Once you start looking, you can find generals fighting the last war all over the place: politicians failing to adapt to new campaign strategies (like John McCain’s somewhat staid online presence versus Barack Obama’s modern use of social media in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign); finance professionals missing the signs of the 2007/2008 financial crisis (because they thought the past could predict the future); or the U.S. education curriculum misreading the staying power of the digital economy (and continuing to fail to incorporate enough engineering).
Employing guerrilla warfare is an example of punching above your weight. In boxing, competitors are grouped by weight, because large differences in weight, all other things being equal, make a fight unfair. This takes us back to the physics models we discussed in Chapter 4 (see inertia). Heavier boxers pack more powerful punches and are generally harder to knock over. A boxer who punches above their weight intentionally fights in a heavier class, taking on larger competitors on purpose.
As a mental model, punching above your weight occurs any time you try to perform at a higher level than is expected of you, even outside a competitive context. Examples include joining a group made up of more accomplished members or writing an op-ed on a subject on which you are not yet a recognized expert. On the macro scale, whole countries punch above their weight when they engage in prominent roles on the world stage, such as Ireland serving as a tax haven for major corporations.
Given the inherent disadvantage of being the smaller player, you should engage in this type of fight only when you can deploy guerrilla tactics that you believe will tilt the game in your favor. If that’s the case, though, you may actively seek out these types of conflicts because punching above your weight can have many benefits. These include the obvious benefit of increasing your chances to reach your goals faster, but also potential exposure to large audiences and opportunities to absorb knowledge from world-class experts. However, following the metaphor can also get you punched hard in the face, so it is inherently risky. It’s like when a new TV show gets marketed to the mainstream but does not retain sufficient viewership and gets quickly canceled—not ready for prime time.
When deploying such tactics, you will want to reevaluate your odds as the game goes on, to make sure you are on the right track. Are your odds improving? Are you effectively changing the game to be in your favor?
ENDGAME
In chess, once most of the pieces have been removed from the board, you enter a stage called the endgame. This concept has been extended to refer to the final stage of any course of events. Whether you started a conflict or were drawn into one, at some point most conflicts will end and you need an effective plan either to lock in your gains or minimize your losses.
Your credible strategy to exit a situation is called your exit strategy. In a military context, the exit-strategy concept has more recently been highlighted with a negative framing in instances where there wasn’t a well-thought-out exit plan, e.g., after the U.S. lost troops in a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia and with U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a business context, an exit strategy usually describes how a company and its investors will get a payoff through either an acquisition, a buyout, or an initial public offering (IPO). In public policy, devising an exit strategy means thinking about the practicalities and consequences of how an entity might get out of certain situations, such as European countries withdrawing from the eurozone.
As applied to your personal life, an exit strategy can be thought of in terms of how you will get out of long-term relationships you don’t want to be in or obligations you no longer wish to be burdened with. What is your strategy to make an eventual graceful exit from something you’re involved in? For example, if you are on the board of an organization, your exit strategy might involve finding your replacement and setting that person up for success. Your exit strategy doesn’t always require a full exit, however. You can also try to find a way to hand off onerous responsibilities to another team member while holding on to the parts that you do enjoy.
In any case, coming up with a well-defined exit plan will keep you from doing things you might later regret. For instance, given the benefits of preserving optionality (see Chapter 2), you should probably come up with an exit strategy that avoids burning bridges, or ruining relationships with individuals or organizations in a way that thereafter commits you not to going back to them (to cross that bridge ever again). The short-term satisfaction you might receive from these acts is rarely worth the risk of the escalation, severing of ties, and resulting fallout. Similar acts to avoid are scorched-earth tactics, which refers to burning (scorching) the ground (earth) so it isn’t of use to anyone (including yourself)—for example, destroying records.
Sometimes, though, you may just have to exit with the best strategy you can come up with at the moment, even if it means that your exit isn’t that clean or graceful, recognizing that the long-term outcomes of staying the course are worse. If a solid exit strategy isn’t forthcoming, one tactic is to throw a Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch, long-shot final effort for a successful outcome. The concept comes from a final touchdown attempt in American football where the quarterback throws a really long pass into the end zone in the hope of scoring the final game-winning points. The phrasing became popular after a successful attempt in a 1975 NFL playoff game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Minnesota Vikings after which Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach recounted throwing the ball: “I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary.”
Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés made a counterintuitive Hail Mary pass by actually eliminating his expedition’s default exit strategy. In 1519, Cortés started a war with the Aztecs that led to the destruction of their empire. However, he had only six hundred men, whereas the Aztecs controlled most of modern-day Mexico. The odds were obviously thought to be heavily against the Spanish, and many of Cortés’s soldiers were reasonably wary of his plans.
To secure their motivation, Cortés sank his ships to make sure they had no option but to succeed or die. Without the escape hatch of going back to Spain on the boats, the soldiers’ best option was to fight with Cortés. Translation errors led some to believe he burned the boats, but now we know he just had them damaged to the point of sinking. Nonetheless, burn the boats lives on as a mental model for crossing the point of no return. (Sometimes people also say crossing the Rubicon, referencing Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River with his troops in 49 B.C., deliberately breaking Roman law, making armed conflict inevitable and ultimately leading to him becoming dictator of Rome.)
Game theory can again help you work through your potential exit strategies, assessing likely long-term outcomes and evaluating how various tactics might affect them. While not all situations parallel game-theory models (like the prisoner’s dilemma or the ultimatum game), most can still fruitfully be examined through a game-theory lens.
In any conflict, whether in the endgame stage or otherwise, we encourage you to list the choices currently available to all the “players,” along with the consequences and payoffs. This method should help you decide whether a game is worth playing (or continuing), how to approach playing it, and whether there is some way to change the game so the outcome leans in your favor.
Thinking this way also helps you with diplomacy, because using a game-theory lens means you must think about how other players will move and react to your moves, which is a forcing function (see Chapter 4) to empathize with their goals and motivations. And through this same process you might also better clarify your own goals and motivations.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Analyze conflict situations through a game-theory lens. Look to see if your situation is analogous to common situations like the prisoner’s dilemma, ultimatum game, or war of attrition.
Consider how you can convince others to join your side by being more persuasive through the use of influence models like reciprocity, commitment, liking, social proof, scarcity, and authority. And watch out for how they are being used on you, es
pecially through dark patterns.
Think about how a situation is being framed and whether there is a way to frame it that better communicates your point of view, such as social norms versus market norms, distributive justice versus procedural justice, or an appeal to emotion.
Try to avoid direct conflict because it can have uncertain consequences. Remember there are often alternatives that can lead to more productive outcomes. If diplomacy fails, consider deterrence and containment strategies.
If a conflict situation is not in your favor, try to change the game, possibly using guerrilla warfare and punching-above-your-weight tactics.
Be aware of how generals always fight the last war, and know your best exit strategy.
8
Unlocking People’s Potential
THE 1992 OLYMPICS WAS THE first to allow active professional basketball players from the National Basketball Association (NBA) to compete. The United States fielded a team dubbed the “Dream Team,” which the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame has called “the greatest collection of basketball talent on the planet.” The team included legendary players Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson. In fact, eleven of the twelve players are in the Hall of Fame today. Collectively they defeated their opponents by an average of 44 points, including a 32-point victory against Croatia in the finals. Needless to say, it was a spectacle to watch.
The 1996 Olympics had a similar result, with the U.S. team returning five members of the original Dream Team to join new stars like Shaquille O’Neal and Reggie Miller. Again in 2000 the United States won gold with relative ease. But then in 2004 something curious happened. Despite having the most talented players (including LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Allen Iverson), the U.S. team lost three games (the most ever for the U.S.) and left with only the bronze medal. In fact, it lost the first game of the tournament to Puerto Rico by a score of 92–73, the biggest loss ever recorded for any U.S. Olympic basketball team.
Argentina then beat the United States in the semifinals in one of the most surprising upsets in Olympic history and went on to win the gold medal that year. Though Argentina had several NBA players itself, including Manu Ginóbili, hardly anyone expected it to be victorious.
Why did the talented U.S. team fall short of the gold? The historical analysis converges on the fact that the U.S. “team” wasn’t much of a team at all—more like a loose collection of individual stars. They practiced together only for a few weeks before the tournament, not enough time to get used to playing with one another. They also didn’t have enough players with experience in all the different positions. By contrast, other countries selected players to complement one another, and then those players worked together for years, honing their collective playing styles and eventually gelling as teams.
We relate this story because most of us are not able to put together or be part of a dream team packed with the most talented people in their fields the world over. Joy’s law is a mental model named after Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, who remarked at an event in 1990, No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said something similar, known as Rumsfeld’s Rule: You go to war with the army you have. They’re not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Both Joy and Rumsfeld acknowledge that organizations hardly ever have perfect resources, nor can they always afford to wait until they have better ones before moving forward. Joy’s law further stresses that great people are unlikely to be concentrated in a single organization.
