INTRODUCTION
BEING THE KIND OF BOSS PEOPLE LOVE TO WORK FOR
In San Diego, California, in 1953, a new startup set its sights on the Space Age. The Rocket Chemical Company had a small lab and just three people, but they could see a major opportunity in front of them. The aerospace industry was producing incredible new technology—missiles and rockets that could fly farther than any had before—but that technology had a major weakness: it was all made of metal, and metal rusts.
Norm Larsen, the chief chemist, had an idea. He thought he could come up with a chemical compound that would keep the newly invented rockets and missiles from rusting. The secret would be to find a substance that would simply displace the water: stop water from clinging to the metal surfaces of the rockets so it would roll harmlessly away, like water off a duck’s back. In his one-room lab, Norm and his two cofounders tried again and again to find a compound that would work. They tried ten times. They tried twenty times. They tried thirty times. Finally, on the fortieth try, Larsen and his team found a successful formula. They were soon producing the product for Convair, a division of General Dynamics and maker of NASA’s Atlas missile.
Then something funny happened. The product worked so well that workers at General Dynamics started sneaking it home to use around the house as a protectant, solvent, and all-purpose lubricant. By 1955, Larsen realized he might have a market for his compound that was broader than the aerospace and defense industry. He went back to the lab and started a new set of experiments aimed at finding a way to put his special formula into an aerosol can. In 1959, the first spray cans of the product hit the market, and the world met WD-40.
The product’s name comes from “water displacement, fortieth attempt.” Not a lot of fanfare or marketing spin behind that one; but forty years later, WD-40 had over 80 percent market share in the multipurpose lubrication market. Today it’s practically synonymous with that market, and that yellow and blue can is found in 75 percent of American households. While companies like 3M and Valvoline have tried to unseat WD-40, none has been able to. By one estimate it has staved off competition from more than 200 rival products, including more than a dozen produced by billion-dollar firms.1
How does a company stay at the top of its game for over sixty years, making and selling a single product whose formula has only been tweaked once? (In the early 1960s, they tried to improve the smell.) How can a company be successful when its product strategy flies in the face of everything the business establishment normally preaches, like “segment your market” and “diversify”? I’d argue they do it by taking a radical approach to managing their people.
Nationally, only 33 percent of employees are engaged in their work, according to Gallup. Worldwide, those numbers are even worse: just 15 percent of employees say they’re engaged.2 But at WD-40, a whopping 93 percent of employees consider themselves to be engaged in their work, and 97 percent say they are excited about the future of the company.3 Why the difference?
Because WD-40 practices a human resources strategy that I call “personal disruption.” A strategy that is centered around learning: you start as a beginner, embracing the confusion that comes with being a novice; you experience a state of deep engagement as you learn, grow, and gain traction; and you feel the joy of mastery once you get to the top of your learning curve. But then—crucially—you find a new challenge to tackle and the cycle starts over; human beings are wired to learn and change, not to stay in one place, doing the same thing over and over again.
At WD-40, this means that employees have an identifiable career path inside the company and that managers help their employees get from point A to points B, C, and D. WD-40 wants to keep people in house, not chained to their roles. They encourage employees to learn, leap to new roles, and learn and leap again. Because management encourages leaps to new learning curves, many people have been there for ten to twenty-five years and longer. As CEO Garry Ridge told me, “I get so much joy out of seeing people who are coming through the company and stepping into new roles. They’re standing on the edge and I say ‘Jump! Don’t worry. There’s a net …’”
No wonder 60 percent of WD-40 employees believe they can satisfy their career objectives without ever leaving the company. Three senior leaders began their careers there in the role of receptionist. “Our brand manager for our key brand started in a part-time position [as receptionist],” says Ridge. “We pushed her and pushed her and she jumped and she jumped, and now she’s brand manager of WD-40. That’s what we love.”
