assembly line. A fundamental lesson of the story is that when it
comes to manufacturing products in a capital-driven market
economy, the amount of resources you have is not enough by itself to
predict your profitability. During the lead-up to the Model T, for
example, Ford didn’t have more capital than his competitors. If
anything, at certain key points, he probably had less. (At the time
when Ford’s
first Model A was sold, for $750 to a Chicago dentist, he
was down to only $223 in cash reserves.
7
) And yet, by the end of
1914, Ford was producing cars at a cost that made it ten times more
profitable than rival automobile companies. What mattered just as
much as how much capital he had was how he
deployed it.
In the aftermath of the Ford revolution, this principle became
foundational for industrial management. It’s now widely accepted
that continued industrial growth requires continual experimentation
and reinvention of the processes that produce the stuff we sell. As
Peter Drucker argues in a classic 1999 article,
this obsession with
industrial improvement was enormously successful. As Drucker
reminds the reader, since 1900 the productivity of the manual
laborer increased by
a factor of fifty! “The productivity of the
manual worker has created what we now call ‘developed’ economies,”
he writes. “On this achievement rest
all of the economic and social
gains of the 20th century.”
8
But when we turn our attention
back to knowledge work, we find
this same spirit of experimentation and reinvention lacking. This is
what I meant when I wrote in the
Times that the rarity of
experiments like Lasse Rheingans’s five-hour workday was itself
“radical.” Rheingans is thinking about his organization with a Henry
Ford mindset, by which I mean he’s looking for bold new ways to
deploy his capital to produce more value. Soon after my
Times op-ed
was published, Rheingans reached
out to me and we began a
conversation about life at his company. He explained that his five-
hour workday experiment had been running for two years so far and
that he had no intention of changing this setup anytime soon.
Accomplishing this transformation, however, proved
challenging. I asked Rheingans how he persuaded his employees to
not check email constantly. “The answer is not as easy as you might
expect,” he told me. Suggesting they check email less was not enough
for many on his team. He ended up hiring external coaches to
reinforce “that checking email or social media all the time won’t help
them.” The coaches also encouraged employees to embrace stress-
reducing mindfulness exercises like meditation
and to improve their
physical health through practices like yoga. Rheingans’s goal was for
everyone to slow down; to approach their work more deliberately
and with less frantic action; to realize that they were “running all the
time without getting anywhere.” With these changes in place, five
hours suddenly proved to be more than enough to accomplish the
work that used to require a much longer day.
Rheingans is one of the few business leaders willing to drastically
change the fundamental building blocks of work in our age of
networked brains.
At the moment, most organizations remain stuck
in the productivity quicksand of the hyperactive hive mind workflow,
content to focus on tweaks meant to compensate for its worst
excesses. It’s this mindset that leads to “solutions” like improving
expectations around email response times or writing better subject
lines. It leads us to embrace text autocomplete in Gmail, so we can
write messages faster, or the search feature in Slack, so we can more
quickly find what we’re looking for amid
the scrum of back-and-forth
chatter. These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up
the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster
shoes. It’s a small victory won in the wrong war.
Lasse Rheingans and I aren’t the only ones to notice the stakes
on the table in this discussion. In the same 1999 article cited earlier,
Peter Drucker notes that in terms of productivity thinking,
knowledge work was where industrial manufacturing was in 1900—
that is, right before the radical experiments that increased
productivity by fifty times. We’re poised, in other words, to make
similarly massive increases in the economic effectiveness of the
knowledge sector,
if we’re willing to get
serious about questioning
how we work. Drucker calls this push to make knowledge work more
productive the “central challenge” of our times, writing: “It is on
[knowledge work] productivity, above all, that the future prosperity—
and indeed the future survival—of the developed economies will
increasingly depend.”
9
We can capture both the necessity and the potential of this
mindset shift in the following principle, which provides the
foundation for all the practical ideas that populate part 2 of this
book.
