lot of people sitting on the bench, everybody knows about that. So there is enormous and I would say positive pressure to like, you know, up your game.

SPEAKER_04 24:40

Lots of accountability.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

Lots of accountability, but critically, not to a boss, to the result, right? To the outcome, not to the business.

SPEAKER_04 24:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Um we have another little story about that. But um, and the other thing is all these people are connected together through, they have a very interesting proprietary online platform. So, unlike most healthcare companies, they have almost not a single care protocol or policy that comes from the top. So nobody tells you this is how you change a dressing or this is you know the protocol. And and instead, um, you are encouraged when you find a better way of doing something, you share that online. And it's all, of course, all tagged and all you know uh uh um uh you know peer-reviewed. So so I can interrogate the wisdom of 16,000 colleagues to find the best way of dealing, which I can tell you you're gonna come up with a much better solution than kind of a one-size-fits-all policy. So, so um so there's accountability, there's coordination, uh, there's knowledge sharing, but in this company of 16,000 individuals, there are two managers. There's there's the managing director and one deputy and nobody else. Um they have they have a few coaches that are kind of on demand, so if the team runs into a problem, but but if you if you asked even me, if you'd asked me 20 years ago, did I believe you could run a 16,000-person organization in healthcare with no managers at all, with none of the trappings of bureaucracy, with like without a pyramid, I would say like I'm not sure. But it turns out when you make people accountable for real results, when there's no place for mediocrity to hide, when you give them the information and skills they need to be self-managing, and you get out of their way, things, a magical things happen. And by the way, I should say they outperform all of their peers on every metric of efficiency and patient care, and now the model is expanding to other countries around the world. But yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:32

So you are, among other things, uh an expert on management and management theory. And I remember hearing you talk about that word manager one time. And we live in a world where management that's just kind of how life and especially work is structured. Has it always been that way? How did management or the idea of managers evolve and and what do you think of it? How does that relate to our humanity?

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Um so I think I think it now uh if you if you look at the history of organizations, obviously you go back into the Roman Empire, you can go back as far as you like. But the modern idea of a manager is really about 140 or 50 years old. And it started at the end of the 19th century when we started bringing large groups of people to work for the first time ever. You had you had organizations like Ford that had 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 people in them. And at that time, the vast majority of employees were illiterate. And so they needed somebody to tell them what to do, somebody literally to manage, you know, show up on time, do the right thing, and so on. So we created this new job category called a manager. They didn't exist. And business schools got created in the late 19th, early 20th century to train these people called managers. And you know, the great Peter Drucker, the great kind of management guru, he spent his life writing about these folks called managers. And at that time, you know, administrative competence was rare. It was like being a data scientist or a geneticist today. And so these people got paid very well. They clearly were better educated, they had a view of what was going on in the organization. So, you know, that became a very prized thing to be a manager rather than an ordinary employee. There was another part of it, at that time, information and data was very hard to move. So the simplest way of moving data was to create a pyramid. And that again goes back to the Roman army and so on. But you know, 10 people would report up to a manager, a boss, they would consolidate that, report up again and again. And in that environment, only the the the person at the top had the full picture and therefore could make the decisions. Well, that's not true anymore. People are not illiterate at work. Information, you know, we can move easily almost, you know, without any effort at all. And yet, our organizations are still kind of you know, uh uh administrative aristocracies, where the surest way at the top is to get one of those management jobs. Even though I would argue, you know. I mean, it's a super interesting question for me to ask that I ask people, John, is this do you think you need managing? Like, you know, if I asked my wife, she's gonna say, sure as heck, you need managing. Right?

SPEAKER_03 29:01

That's where my mind was going.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

She's very clear on that. Um button Yeah, who wants to be managed? Who needs to be managed? And I and I think there's only three reasons somebody needs to be managed in that kind of classical, you know, boss sense. Um uh one is if they lack competence, if they just really don't know how to do the job and uh you know need more skill and training, fine. Uh number two is if if they lack uh context, if they don't understand how their work fits into something bigger, they don't know what the goals are, they don't know how to measure whether what they're doing makes a difference or not, so they lack the context. And finally, if if they lack conscientiousness, you know, if they just like kind of want to screw around and be lazy. Well, we can solve all of those problems without creating you know eight layers of management. You know, we can we can train people. I uh you know have a wonderful story in my my most recent book of an of an industrial company that's trained blue-collar employees how to think financially and how to think strategically and and and created you know, and so we can teach people how to be much more you know thoughtful about the business. Uh clearly we can um uh create accountability to your peers. You don't have to be or to the customers, you don't have to be accountable to a boss, and we can give people the information so they they make wise decisions. So yeah, and so I think you know, those all those managers, it is an artifact of of a time that is now gone, but it's been very slow in changing to reflect new realities because you know, people in power are pretty happy with it and don't really want to give it up.

SPEAKER_04 30:28

I was thinking about that people in power, and uh see if I can name this. I was making a connection I'd love to hear your reflections on. When Jesus uh said to his disciples, um, you know that among the Gentiles, those who appear to be their leaders lord it over them. And uh I've always thought about that mostly as uh uh they want titles, kind of arrogant, uh hubris, and so but it struck me as you were talking, actually, um just treating people as though they are robots that don't have judgment and have to always have a rule to tell them what to do would be a way of kind of lording it over them. Yeah, and I often when I hear you or read your stuff, it will feel like the biblical language for what you're talking about is very, very rich, and it's it's that notion of kingdom that everybody has a kingdom. Your kingdom is the range of your effective will, starting with your body when you're born. And then to be made in the image of God is to have a kingdom, and so that's where dignity comes in, and that so much of what work does is it violates people's kingdom. Yeah, I think that's and and what I'm wondering is because I know you are a son of the church, you grew up uh in faith. How much have you explicitly thought about connections between those kind of biblical statements and how you think about work, human dignity, judgment, autonomy, and so it seems to me like your work has been deeply formed by that. But I don't know how much that's conscious or how much of it's just the way that your mind got molded.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

No, I think I think it has been formed by that. Um, God created human beings with agency.

