YouSaid · the spoken record

Aaron Dignan

lines on the record: 87
first: 2023-02-07
most recent: 2023-02-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Not the human nature part. Like, let's just let human nature be what it is and say if people don't feel threatened, they won't go into fight or flight. So how do we actually create an environment where the threat level is different in nature than the traditional system where it's kind of like, if you don't do this, you're fired.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah, I think biology is a good place to look for lessons. And in fact, that's one of the places that I went when I first went down this whole rabbit hole on self-management and self-organization is looking at complex adaptive systems like ants and bees and fish and murmurations and neurons and immune systems. And they all have a ton to teach us about how to organize to solve problems. But to your point, certainly we can also see just by looking at mammals that we're going to react in fear and scarcity when we feel threatened. And so the job of the organization designer or the founder is actually to focus on the don't feel threatened part.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having the discussion, even when we go to that instinct of like, is there a good reason for this conversation or this information to be private? And if all we do is just have the discussion of is it viable? Is there a reason? Can we rationalize our way to why it should be and challenging that a little bit? That's enough to eliminate a further 50% of those scenarios where you might do that just on instinct. But in actuality, you don't need to be so worried. And in fact, a lot of the organizations that we've studied have a story somewhere in their history of like time's got really tough or things got really bad and a leader chose to just go public to the group without a solution. And people really rise to the occasion. So there is evidence to suggest that even when it feels like it would be toxic to share, there's actually a way to share it and a way to invite collaboration that can overcome that. So not every situation, there's always places that I like to be private sometimes, but”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These patterns of self preservation and risk and safety and fear through the course of our lives. Nonetheless, I agree with your premise, which is like there is a bit of a self-preservation instinct, and it's a good one because we want to survive. What I tend to do with things like transparency is first make it as habitual and operational and normie as possible. So when we think about where we work, the tools that we use, the meetings that we hold, the way that we share information, if you could just make the normal way of doing things more transparent, that helps a lot. And as an example, Slack channels are default public. And so just by making them default public, there are millions of conversations in the world happening that would have been private in email otherwise. So there's just a natural sort of momentum to the category. And I think that kind of stuff helps a lot. So having those norms, rituals, systems that default to transparency helps. And also just having...”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so interesting. I spend an enormous amount of time looking at the biological story versus the kind of behavioral one. And the first thing that I think is challenging is it's hard to pull apart what is biology versus what is socialization. So there are certainly biases and Kahnemann and others have like proven that they're just deeply wired into our brains. But also there's a lot of patterns of socialization and power and safety that get drilled into our heads by the time we're six years old that we might not naturally have. And so I think it's important to notice that the way we operate in, let's say, a kindergarten recess is very different than the way we operate in a boardroom. But fundamentally it's the same person. And so we used to be more socially coordinating. We used to be more fluid and improvisational. We used to be more carefree. But we learned.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that gives you something, or the principle of autonomy says, you know, you have the right to kind of control your own work life and what you do and when you do it unless you make an agreement that says otherwise. And so or unless we have an agreement that says otherwise. And so like these principles do create a lot of room. But to your point, they do also give you a benchmark to say like, are you upholding this agreement? Are you upholding this principle in your activity? And that's what makes us.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love that. We talk about and teach principles constantly. And in fact, we even get pretty aggro about not talking about values because the reality is that human beings have values and can hold values, but organizations don't really. They have ways of operating and beliefs about how the world in reality works. And so it's a little bit more in the Dalio school of like the way reality works is this. And so my principle is going to be measure twice, cut once. And that's going to be how I operate. Or I'm going to have a principle about transparency. And so we're just going to say like default to transparency. So we have a whole host of principles. And in fact, our whole business, both businesses are built on a stack of principles that are what we call agreements about how we operate in the world. But they form this like foundational infrastructure for the company. So the principle of transparency says, unless there's a good reason for it not to be transparent, make it transparent.