How - Dov Seidman [27]
Rules react and correlate to vulnerabilities and infirmities. Companies don’t have rules to tell employees that they must remember at all times to breathe; the company suffers no vulnerability to breathing; people just naturally do it. Companies do have rules that tell people when to come to work, because absent those rules, people would come to work whenever they felt like it and it would be harder to get things done. Rules achieve good floors, minimum standards of behavior, and they prevent bad things from happening—if people follow them. But people transgress, so we write rules to prevent further transgression, yet because rules are inherently limited, people find a way to transgress again. People who feel overregulated in turn feel distrusted. They lose fealty to the rules (and those who make them) and search for ways to avoid their yoke, like Steve Adams did. This creates a downward spiral of rule making which causes lasting detriment to the trust we need to sustain society. With each successive failure of rules, our faith in the very ability of rules to govern human conduct decreases. Rules, the principal arm of the way we govern ourselves, lose their power, destroying our trust in both those who make them and the institutions that they govern.
There is something in the nature of rules and laws that reduces their effectiveness in certain realms of human behavior. How do you legislate fairness? What enforceable language can we use to enshrine into law a powerful value like that? You can (and we do) write long lists proscribing a number of behaviors you think are unfair, but it is impossible to write them all without creating hopeless contradictions, inequities, and loopholes. In business, for example, how do you write a contract that obligates you to delight a customer? To exceed expectations, or even surprise customers? You can’t. You can set minimum deliverables, optimum schedules, and basic compensation, but you can’t construct language that will mandate that extra measure of performance that builds long-term, successful relationships. By setting floors of behavior, rules unintentionally also set ceilings.
When we lived in a Just Do It world, we did not care how you got things done if you generally played by the rules. As long as you did not drop beneath the floor set by rules, we let it slide. Society was content to judge people by their ability to make the numbers—in other words, by WHAT they did, not HOW they did it. As the world became more transparent, however, we began to distinguish compliance from behavior; or, to put it another way, because everyone could see your methods, HOW you did something became as important as WHAT you did. It was suddenly insufficient just to follow the rules, because we could now see and understand people’s relationships to rules. In a hyperconnected and hypertransparent world, you can no longer Just Do It; you must Just Do It Right.
OUTBEHAVING THE COMPETITION
No matter how the world changes or the Certainty Gap grows or shrinks, there are certain traits in us that do not change: We all like to be unique, we like to be valued, we like to be complimented, and we like to achieve things, for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our society. We still must find a way to achieve our goals and desires, to leap as high as we can. Business, as an expression of human aspiration and achievement, mirrors these same goals. It is about being great, about achieving something, and sometimes even about changing the world. Gallup polls in fact show that people’s happiness at work is integrally tied not to their wages, but to recognition, praise, and the opportunity to do what they do best every day.7 And if you look at the companies that make up Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work, almost every one of them distinguishes itself in its employees’ eyes by the value of its endeavor.
As the world becomes ever more connected, however, the challenges to success grow. A bachelor’s degree from a good college was all you used to need