SPEAKER_03 32:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:28

Um and and the I think the the fundamental problem often in work environments um is that we take a very instrumentalist view of human beings. So I think I think What do you mean by instrumentalist view? The the common conception, or I I think in many organizations leaders have this kind of mental model. The institution, the organization hires people to produce products, services, whatever it may be. And so the institution kind of takes the action, hires this person as a resource, and we talk about human resources to do this work. So the employee is an instrument, right? They're they're just something that you use like a piece of machinery to get something done. Now, businesses need to get something done, and that's and that's fair enough. And society holds businesses accountable for using society's resources and being efficient and adding value, and every individual needs to be accountable for that. So this is not about uh you know lack of accountability. But when you look at human beings as essentially instruments, that's where you end up. I think the alternate conception is you say, no, individuals choose to work in some organizations and not others. People do have choice there, and it's the individual who looks at the institution as the instrument to make a difference, to build their career, to do something great for society. So I particularly when I look at young people in the workplace today, um a very difficult, very difficult environment in many ways for them, but they look at the company as a platform where I can do something amazing, where I can learn, where I can try new things, where I can make a difference. So if you just flip that around and and and and and you think of the the institution as the instrument, not the individual, that you start there and it changes everything else. And and I I learned this weirdly from a uh a Chinese CEO um who at that time was a brilliant guy. He was at the the um uh CEO and chairman of Hire, which is a large appliance company. They own GE appliances in the United States, and they're they're the largest appliance company in the world. And he had read one of the books I'd written some years back. He came to visit me at my office uh here in Silicon Valley with his uh translators and entourage. And um he said, Gary, you talk about building organizations that are lateral, that feel like communities and are filled with entrepreneurs. Has anybody ever done this? And this was now maybe 15 years ago. I said, No, that's a dream I have, but I don't think he said we're gonna go do it. And one of the things he said that day, and I can give an almost a verbatim quote, he said, our goal is to create an organization in which every human being gets to be their own CEO because people are not a means to an end, they're an end of themselves. So here's a Chinese executive, by the way, very widely read, who's quoting Immanuel Kant and the categorical imperative about the inherent dignity of individuals. Wow. And they've built a company, the most amazing company, I think one of the most amazing in the world, kind of based on that principle. So, yeah, I think, you know, when you look at the Bible, you know, again and again, there's stories of God giving people agency, the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, right? And if you bury it in the ground, I'm sorry, you are in trouble, right? God gave you that talent to do something. Yeah. But what you so often find in our organizations, we put all kinds of unnecessary limits on the ability of people to grow and to contribute and to make a bigger difference in a way that would benefit that business. I think it's it's it's very my my my myopic. Um and um, you know, and and and when you look at many of the people that God used in the Bible, you look at at the disciples, you know, I'm not sure that if like if you met Peter like selling fish, you would have got like this is this is the rock on which is gonna be built.

SPEAKER_04 36:07

Like, you know, yeah, and so if you How many interviews did you put this guy through?

SPEAKER_01 36:11

Exactly. Now I'm guessing Jesus is better at selection than like most of us are and and recognize something in these individuals. But what really happened there was was was his transforming power in their lives. It wasn't necessarily these were all superstars, but but he he turned them into superstars. And so I think you take that lesson, you go like, and I and I've seen this so often, you know, I was working in a Midwestern company, this is now some some years ago, uh, a manufacturing company, a lot of blue-collar employees, and we trained 30,000 employees how to think like innovators. We taught them how to uh uh think about emerging trends and how to challenge industry rules and so on. And and most of these people, nobody had ever made an investment in their whole careers in their own create in their own creativity. And I remember one idea that came from an African-American woman working on an assembly line that ended up being a hundred million dollar business. It was the first time in her career everybody anybody had ever asked her, like, do you have an idea? What do you think?

SPEAKER_03 37:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 37:08

And you know, you see how that's played out in our society. You know, I I think right now YouTube has about 60 some million channels on it. And, you know, I tell those young kids who all these creators, you know, you are no more creative than your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents. Like we all had the same genetic gifts. What you guys had, you had tools that allowed us to create at low cost, you know, video capture and editing. You have a platform with very few gay creators where you can share. And so we have this explosion of human imagination, creativity, and knowledge, and so on that's mind-blowing. Um, but you don't find a corollary of that in most organizations. We haven't invested in people's creativity, we haven't given them the chance. And I think, you know, that is the story of God and human beings is giving people the chance and picking you know atypical and unusual people and inspiring them, you know, which kind of brings them maybe back full circle. Maybe we talk about leadership a little bit because I think, you know, for me, that's the essence of leadership.

SPEAKER_04 38:10

Yeah, and that's such a huge topic. Uh so let's just dive into that directly. Um, what is leadership? How do you think about leadership? Because it gets talked about so much uh also in churches as well as lots of other places. Uh, what is it and can it be taught? And is everybody a leader? Uh, just unpack that word for a bit.

SPEAKER_01 38:33

It's a big topic, but maybe we can take a couple of shots at that. I think, first of all, I think the word has be has become very misused inside of at least the organizations that I work with, because um now we usually we use that word leader uh basically to mean anybody who has subordinates. And you know, anybody who's ever worked, you know that like having subordinates does not make you a leader, right? Um, and so we've kind of because we don't want to call people managers anymore, because they're kind of like boring and like you know, so let's let's call them leaders.

SPEAKER_04 39:04

Leader is sexier than manager.

SPEAKER_01 39:05

Oh, yeah, like wait, wait. So like we basically, and I know when this happened and why it happened, you know, we needed something new to sell, and so we said, hey, we're gonna teach you all how to be leaders, and we gave everybody a battlefield promotions and like, you know, now you're no longer manager, you're leader. And yet for me, there are a couple of things that make somebody a leader. A leader is somebody who builds something that didn't exist, makes something happen that was very unlikely to happen. And what I see in many organizations, people can go through their whole careers and end up running large companies and they've never had to build anything new.