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experimental spaces, sort of a barbell strategy, like the way Teleb would talk about it. Like you have the safe bets and then 10, 20% of your workshops are different agenda. And so you get the benefit of like, yeah, some of them won't work, but they won't be that bad because the person that veered at least knows their stuff. So they can kind of manage the fact that they improvise. And then the ones that actually work, you bring back to the whole group, hey, I did this other module and it crushed. I tried this other way of designing and it was absolutely phenomenal. And then the team can incorporate those learnings into the default over time. And you can have what we call a steward or an owner of the default that's like incorporating those experimental learnings over time so that five years later, the default is 100% different. But every step along the way, it was a sure thing.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're doing podcasting, for example, it would be like put it out every week. That's the shoe way to do a podcast. But if you might be like, I have a better, I have an idea. I'm going to break that rule a couple times because whatever. And then you can sort of improvise. And then if you're somebody who is like gone beyond all of us, then you're like, I'm going to actually reinvent podcasting. And it's going to look like this. And then everybody's going to kind of follow in my study. You see that happen with TV shows and movies and Olympians and all kinds of stuff like that where they kind of reinvent the art form. So default says if you don't know better, do this. And then in cultures that I work with that do that well, they have an expectation of announcing when you're veering from the default and why. So like I'm not going to do the default workshop. I'm going to do this other design and I'll get back to you on how it goes. And so what you're actually allowing is you're allowing a system to have these veered off.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Shuhari is a Japanese idea in terms of like a ladder of mastery. And so the shoe level is play by the book. So you kind of learn the martial art or the art form or how to make tea or whatever it is. This is the buy the book way to do it. And then the ha level is I'm going to break the rules occasionally. So occasionally I will improvise. Occasionally I will do things a little differently. And then the re-level is I'm going to write a new book. I'm going to write new rules. So I'm actually innovating so far beyond the category that I'm now creating a new art form. And now it'll be, I mean, sort of like Bruce Lee with his Jeet Kundo. Like he's inventing a next level thing. And so in any art form, in any function, in any skill, those levels of mastery exist. And the fun thing about the default is it basically says, we just want you to, here's the shoe level way of doing this. Now, if you've got five years of experience,”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so a standard is the idea that we've all agreed that this is kind of the bar. Like, this is the way we're going to do it. You could replace that with like the word policy or procedure or bright red line, red tape, whatever. But the standard is basically saying this is it. This is the only way. And so you expect people to comply. A default says if you don't know better, try this. And so a default would be like if we're doing a workshop, the default agenda is this and then this and then that. So that's the default agenda. If you're brand new to our company, if you're brand new to this industry, that's a real good place to start. Like that's kind of, have you heard of the framework called Shuhari?”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that is 100% what happens. And in fact, I believe there's a German word for that, that you are essentially saying it's compliant. So it's the bureaucracy's fault. It's the system's fault. And that's because you've given away your right to think or your right to be accountable, your right to be responsible in the ecosystem. And it's a lovely trade for most people because they're like, here, I just have to be compliant. And then when things don't work, it's not my fault. And it's, you know, we have the term CYA, cover your ass in business for a reason. People do a lot of things to CYA. And it doesn't tend to lead to good outcomes. So we have a lot of models that we use to explain this to people and to try to get them thinking about different ways of accomplishing the same goal. But yeah, it's as soon as you get into process and compliance theater, everything goes downhill pretty quickly.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that is funny because it's sort of like, yeah, when you protest too much, right, that would be the Shakespeare of it, right? Thou doth protest too much. When you're speaking constantly about these are our values and they're so important, integrity, integrity, integrity, that's a clue that something is going on that's not healthy, when in fact good change and good patterns and culture are quite fluid. And so it should be moving effortlessly and behaviorally through the culture through modeling and through storytelling, not through the poster with the five pillars.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book doesn't work. And so we sabotage ourselves by constantly bringing it to the table and being like, the culture change initiative will be done in June of 2024. And we will achieve these five metrics along the way. And that's our, you know, those are our pillars. That's just all complicated talk brought to a complex party.