WD-40 exemplifies the practice of developing people through repeated disruptions. Because people are challenged by and engaged in their work, they stay. This impacts the bottom line. WD-40’s market capitalization has grown from $250 million to $1.6 billion over the past eighteen years. Not bad for a company that sells a can of oil.4
The Power of Personal Disruption
Most of us are not excited about our work. In one survey, 84 percent of employees said they felt “trapped” in their jobs.5 In another, only 22 percent said they had anything like a clear career path in their current job.6
I’ve heard these complaints firsthand. In 2015 I published Disrupt Yourself, a guide to radically reinventing your own career. But as I’ve traveled in the subsequent months, delivering keynotes, consulting with organizations, and coaching executives on personal disruption, two questions come up more than any others: “How can I get my people to disrupt themselves?” and “How can I get my boss to let me disrupt my self?” It’s ironic and even sad: both employees and their managers want to experience the growth that can come with disruption, but it’s not happening. No wonder true engagement is so rare.
Change, not stasis, is the natural mode of human life. Change promotes growth; stasis results in decline. Whether they are the manager of a small team or the head honcho overseeing thousands of people across several business units, proactive managers get this. They cultivate environments that keep the work experience fresh. They encourage and facilitate personal disruptions. They recognize that the best reward they can give their people—the thing that motivates and engages beyond money or praise—is learning. It’s what makes each of us more productive. It’s what turns our organizations into talent magnets.
Managers who recognize this not only make a huge difference to their company, but have a direct influence on the lives of their employees. My own experience illustrates this. When I first arrived in Manhattan after college, freshly armed with a not-particularly-useful university degree in music, I needed to work, and I wanted to do something exciting. Wall Street in the late eighties was exciting, but it didn’t have openings for pianists, so I started as a secretary at a financial services firm and took business classes at night. After a few years, my boss, Cesar Baez, helped bridge the gap for me to become an investment banker. It was an unusual move, and it laid the groundwork for my entire career.
From there, I went on to become an Institutional Investor–ranked equity research analyst for eight consecutive years. I was rated by Starmine as a superior stock picker, following stocks such as América Móvil (NYSE: AMX), Televisa (NYSE: TV), and Telmex (NYSE: TMX), which at the time accounted for roughly 40 percent of the Mexican Stock Exchange’s market cap.
But by 2004, I was hankering for a new challenge. I shared with a top executive at my company that I wanted to move into the management track, hoping to enlist his support. Instead, he was dismissive. He had a “We like you right where you are” attitude. In retrospect, I think I could have handled the conversation better. But at the time I remember thinking, “I’m ready for something new, and if it’s not going to happen here, I’ll have to leave.” Within a year, I struck out on my own.
After I left New York, I cofounded an early-stage investment fund with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen called the Disruptive Innovation Fund. It was this work that would lead me to understand that Christensen’s theory of disruption could be applied not only to startups but to people’s careers as well.
Disruptive innovation, at its simplest, explains how low-end industry insurgents take on—and eventually outcompete—high-end incumbents who seemingly should have known better. Think Toyota in the 1960s. Their product was inferior. Their position was weak. General Motors could have crushed them like a cockroach. But they didn’t. Market leaders rarely do. After all, it was just a silly little Corolla. What threat did it pose to the bigger, faster, better, more expensive Cadillac? But once a disruptor gains its footing, it too is motivated by bigger, faster, better. For Toyota that was the Camry, then Lexus. Lexus today has a 16 percent market share in America, twice that of Cadillac.7
Christensen and others have found similar examples in health care, steel manufacturing, personal computing, and dozens of other industries. But the pattern is the same: an insurgent firm starts out making a vastly inferior product and sells it to nonconsumers (such as people who can’t afford the incumbent’s product) or to customers overserved by the expensive bells and whistles attached to the incumbent’s offering. Once the insurgent firm gains traction, its growth hockey-sticks upward, letting it also add features, improve quality, and like Pac-Man, eat away at the incumbent firm’s market share. By the time a counterattack by the incumbent makes sense, it’s too late: the insurgent is too strong, too firmly entrenched to dislodge.
It is now generally accepted that disruptive innovation underpins the invention of new products and services, creates new markets, and amplifies revenue and profits—often in huge ways. Less generally recognized, but equally true, is that personal disruption in the workplace—the movement of people from one learning curve to the next, one challenge to another—can drive learning, engagement, and even innovation.