SPEAKER_02 39:36

Oh, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:36

They're they're simply administrators, stewards, managing what's there, polishing it a little bit, but you didn't really have, you know, to build, build, build something new. That would be kind of one way of thinking about it. The other way for me is a leader is somebody who makes a catalytic difference to collective accomplishment. They have a point of view, they know how to mobilize people and bring them together, um, they can energize a group of people and help them do something that they thought was probably impossible. And um, so in that sense, John, I would say you we really only know leadership um, you know, after the fact. You know, we we we know I I think it'd be very difficult to predict like who has natural leadership talent, right? If you took a whole bunch of, you know, I don't know, 12 or 13-year-olds that hadn't played golf and were thinking about it, it'd be very hard for you to predict who's gonna become like a world-class golfer. Like, you know, it's natural talent, it's opportunity, and so on. So I think leadership potential, like creative potential, is very widely distributed, but it's not evenly distributed. And I think in some senses, you only know somebody's a leader when you've seen them exhibit the qualities of what it means to be a leader. So the evidence says we are not good at all at training leaders. And there are people like Barbara Kellerman at Harvard and Jeff Pfeffer at Stanford. There's a lot of stuff. I mean, and by the way, when when you when you ask executives, do you have any faith in your leadership development programs? Like the answer is like single digits. No.

SPEAKER_04 41:03

You recommended to me a year or two ago a book by a woman about what she calls the leadership industrial complex. Yes. And she talks about how many billions of dollars gets poured into leadership training. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

With with with very little discernible result. And actually, when when you look at that whole industry, there are actually very few papers that ever get published that look at um uh the real impact of leadership development. And the ones that do, the primary measure they use were were the folks happy with the experience on the program. I think the only people can assess the effectiveness of leadership development are the lead, right? Ask them what's different six months later.

SPEAKER_02 41:40

It's getting better.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

Yeah, they know a difference. So I think I I don't think the the the the I don't think the primary way you grow leaders in an organization is through leadership training and so on. I think the primary way you grow leaders is by giving people more opportunities to lead. And you see who steps up and who learns that. And you know, it's it's it's putting kids on a driving range and who stays there till after dark and who's passionate about and like who develops a good swing and so on. And you know, and yes, coaching and so on helps, but no amount of coaching is going to turn me somebody like me into like you know, a world-class golfer.

SPEAKER_04 42:15

It's just like so that kind of leadership is more of um a skill or even a way of being than mastering a certain amount of information.

SPEAKER_01 42:24

I think that's true. I think that's definitely true. Now, definitely read read everything you can, learn, you know, find a mentor, learn, learn. Because I do think there are a lot of things you can learn that are effective. How do how do you become a better listener, right? How how do how do you uh you know, how how do you think about organizing a complex project and making it tractable? So I think there are kind of leadership skills that you can learn. But the essence of being a leader, having the vision, having the tenacity, uh having that personal resilience when you get knocked down, um uh being willing to sacrifice personally for something you believe in, um I don't know that very much of that can be taught. Um but I think more I think more of that is in most people than we realize. Because actually, as much as companies say we want more leaders or organizations say, I'm not so sure. Because often, if you're I'll I'll give you an example. Some years back there was there was a guy working um for a company called WebEx, which was you know video conferencing, mainly for for large companies. And I think that company was bought by by Cisco, the big networking company. And this young kid, a Chinese national that emigrated to the United States, had this vision of creating um uh a video conferencing service that was cheap and available to everybody, super easy to use and didn't require a big company to buy it. So several years he would go and make this argument to his leadership team, who were interested in selling video conferencing to big companies. And they kept saying, no, we're not gonna do that, it's not our business. So the kid finally leaves and he creates uh Zoom, right? Which is now by far the most used video conferencing service uh overall. And and you think about That kid had that leadership capacity. But in a company, often, you know, uh somebody with vision and passion, like, no, no, like that seems like a little bit of a silly idea or ludicrous idea. Like, you can't tell us exactly how you're going to do it, so it's not very credible. If you're tenacious, it just means you know you don't learn from experience and like you know, you need to get on and and and do something else. And so I think actually, rather than creating healthy incubators and environments for leaders, it's quite the opposite. And instead, we just send them on these programs, by the way, of some of which I teach on. So I do think they have some value. Some of them are good. I wouldn't be doing it for sure. Um but yeah, I think I think it's mostly about creating more opportunities for leaders to emerge.

SPEAKER_04 44:43

I I think there needs to be two words. I'll give you an assignment. Yeah, please. I think uh on the one hand, there is kind of an organizational leadership gift skill set capacity. So it's a bit like athleticism or musicianship. Everybody, we're all kind of wired-alike music and we all like to move our bodies, but some people are particularly skilled in that way. Yes. And so there is uh there's a certain kind of person who's gonna be able to lead a business or uh coach a team, say. Um then there's another way that every human being being made in the image of God, and there's all kinds of imagery around this by uh in the Bible, we will all have crowns that we will present to God. That's a in our day we would talk about leadership, exercising dominion. God says, exercise dominion, be creative and powerful in the service of the good. Um, so when we say to somebody, you're not a leader, I had somebody at one time who was reputed a good leader, to be a good leader say to me, You do not have a leadership bone in your body. And I still remember that many years later. It felt like an insult. And um, so I think there's a way in which every human being is meant to reign with God, to exercise dominion, not to be a sheep, not to be a lemming, uh, to create. But not everybody is made to be an organizational leader in that way. And I think there's lots of confusion in the church and out, because uh we need two different words. One to describe the image of God and dominion in each person, and another one to describe that narrower skill set.

SPEAKER_01 46:20

Yeah, I think so. Well, I thank you. It's a good assignment.

SPEAKER_04 46:23

We've had all these years, you haven't come up with anything yet. Do something practical, man.

SPEAKER_01 46:28

I think uh I have another way of saying, maybe it's something quite similar. We need to be able to dis uh distinguish or disentangle leadership from hierarchical position.