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Complicated approach, the checklist, the Gantt chart, the quarterly goals, the objectives, the management to that context, you tend to really struggle and fail. And what we see is that organizations tend to just over-index on everything must be complicated. And so we're going to treat everything that way. And I routinely get brought into boardrooms with executives and teams that are like, look, we changed our company values and behaviors last year. We put them on coffee mugs and posters all over the world, all over the office, and nobody's behaving differently. Why? It's like, well, because you're yelling at the weather, right? You're yelling at the garden. That's not how these sorts of systems work. If you have a manufacturing problem where you don't have a tolerance, get that checklist out. If you have a broken engine, take it into the dealership. But if you're trying to raise a human being or build a successful team or create a culture of trust, that plays.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I guess the last one is that we, and I talk about this a ton, but we confuse the context that we're operating in. So I talk a lot in my work about the difference between complicated and complex. And you've had some people on your show talk about complexity before as well. But the complicated context is like the engine of a car or a watch. It is predictable. There's cause and effect inside it. The parts fit in a way that if you're an expert, you kind of know how to take it apart and put it back together again. And so if there's a problem, it can be solved and it can be delivered and it can be working again, no problem. There's very high confidence in solutioning in those areas. But in a complex system, which would be like weather or traffic or gardens or six-year-olds, they are dispositional. So they have an attitude, a way they're trending, but you can't fundamentally predict them. You can't be sure what will happen if you try something. And if you bring that.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, right? Like, just let it go and then move on. They don't wait for patterns, right? We don't wait for patterns generally. We just overreact and try to systematize everything. So that tends to sabotage us quite a bit. The other thing that we do is that we really get stuck focusing on metrics that become incentives, that become ways to drive mismanagement. And so there are many different names for this law. But when a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to become a good metric. And the idea is that we're optimizing for something that is a proxy for reality instead of reality itself. And again, we're putting our judgment down and just focusing on like click-through rate. Like I'm just, I just have to hit this click-through rate and I'll do whatever it takes to get it. And so that sort of overoptimization on proxies or abstract goals rather than absolute principle driven goals is really problematic.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially, what tends to happen is that you have a few things that go on. The first thing is that we tend to do what Jason Fried calls scarring on the first cut. So when something doesn't work or goes wrong or there's an issue or somebody steals a laptop, the organization freaks out and it immediately reacts with a policy or a procedure or a new security protocol or something.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They really do. It's a common pattern across. I mean, we looked at 68 for the original book, Brave New Work. And yeah, it's a strong pattern.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cares about. It's not what the market cares about. And so I'm actually serving the wrong master, so to speak, and end up getting stuck in a feedback loop that's inaccurate and inauthentic.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slightly turn left and right as you go. That's what you're actually doing when you go straight. You're kind of in a dance with the information that you have. And as you move from point A to point B, you're going to do some steering. And so I think for organizations and for people in teams and for people in relationships, that's what we're trying to do at our best is steer dynamically based on the feedback we're getting, based on what we value. So based whatever your principles, whatever your values are, whatever you care about, whatever winning means to you, you're going to steer in the direction of that based on the input that you get. But if you live in a system that's far removed from feedback, then it's problematic or even worse if the feedback you're getting is actually disconnected from reality. Because you were talking about that part of being disconnected from reality. And it can happen a different way where the only feedback I get is from a boss. The boss is telling me what they think is important. That is not what the customer is.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. Yeah. I mean, feedback is essentially is tension. It's dynamism in the system. And you can quite literally make the argument that life being alive is about needing feedback. Like everything you touch as you walk, as you listen, as you feel the air on your skin, as you communicate with others, as you run, there are millions of points of feedback entering and leaving your brain. And that is essential if you take away your senses. I've taken away your feedback. And so you can't really operate in the world. And the same thing is true of a business. And he used to use a bike as a metaphor. So he'd say, you know, if I put you on a bike and I say, lock the handlebars and go, how far can you go with the handlebars locked? And the answer is like not very far at all. If you ever try this, you fall over within like 10 or 15 feet. But instead, if you can have the feedback from the road and the resistance and the gravity and then.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is what you get to kind of see around that business, what it does to the environment, what it does to society is also on your mind and on your conscience. And I think in general, government is also a little bit removed from that. It feels like these wild swings between parties and these kind of deep institutions don't feel like they're really affecting anything at some level.