Managers are the people best placed to shape these learning curves and help employees recognize when it’s time to leap to a new curve.
And yet all too often, that kind of clarity of purpose, on-the-job development, and career-shaping mentoring get lost in the day-to-day shuffle of putting out fires, running to meetings, and answering emails. It’s not uncommon to hear a manager complain that they have no one who can pick up the slack when they’re on vacation but in almost the same breath say they’re just too busy to teach employees what to do or dismiss hands-on coaching as hand-holding or babysitting.
This isn’t the kind of manager most people set out to be. It’s just that the long-term, important task of coaching and developing people gets lost in the chaos of day-to-day to-do lists. And then, when an employee leaves and the manager has an empty role to fill, we are so harried, we hire someone who knows how to do the job today—rather than hire someone who might grow in the role over the course of many tomorrows.
As managers, we have the same dilemma that industry incumbents face: we become great at maximizing efficiency while taking our eye off the ball of personal and professional growth. And that’s how we end up with so many people feeling bored or stuck in their jobs, with no clear career path. The result is stagnation, for both the employees and the organization.
An employee, like a startup, requires a certain amount of up-front investment. A good manager, like a good investor, knows how to exercise patience. Having done your due diligence before bringing someone new onboard, you’ll have a certain amount of confidence that they’ll grow into the role. When they do, you’ll be rewarded with the returns: an employee who is highly productive. If you take this approach with your whole “portfolio” of employees, the result will be an A-team: people who are at different stages on their individual learning curves who achieve the “sweet spot” of highly engaged growth at different times.
How This Book Is Organized
In Build an A-Team, I lay out a framework for engaging and motivating employees by understanding and managing their individual learning. Chapter 1 explains the basic idea: that a learning curve is shaped like an S. At the low end of the curve is the discomfort (and excitement) of the unknown. At the high end of the curve is the confidence (and dullness) of mastery. In the middle, on the steep part of the curve, is where the magic happens: where employees are happiest, learning quickly and highly engaged.
Chapter 2 gives an overview of seven ways managers can support and accelerate their employees’ movement up the learning curve. I’ll describe how you can identify where each of your employees is on their personal learning curve and what help they need to climb it—eventually mastering their existing curve and leaping to a new one.
Chapters 3 and 4 explain how to use this approach in hiring and onboarding, respectively: when your employee knows little about their new learning curve. Chapter 5 describes managing the “sweet spot”: the steep part of the learning curve, when your employee is maximally engaged and learning fast. Chapter 6 discusses what managers need to know about the period of mastery at the top of the curve. While it sounds great (“Hey, my employee is a master! I’ll just stay out of their way!”), this can be a really tricky time. If things become too dull, they’ll start looking for a new job. Or worse, become complacent. Chapter 7 describes how to craft new challenges inside your company. Finally, the conclusion discusses some of the mental challenges and other roadblocks that can get in your way as you apply this approach.
Managing people so they can disrupt themselves honors the biology of change that is our human nature. We each have a life cycle, made up of myriad smaller life cycles. Beginnings and endings, growth and decline; we cannot stay the same.
Our work life—so large a part of the whole—is like this too. Individual jobs have a life span. They have a first day of work and, if we are wise, a last day. This opens the door for our talented employees to continue to grow with us and for us, rather than constantly turning these valuable assets over to other employers.
Because we are always evolving, one of the great frustrations we can encounter is the perception that nothing is changing around us. That our organic human life is rolling along in a static landscape like a car in an old movie jostling against a painted background. How can we help but become disengaged and detached when we feel like actors on a set that never alters, where Act I is never succeeded by Act II or III? It is not enough to do our work with the latest gadgets and hot-off-the-press technology. Bright shiny objects lose their sheen quickly. The work itself needs to change: problems to solve, needs to address, brain-stimulating challenges must roll around again—and on a regular basis.
We can only rummage through the same rocks for so long and still find diamonds. Eventually it’s time to swing our pick into the solid wall of the unknown and begin the work of discovery anew.