SPEAKER_00 46:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:40

So, so, so, you know, and and can everybody be a CEO? No. Having said that, um CEOs today do not have the breadth of skill and imagination and creativity to run their organizations by themselves. It is has to be an immensely collaborative, open effort because in this world, no small group of people has, and and by the way, when you look at organizations that get into trouble, that get blindsided in almost every case, it's a leader who is arrogant, who is myopic, who is not willing to listen to people inside of their own organization.

SPEAKER_03 47:12

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

So I think I think a concentration of power is immensely dangerous to the resilience of organizations and societies. It's it's like almost always a bad thing. Uh so I do think we have to distinguish leadership meaning you couldn't be a CEO or whatever from you don't have the ability to inspire others or to you know bring a group of people together to accomplish something. Because what I what I see every day in my work is I see people who would would who would would no sense have been thought of as leaders do extraordinary things. And um, but the organization, because they didn't have the positional power, uh, you know, the organization says, well, you you, you know, and and much of my work is is is is focused on you know, frontline ordinary people and organizations saying, how do you change the system when nobody asks you to do it? Right? How do how do you punch more than your weight? How do you how do you make a difference that is all out of proportion to your formal power? Because again, that's that's what you see through the Bible. You see these individuals who were not, you know, they they they they weren't, you know, they didn't have senior positions in society, they weren't, you know, Roman centurions, they weren't part of the priestly class, and yet they would do these extraordinary things. So I think, you know, there's a lot in there you can learn if you really want to understand what like what leadership really is. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_04 48:32

There's a physicist at Cambridge, and he's he he writes an idea that I like a lot. He said that um often uh in any given age, the worldview, scientific understanding of the world impacts theology. So in the 17th century, Newtonian physics, everything is a giant machine, it's it's mechanical, uh, colored people's view of God in that way. Sovereignty is this kind of deterministic, this I'll make this happen. And he said, in our own day, the uncertainty principle, things seem to be a lot looser and more innovative. And that's actually seems to fit better with the God of the Bible who says, Yeah, this wandering group of nomads, sure, I can use them, that's fine. These fishermen, that that God knows where he's going, but he's able to improvise on his way there. And that life kind of works.

SPEAKER_01 49:21

You know, that kind of fits my theological worldview, which you know people can argue with. I think I think they that they call it like a maybe maybe more open or relational theology. Uh, you know, I don't think our world is a clockwork world. And I I think in some sense our creation is an experiment with God saying, well, what happens here? And uh, you know, when I create a world in which people have agency and and and and but I think, you know, back to here's what I take away, because I the question I've asked, and I've you know, I've tried to apply this in my own life. I don't know how well I've done it, but I've often been interested in how do ordinary people do kind of extraordinary things. Um and I think for me there are three or four things that are key to that. I think one is courage, um you know, having the courage to tackle a problem that's bigger than you are. So, you know, you're working on the problem of character formation and how do people grow. I mean, you know, by yourself, you know, you're gonna make a difference. But that's, you know, but the size of that problem keeps you intellectually alive. It keeps you inspired, you keep learning and working. So I think you you have to be in the thrall of a challenge that's bigger than you are, and you have to have the courage to take it on, even though you you may fail. So I think that's kind, and there's there are beautiful stories in the Bible, there are beautiful stories in business where that has happened. I think the second kind of force multiplier uh for an individual is you have to be a bit of a contrarian. Um, if you see a problem or something that has existed for a while uh and clearly we haven't solved it, more of the same is not the answer. So you need people who come at it from a different angle, who who'll sit in a meeting and say, what aren't we talking about? Um what what what assumptions are we taking for granted? What what what things have we haven't tried simply because they might be uncomfortable, right? So it is it is definitely that mindset that that that that that changes the world. Uh I think I think thirdly, uh another multiplier is just is is just community who who you know I say to young people in the organization, you know, when when when when a young person wants to get something done, almost always their first instinct is let me go ask my manager, let me go like go up the chain of command. And I say, no, no, no, go sideways first. See if you can find a group of peers and colleagues who care about this, engage them, you know, improve your idea, come come with a dozen of you. But but community is a basic building block, I think, for any kind of success. And people like Martin Luther King and others were very, very good at making that happen. And the last one, which I think is the most underrated in in organizations, is compassion. Um, you know, I I sense that we live in a super cynical world, right? Anytime kind of comes at you, you're asking, well, what's in it for them and what's their angle, and what are they trying to sell me, and so on. And I think when people see over time, when they see you are not in it for yourself, that you care deeply about their life and their reality, that you're willing to go to bat with them and take your own personal risk, those people will start to follow you. And they will pick you up when you fall, they will give you grace when you make mistakes. Um because we are we are hungry to see that kind of compassion. And I think it is a magnet for for for for for people. So um, and yet in most organizations, you couldn't even, you can't talk that way. You can't talk about love and you can't talk. But I think so. For me, the courage, the contrarian spirit, um, um, you know, the the the the the ability to the community, the compassion, these are what multiply the impact of any human being. And they're four C's. Well, there you go.

SPEAKER_04 52:56

Which my wife will hate because any kind of uh alliteration, yeah, yeah, yeah. Alliteration mnemonic.

SPEAKER_01 53:02

But that's you know, when I when I look at the Bible and I learn from the people there, that's part of what I I love all four of those.

SPEAKER_04 53:09

You know, I love all four of those. So, what I'd like to do for a moment then is kind of have you switch hats. Normally you'll consult with, you know, very uh wealthy, powerful people. Um, for a moment, just think about young people kind of starting out. And uh if you could speak into their lives, uh it might be what would be a big mistake that a lot of people make with their work life or their career, or particularly young people? That might be the way to get into it. But how would you, what wisdom would you give to somebody who is trying to think deeply about their work life, especially if they're younger?