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The difference, though, is that there are very few feedback loops for the government. So one of the early kind of theories that I pull from a lot is sociocracy. And the guy that kind of created the modern version of it talked about feedback constantly as like the lifeblood of everything. And so not just feedback at a person-to-person level, but system to system and marketplace to marketplace. And so with government, the feedback loops tend to be really, really poor because it has to be there. It's going to be there forever. To your point, there's a time horizon to it. But also, it doesn't really get like defunded next year if it doesn't do a good job. But a public company does. So even if you did have a hundred year time horizon and you owned, I don't know, if you owned Apple outright, if they just blow it year after year after year, the value of your asset is going to go down and down and down. And if they do a great job in theory, that asset will go up and up and up. And the extra.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three, four years now. They don't, you know, it's just that horizon is so different, which is one of the reasons why you hear Bezos talking about like, if I make a seven-year bet, I'm already winning because nobody else will. It really does feel like that out there. And that optimization has come at the expense of our ability to operate in a sustainable way. It's prioritizing this external stakeholder who doesn't really have to stay with the program. They have to live in society with us, but they don't have to stay with the company. They don't have to, they're not committed to anything other than that return. So it's actually quite dangerous. And that's why I'm a big fan of what Eric is doing with long-term stock exchange and other things like that. Like we need to reorient around the time horizon of our commitments if we want to have a community and a society that we actually enjoy living in.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. Yeah. And actually, that short-termism is a relatively novel phenomenon. So if you roll the clock back on the stock market even 20, 30, 40, 50 years, we didn't buy and sell companies like this. People would make an investment and they'd hold it for 10, 20, 30 years. It would be part of their portfolio. They would kind of play the game more like Warren Buffett plays the game and less like, you know, the average swing trader. But the actual time to hold has gone down to the point where now it's like it can be measured in days or hours on average. And so we're really just looking for as investors an edge when you said seven years, I was like, shit, I would love seven years. If everybody actually had a seven-year time horizon, that would be amazing. But in reality, it's mostly a quarterly time horizon. It's like, when's the next earnings call? That's the time horizon of my commitment. Unless I'm private equity or I'm doing like a multi-year bet. But even then, PE swings into.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And end up making things compounded. And typically what happens if you don't end up failing for lack of agility is that you end up becoming so big that you realize, all right, we have a cash machine that nobody really loves to work in. And we're missing that innovation. We're missing that spirit, that energy that we had when we were young. What should we do? Let's go buy some companies. And so you start acquiring that innovation and then to finish the Doom loop that we're talking about, you bring in those acquired companies with all that creativity and judgment and you squash it by conforming them to your operating system. And then you start over. And that's essentially how the economy works.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creativity is much, much narrower. It's much smaller and harder to find. Like, when can I do something that hasn't already been thought about or planned? When can I do something without permission? When can I do something that doesn't match the strategy we already have? And so you kind of eliminate the serendipity and the randomness from the organization's operations and day-to-day reality. And it gets pretty static. And then to even make things worse, you tend to get expectations from outside players. So you've taken on investors or you've gone public or you've been acquired. Someone else is now setting the agenda in terms of the goals. And they're hoping for more juice out of the orange. So they start to squeeze the orange even in the midst of all that structure. And what you tend to do is you double down. You're like, we need a better hiring process. We need even higher goals. We need more engineers. We need more layers. We need to push the managers to manage harder. And you sort of, you turn away from the skid, essentially.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you figure something out usually. Otherwise, you die, right? So either you go out of business, and that's that, or you figure something out. Oh, people like it when we do this. Oh, we have 10 engineers. We better have somebody to manage them. Oh, we have a process that's starting to emerge. How do we hire people? We better figure out a hiring process. And as you figure things out, you dial them in because you think, I want certainty. I want control. I want reliability. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to nail this stuff to the wall. So like this is the hiring process. This is the, you know, business model that we use. This is what we charge. This is what we do. This is what we don't do. And you take a lot of joy in clarifying that stuff in those early years because it feels like building a business. It feels like we're getting everything specified. And then what tends to happen is a combination of things. But essentially, you start to figure everything out. And then there's a rule and a role for everything. And now the space for human judgment and creation.