Don’t be discouraged, though. With the right leadership, a well-constructed team can accomplish incredible things, as Argentina and Puerto Rico did in the 2004 Olympics. As another example, startup companies that disrupt large incumbents routinely start with relatively tiny amounts of resources, often a hundred to a thousand times less. Yet they become successful because they are the right group of people led in the right way. Instagram had only thirteen employees when Facebook bought it for one billion dollars in 2012; a few years later Facebook bought WhatsApp, with fifty-five employees, for a whopping nineteen billion dollars.
In the startup world, you will sometimes hear about a 10x engineer, an exceptional engineer who produces many times the output of an average engineer: a world-class all-star. Ten isn’t an exact number here—it’s just meant to signify that a person is much, much better than average, a true outlier. (Of course, this concept applies beyond engineering, as there are top performers in every field.)
Organizations are always on the lookout for 10x individuals because they can be the ingredients of a true dream team. Keeping Joy’s law in mind, however, reminds you that just seeking out 10x people is a trap for two reasons. First, they are extremely rare; not every organization can hire world-class talent, because there just isn’t enough to go around.
The second reason is subtler. There are many excellent people who, despite not being world-class, can achieve 10x output in certain situations, but that output may not be replicated when they switch roles, projects, or organizations. In other words, when you see outsized output by an individual, such as on a resume or via a reference, it is usually because they have many things working in their favor all at once to produce that outsized impact: role in the organization or team, personality as applied to this role, types of tasks assigned, resources provided, and the value of their unique set of skills and relationships in that particular situation. When one or more of those variables change, the person may not be able to produce at the same level.
We actually view this as a positive. It means that such outsized output can be created within an organization, not by recruiting world-class all-stars, but by crafting the right projects and roles, ones that allow excellent people to reach extraordinary performance given their unique set of characteristics. As a manager, if you can help your team members in this way, you can create a 10x team around you.
A 10x team arises when you’ve helped to arrange everything so that multiple people on your team become 10x contributors all at once. These are the teams that punch above their weight (see Chapter 7), as in defeating a U.S. Olympic Dream Team in basketball, competing successfully against much bigger organizations, and achieving other impressive and unexpected accomplishments. If the members of the team were on different projects, in different roles, or embedded in different organizations, they might not perform this well, but on this particular team, you’ve helped everyone achieve their full potential. That’s the dream of management in any situation.
This chapter is about using mental models to form and lead such incredible teams, 10x teams. A February 4, 1996, quote from former U.S. senator Bill Bradley in The New York Times is apt: “Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.” When you foster a 10x team, you draw on people’s different skills and abilities, allowing each person to play their unique part and collectively achieve outsized impact.
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
To work toward a 10x team, you must recognize that people are not interchangeable. On the same team, one person’s 10x role on a project might be another person’s 0.1x role on the same project. In figuring out who goes where, you must appreciate the nuanced differences between people, and in particular, appreciate each individual’s unique set of strengths, goals, and personality traits so you can craft roles for them that best utilize those characteristics and motivate them.
First, consider personality traits. Both of us are introverts. We strongly prefer small group interactions to large group ones, as we can easily be overstimulated or drained of energy by larger social activities. At the same time, we are totally fine and even thrive when working alone for long periods of time. So we enjoy roles that involve things like reading, writing, planning, and building things like programs and spreadsheets.
By contrast, extroverts gain energy from large group interactions. They tend to avoid solitary situations when possible, preferring synchronous interaction. A team role that involves
frequent interfacing with others (like many sales roles) and appearing in large group settings (e.g., conferences) is therefore well suited for an extrovert. And conversely, a team role that involves solitary work, like many programming roles, is well suited for an introvert.
Extrovert
Introvert
Where personality traits come from is subject to debate, and that debate is generally referred to as nature versus nurture. Nature refers to traits being explained by genetics, and nurture refers to traits being explained by all the environmental factors that don’t come from your genes (parenting, physical environment, culture, etc.). Studies have shown that many personality dimensions (like introversion/extroversion) arise out of a combination of the two.
Regardless of the root causes of people’s differences, the key insight to remember is that people really are different. What’s going on in your head isn’t the same as what’s going on in someone else’s head. You will approach and interpret the same situation differently, filtered through your personality, culture, and life experiences (see frame of reference in Chapter 1).
Also, even if derived largely from nurture, most personality traits aren’t quick to change once established. That means an introvert isn’t likely to become an extrovert (or vice versa) when put in a new situation. You should therefore look to accommodate these traits in the roles you select for yourself or for other people.
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