SPEAKER_01 53:49

You know, first of all, I would say don't be embarrassed to start on the lowest rung. Um, you know, I I think we have in many cases, you know, and and you know, you know, kids were told if you go to university, that's kind of an automatic ticket. It is not an automatic ticket anymore. And, you know, you can go to university and end up in, you know, any kind of very entry-level job. And so my first thing is like, don't hold out, don't wait for some magical thing, just find a place where you can do it.

SPEAKER_04 54:18

Well, and it's like now you're supposed to go to Stanford or Harvard and drop out by the time you're a sophomore and start a billion-dollar company.

SPEAKER_01 54:24

So the pressure on Yeah, that's certainly that's the the myth uh uh uh around uh this part of the world where we're sitting in now. But I think you know, don't don't don't be afraid to start wherever you are. I would say once you're there, what do you want to ask every day is how do I um how do I outperform expectations in whatever modest way that is? Because people who do that will get noticed, you know, maybe not the first time, maybe not the second time, but over time, those people I you know, I can always trust John to do more than we asked for. He's always coming back with even a better way. So, you know, never never be content with going through the motions or simply like ask like what more can I do here? How do I make a bigger contribution?

SPEAKER_04 55:07

I I love that. I thought at first you were gonna say, how can I outperform my peers? No. But it wasn't that, it was how do I outperform my peers.

SPEAKER_01 55:14

Expectations. And by the way, doing that may be engaging your peers and helping and doing it. Help them also, yeah. Yeah. So I think I think for me that would be uh kind of number two. I I would say number three is build a story, and I don't mean a myth, but build a story about the significance of what you're doing. Um you know the guy who shows up in the middle of the night to solve my plumbing problem is like an angel to me, right? I mean, that's immensely significant. Uh, you know, the person in a restaurant who says hello and takes care of you, and I mean that so you know, we we we are so in society, we are so likely to, you know, create some kind of hierarchy of jobs and status and so on, and that of course impinges on people. You know, what one of the things I loved about um Herb Kelleher, who founded Southwest Airlines, who I fear have kind of they've kind of lost their way since he died. But one of his his things that he would say over and over again is no job here is better than any other job. Everybody here is equally important to what we do as as an organization. And um, and I had somebody in a big steel company that is that is run on that same philosophy. Somebody said, around here, being a manager is the least noble thing you can do. Because we're actually not really creating. So don't let anybody tell you your work doesn't matter and find significance in that, you know, however, you know, however uh seemingly humble that that that that thing thing may do.

SPEAKER_04 56:42

But part of what you're saying there is uh I have to find that for myself. It's not gonna be given to me outside. Part of my job is to look for that. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 56:50

To look for that. And you know, maybe your company has a you know of a wonderful purpose like Patagonia, where you know our goal is to save planet Earth, but it probably doesn't. And so you're gonna have to find that yourself. Um, but don't let anybody else tell you why your work matters or why it doesn't. You have to make, you have to do that. And and and and it all matters, and you have to understand that and believe that. I would say today, obviously, you have to be just continually learning and getting better. You have you have to look at you know school as a lifelong thing. You cannot rely on your company or anybody else to kind of teach you or you know, train you. And luckily today we have an infinite number of ways of doing that, but you know, continue to invest in in your own learning. And then I guess lastly, what I what I said before, John, is learn how to harness the energy of people around you and learn how to you know build community and reach out and do things together. I'll I'll give you one kind of amazing little incident there that it has inspired me for a long time. There's a woman, Helen Bevan, that I met some years ago. She was kind of a mid-level, she was she she wasn't an expert kind of in change, but she was a mid-level uh role in Britain's National Health Service, which has like whatever, 1.7 million or something employees. So it's a gigantic, bureaucratic, pretty screwed-up organization that, you know, every day is the news for some catastrophe. And no one person is going to change that. And it is so easy when you're working in a big organization like that, or any organization, it doesn't have to be that big, to give up the idea that you can make a difference, right? And I mean, learn helplessness is just endemic in these institutions. Uh, you know, I'm not a CXO, it's not my system, it's not my process. So Helen, you know, she was talking to young doctors, and they were all very frustrated by how much time they were spending like doing paperwork and all the institutional things that were getting in the way of taking care of patients. And they saw so many ways in which the system did not serve patients very well. So this is now about uh maybe 15 years ago, and Helen said, okay, we're gonna do something about this. Without anybody's permission, she and this team of young doctors they set up a little uh template on a on a website uh where you could come in and make a suggestion on how, in your role, you would improve patient uh uh outcomes and patient satisfaction. And so she started using using viral media and and she started inviting people across the NHS to go on, find some small thing you can do in your role that will make patients' lives better. And like tell us what that is, and then you know tell us what what you did. So they they were actually doing this during the 65th uh anniversary of the NHS, and they had this little website up for uh 90 days, and she was hoping to get 65,000 signatures. Well, by the time they finished, they had 180,000 signatures. They ran it the next year and had 900,000 submissions. President Obama talked about this as a thing. It became the single largest change initiative in the history of the NHS, and it started with one person who said, I refuse to be helpless, I refuse to ask permission, uh, you know, I refuse to wait for somebody else to lead. You know, we have the technology, we can put this thing out. And, you know, so don't believe that you can't make a difference. You know, that's a that's a self-defeating, self-limiting kind of a belief. And today there are so many ways of of building energy and and bringing people around a problem that um, you know, if if if you're in an organization and you're sitting there just whining about it rather than trying to change it, that is your problem. It's not anybody else's problem.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:18

So um it reminds me one time Dallas Willard, who's been a huge impact on lots of our lives, would talk about uh what he called job discipleship. He said, you know, the idea is if you want to become a different kind of person, uh Jesus is the best uh person to go with. And um, so to be a disciple, be a follower, be a learner together with him. And then he said, for most adults, most of our waking lives were actually at work, we're on a job. So that's the most important place for job discipleship, uh for discipleship to happen is kind of on the job. And it's not mostly about trying to witness to people, could be, and it's not mostly about being the Christian nag in residence. Mostly it's about how do I learn to do my job together with Jesus and to do it really well, to outperform expectations. That whole topic of um faith and work uh has gotten a lot of attention over the last couple of decades, tends to be pretty white-collar and pretty abstract. How do you think about uh integrating faith and work and whatever job dishes are?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:27

You know, we talked a little bit about okay, but you know, what do you do if you're an employee in an organization and and you don't feel very that you have much power and and how how do you how do you exercise dominion when there's a lot in the system that really is pushing the other way? Um but I think if if if you're like quotes a more senior person a little farther up the hierarchy, for me, living out my faith, and I would suggest maybe this is should be true for most Christians, is really around not just the way I treat people individually, but the kind of workplace I'm trying to build. And I think for me, there's there's maybe three things that are key to that. One, I would I would use the word ennoble. You know, how do I ensure, as we were just talking, as I you know, quoted Herb Kelleher from Southwest, how do I ensure that everybody here feels valued? Everybody here feels they make a difference, that they don't feel that they're out of the inner circle, that their work is not important. You know, um uh one of the former CEOs at Newcore, a steel company I alluded to earlier, he had a little routine when he met new employees that I thought was, I don't know whether he was a person of faith, but I thought was really salutary. He said the first time he would meet a new employee, a more junior employee, he said in the first conversation, he would only seek to understand that individual. Like, where did you grow up? What's your life? What are your goals? What's going on, you know, in your family, you know, what do you want to share about who you are? And it was nothing about the company or him. He said in the second meeting, he would ask if there was a, he would, he'd want to find out how do we help you? What do you need from us as leaders in this company? You know, what's not working in your job, what are the problems you see, but clearly coming at them with how do I, how do we serve you? And then finally, in the last one, he might talk a little bit about the company's goals and where they were going next. But that is an a powerfully ennobling way of approaching somebody. You start with who you are and what's your reality, what's your life, and then how do we serve you and how do we help you? And that makes it clear that even, you know, this this powerful CEO of a multi-billion dollar company is starting by saying, How what do I do for you? Right. And and there's other ways of, you know, getting rid of the status differentiators and so on. I think all of that is important. I think the second word, you know, that we've kind of been hinting around is empower. And and just expanding the discretion of people on the front lines. I mean, it's it's amazing to me that you know, just about everybody you would meet walking down the street here, you know, has probably bought a car. Uh, many have bought a house or, you know, some property. And yet you put those same people in a in an organization, they can't buy like a $400 chair without getting somebody to sign off on it. And so, you know, uh it doesn't mean, you know, if you're going to empower somebody, you better give them the skills to exercise that power wisely and you still need some accountability. But but I think that's that's kind of number three. And I and I think the third one for me would be embrace, which is back to this theme of building community, not being afraid to talk about love, um uh, you know, building building investing in interpersonal relationships. You know, I think particularly for senior leaders, they have to move from focusing mostly on tasks and the inbox to focusing a little farther out on the future, which is very hard for many of them to do, but also they have to shift from focusing on tasks to focusing on relationships. So all the great leaders and folks that I've met, people like Angela Ahrens, who was at Burberry and then ran um ran uh retail for Apple, and uh uh uh Zhang Rumin, who I mentioned at higher, these are people who, you know, their investment is in is in building relational capital. And uh and building that sense. So for me, you know, if if you believe, if you follow Jesus' example and you look at how he treated the people around him, that's what I need to do as a leader. And by the way, you know, it's it's not just theology. One of the greatest management gurus in the United States, a a woman named Mary Parker Follett back in the early uh 20th century, she said the primary goal of a leader is to create more leaders, right? And and and that a leader should exercise power with, not power over. Those are like power for powerful ideas, and yet it is so easy to fall into that trap of thinking about yourself, being jealous of your power, wanting to kind of you know demonstrate your status, um, and uh being unwilling to listen. And um yeah, that's guarding against the the that that pride, I think. Is hugely important for leaders. And you know, humility and curiosity may be the greatest underappreciated leadership uh talents, or yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:10

So uh let me ask you a little bit more about that journey for you, because part of why I value this conversation so much is in our relationship, in the darkest moments of my life.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:28

And vice versa, John.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:30

You have been there.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:33

And I know whatever's going on, wherever you are, uh I can call you up and you you'll just drop what you're doing, and uh I have a friend and I'm loved. And uh I know that faith journey has been a big part of that. You know, you started in Michigan in the Adventist church, uh uh entered into a real big world um in your work life, and and then had this brain that's exceedingly curious and interested in science. And so, how do I hold on to faith in God? What does science have to say about that? Bible history, questions, doubts, uh navigating life and its challenges. Um I I'd love for folks to hear a little bit about kind of that faith journey for you and what feel like it's been important pieces of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:32

Well, first let me say, John, um I've I've I've I feel I've gained way more of from our friendship than I could ever put into words. And and and the same in terms of, you know, we've both had experiences in life as as everybody will at some point that that tests you to your very core. Um, you know, I think everybody's faith story is probably unique, and and therefore, you know, I don't know what what people can generalize, but I'm happy to reflect briefly on mine. As you say, I I grew up in a very religiously conservative uh home, uh in in a very conservative uh uh parochial university. Um my my my parents were deeply curious, and it we could talk about anything, and and and I felt it was a very free environment, but that was not necessarily the case, you know, in in the university, in the Bible classes, and so on. And, you know, I think one of the challenges for almost anybody who grows up and is curious, and most of us are you are very grateful for the foundations that your parents put in place, but somehow you kind of almost, and and some just take those foundations, that's fine, like let me, let I'm just gonna build on that. But I think, you know, those of us maybe who are a bit too much contrarians or whatever, we we want to like take that apart and see for ourselves. Yes. And what do you find, and it's not a criticism, but what you find when you're in a community of people who, for them, their faith is very much settled. When you start to ask those questions, it it freaks people out a little bit. Like, oh my gosh, is Gary losing his faith, right? He's like, and he's asking these questions, and by the way, maybe I don't have very good answers for them, so like they're not making me very comfortable. Can you just like stop and let's go back and pretend like you know we all agree here?

SPEAKER_04 1:09:15

And um so pretending like we all agree here has gotta be one of the biggest toxic choices churches make.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:23

Yeah. And not confronting. You know, if you look through the Bible, all the way to the end, in every life, there is some amount of doubt, right? There's some or they struggle with that. So so I I think doubt is the engine that drives us closer to God, not away. We're searching, we're looking, we're we want to know more. So I had, you know, and and then of course, anybody today uh who goes through a, you know, uh gets a graduate degree or goes through a secular university, you are going to come away believing, more likely than not, that religion is kind of a fantasy, it's a self-soothing set of myths. Uh it might have served some evolutionary purpose, but it is certainly not grounded in any kind of knowable reality. And and, you know, and and if you have a religious faith, it's because you're willing to happily ignore all the uh all the evidence. And as and as uh you know, Richard Dawkins said, you believe in the flying spaghetti monster or something like that. And so what was what has been amazing to me in my life as I started to read in question, and I kind of I kind of live, I kind of abandoned it all. At least said, I'm gonna have to like rebuild this from from the ground up.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:32

So about what age were you when you in my late 20s and early 30s.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:36

Okay. And then you start to read Francis Schaefer and C.S. Lewis, and you meet people in your life who are incredibly intellectually honest and deep thinkers, and they have faith. And you go, like, well, like faith in what and faith how? And I think what is there's really been a revolution, which has certainly aided my faith journey. There's been a revolution over the last few decades, in that I think faith and science have found or are coming back to a rapprochement. I mean, it's not, you know, the idea that science is implacably uh uh opposed to religion is basically something that got created in the late 19th, early 20th century, mostly by scientists who wanted to have, you know, everything in the world is ours, and we'll understand it, we'll tell you about it. And the fact there might be things that are not unknowable, but knowable through different means was just like, no, no, no. So you get, you know, kind of the radical materialist understanding of the world, and you know, Adams is all the other. And then you start to read people, and I'm not gonna remember, you know, all of the names here, but you read people like Stephen Meyer or the most recent book by Charles Murray, and you and you go like, no, no, no, no. There's there are deep reasons to believe in the historicity of Christ. There are actually really good reasons to believe in the in the accuracy of the resurrection account. There are extraordinarily powerful reasons to believe that there's intelligence behind the creation of the universe. There are pretty good reasons to believe that that intelligence was interested in relationship, right? And and wanted to know us and us to know that. And so, you know, just piece by piece, you know, I've I've rebuilt that in a way, and and I think it's always as as as as so much in life is, it's never that there's proof, right? There's much in science that we can't really prove. So what you have to look at is the preponderance of evidence. And when you look at all the preponderance of evidence, I think, at least for me, I'm in a place where I'm very happy, and and I may not convince people, and I hope I'm not under any delusion, but I can give you what I hope are very solid intellectual, evidence-based reasons for believing that it makes more sense to believe in a creator and to believe uh in in in the salvific work of Jesus Christ than it is to doubt it. Do I still doubt some of it? Absolutely. But I think it's, you know, there are days when I might doubt that a friend is really a friend, or, you know, or other things, but the proponent's evidence, I I I feel pretty, pretty secure and settled. And by the way, a lot of that came from listening to you.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:11

Well, we we were talking a little bit earlier about hope. Uh you and I were uh off camera, and um uh faith obviously is connected to hope. There's a huge need for hope in our day, and it would be difficult, apart from some kind of faith, to have any kind of hope that feels like it's real and not just wishful thinking. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:38

And I I think, John, you you've said that to me in different ways uh uh uh over over the years, and and I want to share that for a moment in a moment, but I think you know, we live in a world that is immensely nihilistic and and has influenced deeply the academy and philosophy and the worldviews that people have, that there is no purpose in our world, that you know, it is completely random. We are just bits of stardust that happen to exist. And um, you know, most scientists through history have rejected that that view. Um uh and of course the church created the universities that created science, so the idea that these are implacably opposed is just kind of nonsense. We can you know talk about Galileo if you want to, like, but we pick a couple of examples and then generalize from those. Um But you said it you know this way to me in one of those dark hours. You said we all have the choice uh to be hopeful or to be desperate, uh to live in hope or or or or live in desperation. And I do think it's a choice. I think it's a rational choice. I don't think it's just you know, I'm gonna tell myself a story that makes me feel good, because much of what, you know, when when you choose a religious uh life and you choose to follow Jesus, there's much that is not convenient. It's not like this just makes everything easier. But I think I thought it was a very important thing you said that that that that the at the core, there is a choice at which uh of which of these giant epical views of of life and and our world you believe. Do you believe one that is essentially meaningless at its core and you know, no help is coming, or do you believe something else? So, you know, I choose to hope.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:27

I I was listening last week to an interview, one of the writers of the New York Times, uh Russ, I think it's pronounced Dufat, interviewing Bart Ehrman. And Bart is a quite well-known New Testament scholar uh who has ended up essentially being an agnostic. Um Bart was converted as an adolescent, went to Moody Bible Institute, which is not quite an Adventist school, but it's quite strict and uh uh very careful in its belief, and then went to Wheaton College and was largely shaped by a person who was largely uh formative in my life, Jerry Hawthorne, a New Testament Greek professor. In fact, I have in my library, I treasure them dearly. Jerry died years ago, and his son gave me a couple of books, translations of the patristics that Bart wrote and that he dedicated to Jerry Hawthorne. And Jerry, not long before he died, talked with me about his love for Bart Ehrman, very moving ways. When Bart was interviewed last week, he said the basic reason that he no longer believes in God, or would be at least agnostic on it, is the amount of suffering in the world. And I was thinking I I think that would be an increasingly prominent perspective in our day. One of the things that's interesting, I'm not gonna be able to say this real well, is I think there's uh an inverse relationship between a sense of meaning in life and the impact of suffering. I mean, Victor Frankel, man in search of meaning. Um the more powerfully, deeply, concretely somebody senses there's a meaning to their life, the more that they are equipped to deal with suffering. Or I think about Connelly Rice, who went to Menlo, who grew up, you know, Birmingham bombings going on, Jim Crow, civil rights movement, immense pressure on her when you look at her life. But I think the deep sense of meaning that she had enabled her to navigate lots and lots of suffering. And I think in our day, in a way, part of why, you know, uh objectively, we probably suffer less than any human beings who've ever lived. We live longer, we're healthier, our hair is better, our food's better, you know, we have more stuff to do. But we're more troubled by suffering. And I don't think it's because the suffering is bigger, I think it's that the meaning is less. So as you have walked through life and you have gone through uh painful moments and suffering, uh, how has that impacted your own faith? As it made it harder to believe, increased doubt, caused you to search for God, done both, been mixed? What's that?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:14

All of those things. Yes. Made it harder, uh, you know, you know, created a deeper need to search for God amidst all of the pain. You know, I think, John, you know, I'm not a theologian, and I and I think that is that is probably the the the deepest, most profound critique of of faith and and of and and of and of the Christian message and and of God, right? How does a God, uh, if that God is all powerful, allow this to happen and uh and and all good, how you know, how why does evil exist? I do not have an answer to that question. You know, there are many, many, many books that have been written about them, some some more convincing than others. Um again, you know, let me go back to to Christ and and his resurrection and that story. You know, we've had through the years, we've had a lot of kind of theological debates, and I've tried to pick apart different uh things, expressing some of my doubts. And I know you have, you know, your own set of questions that you ask, but you said something once that really struck me. You said you have to take this as the whole story. You know, you don't pick this apart. There's a story of God's love for this world, of Jesus coming to this world, uh, of saying that in some way he wants to ransom it, um, that that he wants to wipe away the tears. Why do those tears exist in the first place? I don't think it's simply a matter that we had free will and made dumb choices because the planet conspires against us through earthquakes and tsunamis and so on, right? But I think God created a dynamic and emergent world in which those things, you know, were definitely possibilities. I think that, you know, whether you give it a persona or not, there is evil in this world. I, you know, God is not the only power on our planet right now. Uh that doesn't, you have to don't have to create a devil, but there's us who oftentimes have a lot of quite devilish instincts inside of us. So I can't answer that question. But I think to sacrifice the meaning, the story on that particular critique, I think um doesn't make sense, right? I I think it's one of those things that I have to take as a paradox, as something I'm not I cannot understand. Um, you've given me a few books to read in that topic, and I've dug into those, but I, you know, I don't I don't have an answer. Um and you know, anything that you believe in, you know, I I remember you telling a story about Dallas Willard. In fact, I think it was when he was at Menlo, favorite conversation, and students would come to him and and say, Dallas, why do you believe in in Jesus Christ? Why do you follow Jesus? And his answer was, do you have somebody better in mind? So, you know, so that's kind of where I'm at. Um, you know, if if I if you know, you you look at the like neo-Darwinism is now in crisis. Um, you know, nihilism has led us into so many dead ends and and and and and so much terror in our world. There are many different stories out there. And by the way, I do believe in an old earth, and I do believe there was a there was evolution in some way. So it's not like, but there's so many different stories to believe. Uh, but I believe, based on all the evidence, the Jesus story is the one that probably leads you to the best place in your life now and maybe somewhere better beyond. But um, any one of those stories is gonna have problems. I think this story has fewer problems and more hope than the rest.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:36

Yeah, Dallas used to say, Jesus is the kind of person who would be the first one to say, if you can find a better way, take it.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:43

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:45

Yeah, and that takes a lot of the pressure off of, you know, oh, he's he's he's pushing me that I have to believe this. He's like, nope, uh, here is a way. Now, if you can find a better way, yeah, you know, and and so far as has not yet emerged. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:01

And I think, you know, there's humility, I think, is useful here. If if if there is, and I believe it's likely there was, if you believe there was an intelligence and a power behind the Big Bang 13 some billion years ago that could create billions of galaxies and put them into the world, that power is so far beyond my knowing, and it's its means and and are so far beyond my can. I can look through a little lens called the Bible and called the life of Jesus to understand that and and the faith of people around me. But I have to accept that I am not God. And I have to accept that you know there is a lot here that I I do not know and will not know, at least in this life, and I have to be content with that.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:44

Yeah, there's a uh Frankel in one of his books, he he poses two questions, and they remind me of your approach to work. Um, one of which is more cynical, what's wrong with them, why don't they? And then the other one, which is humbler, he said, I can ask, what do I expect of life? And then I'm kind of at the center, and I'm disappointed at this, and why isn't it more like this? Uh so asking that question will create a whole bunch of dynamics. The other question he can at we can ask, he said, is what does life expect of me? Yeah. And that just leads to a whole different set of thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think you've you've set framed that sometime also as, you know, what the the primary purpose of of growing in faith is growing into the person that God hopes you can be and will be. And I think that's, you know, that's a lifelong journey. And we're all at it in very imperfect ways, I'm sure. But um, but but I but I do think more generally there is a crisis of purpose in our world. Yeah. And and and I think the the secular story is very um very unsatisfying to most people that we are here to be consumers, um, you know, that we are here to satisfy our own needs, um, uh, that we are here uh for a few years and then, you know, nothing. Um and you know, I I think Christianity has succeeded because it had the best story. And that doesn't mean it's a made-up story, right? Right? It had the best story. Um and uh there are all kinds of historical stories you can go back and say that's like an amazing story, and by the way, it happens to be true. And I think it just has the best story about who we are, what life is for, what is our responsibility to those around us, uh, and as you say, what does life expect of us? So if I find a better story, I'm gonna tell you about it, John.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:39

Um I am very grateful for your story. I am deeply, deeply grateful that my story has gotten to intersect with your story. It has changed my story. And um thank you for making this time available for all of us. Deep, deep honor to be here, John.