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially, we lose our way because we believe in a false choice. So, most people believe that the pattern of organizational evolution is from chaos to bureaucracy. So you start in chaos with a startup. You have a handful of people around the kitchen table or the kitchen door in the case of Amazon. And everybody's doing a lot of different things. There's no clarity about roles. There's no clarity about what we do for a living. We don't have product market fit yet. Everything is about search and figure out an experiment.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about our feelings, right? We need someone to say all right, whether I have it through virtue of power and position or because you gave it to me, I'm the one that everyone's going to turn to in this moment and I'm going to say we're going to go left or we're going to go right. And that way we can actually move as one and act quickly. So there are plenty of places like that where those things make sense. And certainly, like we talked about in the factory context where we're trying to optimize certain practices, certain ways of having a hierarchy or optimizing for a way of doing something that's very specific and very mandated works great. I think sometimes we get a little too heavy-handed with that and we dehumanize each other. But nonetheless, there are certainly times and places where that kind of stuff works well. My contention is just most of those contexts are well figured out and are not the center of the universe anymore. That's not where most of the interesting work is happening.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it works so well for certain things. And I think that is really the crux of it is recognizing that there are different contexts and different problem types that we encounter in the world. If somebody says, I've got 40 pounds of pasta in the basement and I need to get it out to the truck as fast as possible, there is a tailorific way of doing that that's going to be optimal. You don't want a bunch of people brainstorming about how to do that and think about it for six hours and then try five different ways. Like you really just want to get the stopwatch out and basically make a line, do a factory line and hand the pasta up. So I think there are problems and contexts where hierarchy makes sense. There are problems in context where you actually need command and control because of the nature of the environment. For example, in a fire in a chaos issue where you're dealing with some immediate emergency, there's no time for consensus. There's no time for let's all sit in a circle and tell it.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that infected the mindset of workers everywhere. He also really gave birth to the management class for the first time because they were charged with ensuring that stuff.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, I actually have his original book right here on my shelf, The Principles of Scientific Management. Yeah, he was one of that generation. There was a whole generation of folks, actually, that saw the opportunity to help apply the principles of science and numbers and analysis and stopwatches to the way we work in order to make those factories and those businesses that were focused on scale really work. And so he was a guy who would literally spend his weekends figuring out what is the optimal number of pounds of coal in a shovel that would give you the maximum amount of shoveled coal in an hour. And then he would go back to the factory and actually say, hey, I'll make you a deal. I'll give you a small raise if you agree to shovel exactly how I show you. And so this whole idea of the one best way was really born with him and the idea of like best practice.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we actually get to choose how we work and how we make decisions and how we organize and how we allocate power and resources. And we don't. We generally don't.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the problem with work is that most of the way that we work is inherited from the generations that came before us. And the way we work today, when you think about hierarchies and bosses and managers and boxes and lines and Gantt charts and schedules and quarterly plans and budgets, all that stuff came about roughly 80 to 120 years ago and it came about in the time of the factory floor when we were trying to make sure that size nine shoes fit the same across the country and cornflakes wouldn't kill us. And everything was about reliability and consistency and scale. And so that entire what I call operating system, that way of working was born for that purpose. And now here we are 100 years later. Most of the problems we solve are not cornflake problems. And so there's a huge disconnect between the way we work today that we think is normal, that we think is kind of inevitable. And the reality.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's no such thing as a big company, really. I think the main thing I deal with when folks ask me about doing this at scale is like, there's no such thing as Apple or Amazon, right? Like that's not actually a real thing. There are groups of 150, 300, 500 people that live their whole lives with each other and just like very rarely interface with other divisions and units. And, you know, it's 50 small companies that are just under the same banner with a set of shared principles. And that's kind of it. And that's your company.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT