INTRODUCTION

As a child, I lived in a world of paradox. My globe-trotting father swept our family from Venezuela to Turkey and beyond, providing my sister and me with invaluable experiences. We learned multiple languages, were immersed in exotic cultures, and developed an inclusive, cosmopolitan perspective that was decades ahead of its time. But my childhood was far from perfect. I often felt alienated and lonely; worse still, my parents were deeply unhappy, and my sister and I bore the brunt of it.

As an adult, I live and work in a world that is no less paradoxical and troubling. A globalized marketplace and quantum leaps in computing power have speeded up the flow of knowledge and vastly improved productivity, but these same developments have shortened product cycles and heightened the competition for markets and jobs. Our world is filled with exhilarating opportunities but also with a debilitating pressure to perform, which leads to fear.

Opportunity and pressure, hope and fear—the tensions between these opposing forces shaped my life, sparking a passion that has sustained me for decades, connecting me with people from all walks of life who have helped me learn and grow. But they have also caused me no end of sorrow and struggle. All of us are living the same paradox, feeling on the one hand a sense of nearly limitless potential and on the other the fear of being left behind.

Our challenge is to respond to this pressure in ways that build hope and excitement, allowing us to seize the opportunities before us and make the most of them. Don’t underestimate how difficult this is. Our instinctive responses to fear can easily erode, if not obliterate, those opportunities. Instead of grasping them and moving forward, we can just as easily withdraw, hiding from each other behind walls.

Think of your life as a journey by water. You start out with a vessel—yourself—that is more or less seaworthy, depending on your particular strengths and weaknesses. To reach your goal, you will need a powerful motivation (what I call a narrative) to impel you to set out from the safety of land; food and fuel to sustain you along the way (what I describe as passion); and perhaps most critically, help from others (via the learning platforms you can create to mobilize them). Narrative, passion, and platforms are the three pillars of positive emotion. Everyone’s journey is unique, but we all need those three pillars if we are going to reach our destinations.

I’m in the midst of that journey myself, and whether you know it or not, you are too. Your career path is a part of it but by no means all of it. Your ultimate opportunity is to develop your own, your organization’s, and ultimately all of humanity’s potential in the fullest possible way.

In the pages that follow, I will tell you a lot more about narratives, passion, and platforms while sharing what I’ve learned on my own journey. This is not a memoir; my goal is to help you transform your own journey into one driven by hope and excitement rather than fear. But it is necessarily a personal book, because you can’t fully tap your potential without confronting the emotions that stand in its way. Also, I’m going to resist citing the extensive literature and research that support my perspective. I know that will be frustrating to some readers (especially academics), but if I tried to include everything, the book would be at least twice as long as it is.

OPPORTUNITY AND PRESSURE

Both of my parents grew up in small towns, but they were driven to move beyond their comfort zones to explore and learn. My father, an executive at Mobil Oil, loved international assignments. My earliest memories are of a life filled to the brim with adventure as we moved from one far-flung place to another. I truly had marvelous opportunities, and I tried to make the most of them. Looking back, I am deeply grateful to my parents for providing me with them.

But there were challenges, too. As soon as I started to feel comfortable in a place, my father would announce a new assignment in a different country, and we would be uprooted. The next thing I knew, I’d be starting all over again in a new school. When I did make friends, I knew I’d have to leave them in a year or two when we moved again. All of this was before the internet and social media. Once we left, I’d quickly lose touch with my friends, no matter how close we’d become.

That would have been pressure enough. But my biggest challenges were on the home front. My mother, who’d survived a difficult childhood of her own, was filled with anger. Like my father, she became the first in her family to attend college. She went on to earn her master’s degree, intending to pursue a career with the State Department, which was quite an accomplishment in the 1940s. But then she sacrificed her ambitions for my father’s. Frustrated, she lashed out at the daily challenges of life.

If you had met my mother outside the home, you would have found her to be warm and kind. At home, she was very different. One of my earliest memories is of her shouting that she wished I had never been born, that life would have been so much simpler and easier without me. Another very early memory is a tirade about how selfish and inconsiderate I was and how I should be focused on the needs of others, rather than my own. My mother never raised a hand to us, but she didn’t have to. Her words were devastating enough.

My strong but gentle father loved her dearly, but her rage proved too much for him, and he gradually withdrew. His preferred escape was to his study and his stamp collection. As my sister and I became teenagers, he sought further escape in alcohol and pharmaceuticals—pain pills that numbed his ability to feel. He was not there for us when we needed him. No one was. Our extended family was back in the United States, so they couldn’t see what was happening, never mind intervene.

Afraid of my mother’s immense anger and desperate to win the kind of love I needed from my parents, I focused on getting top grades in school, since my parents respected academic achievement. That won me their praise, but I did not succeed in breaking through to the love I was seeking. Though I went on to earn multiple degrees and pursue a challenging career, it took me a long time and two failed marriages to realize I was on the wrong path.

I don’t tell you all this to blame my parents. Looking back, I now realize they loved me deeply and in the best way they knew: they showed me the world and provided for all my material needs, including wonderful homes, extraordinary meals, and great schools. For that I am grateful, but they were not able to love me in the way I needed. My inability to receive that love shaped the path I pursued as a young person, a path that led to professional success but obscured what was meaningful to me.

OPPORTUNITY AND PRESSURE IN THE WORLD TODAY

Eventually, I landed in Silicon Valley, where I’ve lived for almost 40 years. Almost as soon as I arrived, the rapid and sustained improvements in digital technology that had begun there in the 1950s reached critical mass, unleashing a full-blown revolution.

Until then, powerful computers had been accessible to only the government and a few very large organizations that could afford mainframes. In the 1980s, they were becoming available to everyone. Today computing, storage, and networking technologies continue to advance at exponential rates, radically altering virtually every aspect of our lives. Biosynthesis technologies, 3D printing, and materials to build “smart” houses are transforming such diverse arenas as medicine, manufacturing, and construction. As with innovations throughout history, there is a significant lag between the introduction of new capabilities and the knowledge of how to harness them for good, but we’re getting there. Thanks to wireless networks and drone technologies, for example, farmers in developing countries can connect with international markets, giving them better opportunities to sell at a fair price. And people with a wide variety of disabilities are benefiting from advances in implants and prosthetics. In some cases, these products also can augment the capabilities of healthy human bodies—for example, providing “exoskeletons” that can help warehouse workers move heavier objects without straining their muscles.

But here comes paradox again. All this opportunity has a dark side, which is gathering force at both the individual and institutional levels. As I discussed in my book The Power of Pull, these forces are reshaping our global economy and society. Digital-technology infrastructures are intensifying global competition. Customers can much more easily access vendors, regardless of where they are. New companies can find customers more quickly, wherever they are.

These digital-technology infrastructures are also increasing customer power. As consumers, we can quickly identify a broad range of vendors that might be available to address our needs, gather information about them and their products, and shift our business from one to another if our needs are not being met. Rather than settling for standardized mass-market products, we as customers are increasingly demanding products that meet our specific needs and tastes and that will evolve as they do. An early example of this is the rapid growth of craft beer and craft chocolates that address narrower and narrower segments of markets that large incumbents used to dominate with just a few offerings. Where once Americans would drink the same few pale lagers from a giant brewer and indulge a sweet tooth with milk chocolate from a giant candy company, today they might seek out a particular pumpkin stout or a fair-trade chocolate bar with 60 percent cacao.

The paradox arises because we are customers in one part of our lives but employees in another. The trends in globalization, technology, and customization are intensifying the pressure on our employers. The way employers harness these trends and meet the challenges often threatens jobs and consequently our livelihoods. The result of all this change is mounting pressure, for individuals and institutions alike.

The pressure on individuals was perfectly captured by a billboard I used to see beside Highway 101, which runs through the heart of Silicon Valley. The billboard asked a simple question: “How does it feel to know that there are at least 1 million people around the world who can do your job?” A few decades ago, the answer would have been obvious: It doesn’t matter; I’m here and they’re there. But now it does. More and more people are competing for our jobs, regardless of where they are on the planet. And in a world that is changing this fast, it matters less what our college degrees or professional certificates are or what we accomplished in the past. What matters is what we are learning today and, even more importantly, what we will learn tomorrow.

Besides competing with each other, we are competing with machines. Indeed, if that billboard came back today, it might read, “How does it feel to know that there are at least 1 million robots around the world who can do your job?” Automation is not just affecting low-skilled workers. Digital technology is carrying out tasks that used to be done by lawyers, journalists, and research scientists, and it’s doing them faster, cheaper, and more accurately.

That’s a lot of pressure at the individual level. But the pressure is also mounting for organizations. Many are slow to adapt and thus ripe for disruption. At Deloitte’s Center for the Edge in Silicon Valley, the research center I founded and led for 13 years, we studied the long-term forces reshaping our global business landscape. We came to see that we were in the early stages of a Big Shift that has been transforming our global economy since the 1960s, when digital technology first became a significant factor in the business world.

We wanted to understand how companies were performing during this Big Shift. For our measure of financial performance, we selected return on assets (ROA), which essentially compares profits earned (reported on the income statement) with the assets required to support business activities (measured on the balance sheet). In our view, this was the best measure of the fundamental performance of a business. Many analysts look at returns to shareholders or return on equity, but the problem there is that many companies have found ways to manipulate these returns through financial engineering—for example, increasing dividend payments, increasing debt on the balance sheet, or buying back stock from shareholders. While this financial engineering can improve returns to shareholders in the short term, such returns are not sustainable. In contrast, ROA keeps the focus on the fundamental performance of the business.

When we looked at ROA for all public companies in the United States from 1965 to 2019, we saw something disconcerting. Over this period of more than five decades, ROA has declined by a whopping 75 percent. What’s more, this long and sustained erosion shows no signs of leveling off, much less turning around.

When we first released these findings, some skeptics suggested that the erosion in performance might be concentrated in one or two industries. So we segmented all public companies into 13 different industries and found that the steep erosion was occurring in 11 of the 13 industries. The two exceptions were aerospace/defense and healthcare, and even there we found long-term erosion in performance, just not as severe as in the other industries.

While some companies performed better than others in all industries, their ability to sustain this superior performance was declining. The “topple rate” of companies falling out of the top quartile of performance was significantly increasing over time. This widespread and long-term erosion of financial performance is a striking indicator of mounting performance pressure. Twenty years ago, if you launched an amazing new product or service into the marketplace, you had a few years in which you could sit back, catch your breath, and in not a few cases, retire. Now if you launch an innovation, you immediately face a pair of questions: What do you have next? And how quickly can you get it to market?

We’re not just in danger of losing our market share and our jobs; even our lives are at risk. Thanks to global connectivity, a small event in some faraway place can quickly cascade into an extreme event, whether it is a financial catastrophe, an act of terrorism, or the COVID-19 pandemic. It used to be that some core things in our world were constants we could rely on for support when we confronted unexpected situations. Those are few and far between today.

This growing pressure is intensified by an increasing disconnect between the way our institutions are run today and the way the world around them is changing. As we will see later in this book, our institutions will need to be fundamentally redesigned to overcome mounting pressure and target the expanding opportunities generated by the Big Shift.

HOW WE RESPOND TO MOUNTING PRESSURE AND ACCELERATING CHANGE

Human beings react to pressure and change in predictable ways. We tend to become risk averse, magnifying our perceptions of what can go wrong and discounting our perceptions of potential rewards. For instance, most of us are now comfortable with driving a car, but when something new, like autonomous vehicles, comes along, they sound terrifying to many people. That fear response takes the place of a side-by-side comparison of the risks and rewards of driving oneself versus using a self-driving car.

We also tend to shrink our time horizons, focusing more on the short term. With a mindset focused solely on the moment at hand, we believe that the rewards—or resources—available to us are strictly limited. The only question is who will get them—me or someone else. This drives us to adopt what economists call a zero-sum view of the world, in which for me to win, you have to lose. No win-win scenario is possible; there is no sharing of rewards. That mindset actively erodes trust. You may seem like a nice person, but at the end of the day, only one of us is going to get these resources, so I can’t afford to trust you. It can easily create a vicious cycle in which we behave in ways that intensify rivalry, ratcheting up the pressure even more.

Pressure affects more than our cognitive biases and mindsets; we need to go one level deeper and explore its emotional impacts. During my travels around the world over the past several years, I have witnessed growing fear among people at every level of society. For example, when I spoke with senior executives in the privacy of their offices after taking the time to build some trust with them, I would inevitably discover that they felt enormous fear. They were acutely aware that the average tenure of a senior executive was significantly declining. Executives were getting removed if they missed their numbers by even a small amount. With accelerating change and growing uncertainty, they were afraid they would soon be out of their jobs. They might not have been willing to acknowledge that fear publicly, but the people around them could sense it.

Emotions have an interesting network effect: Once a critical mass of people feel a certain emotion, it tends to spread exponentially, both in terms of the number of people who feel it and in terms of the intensity with which it is felt. As the emotional cascade takes hold, it becomes harder and harder to resist.

Although I have worked as a business strategist for most of my career, I have come to believe that psychology is as important a factor in performance as strategy. If we don’t understand the emotions driving our choices and actions, we’ll never be able to get people to have more impact. A conversation with Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, brought this home to me. I was rambling on about the importance of risk and reward as motivators when he stopped me midsentence. “John,” he said, “you’ve got it all wrong. It’s not about risk and reward, it’s about fear and hope. That’s ultimately what motivates people to act.”

My hope in writing this book is to help you become more aware of the emotion of fear and introduce you to the tools that can help you replace it with a sense of hope and excitement. As more and more of us do so, the same emotional network effect will take hold, only in a positive way. Of course, our fears can never disappear fully, but the key is to find the motivation to move forward in spite of them.

THE JOURNEY AHEAD

I felt deep fear as a child, but I tried to cope with it on multiple levels. First, I withdrew. When my mother erupted, I retreated to my bedroom and shut the door to block out as much as I could. Second, I used books. In particular, I escaped into science fiction, which allowed me to visit foreign worlds, not just the foreign countries we lived in. Happily, the science fiction from my childhood was generally optimistic, as it tended to show humans achieving unimaginable feats on a galactic scale.

This escape—actually a survival mechanism—turned out to be a healthy one, as it helped me cope with my fear and avoid the negative mindset that is a natural human reaction to pressure. It focused me on the amazing opportunities that would be available in the future and gave me confidence that our resources are not limited but capable of infinite expansion. And it convinced me that, by trusting each other and working together, we could accomplish awesome feats.

But reading science fiction couldn’t fully protect me from the toxicity of my environment. My journey to recovery was not straightforward, and with the benefit of hindsight, I can see I could have pursued a different path that would have speeded up my healing and allowed me to transform the pressure I was feeling into opportunity. That is the path I’m going to tell you about in this book.

As I mentioned earlier, to succeed in your journey, you will need three essential tools: narratives, passion, and platforms—the three pillars of positive emotion. As you will see, I define them in a very particular way:

•   Narratives are the catalysts that help you see the need for a journey. From my perspective, they are about something in the future that has not yet been achieved, and they provide an explicit call to action.

•   Passion is the fuel that moves you ahead, helping you overcome the inevitable roadblocks and obstacles you will inevitably confront along the way. The specific form of passion I will be exploring involves a commitment to making an increasing impact in a domain that excites you.

•   Platforms are how you connect with other people on similar journeys. They are accelerants that help you to move more quickly and achieve more impact. Platforms explicitly designed to help participants connect and learn faster together are particularly powerful.

In a digitally connected, globalized world, people and companies need to learn how to find and tap people and resources wherever they find them—something I’ve called the power of pull. The highest level of pull is the ability to draw out more of our own potential from within ourselves. If we look deep within ourselves, we all have a strong need and desire to achieve more of our potential and to help our loved ones achieve more of their potential as well.

We can achieve more of our potential when we find ways to build relationships with others. Narratives, passion, and platforms are key enablers of that highest level of pull. In fact, the ultimate goal of our journey is not what we can do for ourselves, but for our personal transformations to lead to the transformation of the institutions and the broader society they are embedded in, which grew out of a very different set of opportunities and constraints than the ones that define our world today. The results from our analysis of US public companies’ return on assets are just one indication of the growing disconnect between the institutions we have today and the institutions we will need to create to address our expanding opportunities.

Our large institutions today—companies, governments, schools, and nonprofits—are organized around models of scalable efficiency, in which work consists of tightly specified and highly standardized routine tasks. These institutions are risk averse and discourage anyone from improvising or deviating from their assigned tasks. They tend to feed the fear of their participants, suggesting that participants are at increasing risk of losing their jobs if they fail to deliver as expected.

While we need to begin with ourselves in the journey beyond fear, we also will need to reach out and connect with others to find ways to drive the broader changes we need. If we focus only on ourselves, our institutions and broader society will hold us back. Conversely, if we focus on changing our institutions and broader society without addressing our own emotions and behaviors, we won’t get very far at all.

For decades now, a robust and growing human potential movement has sought to help us thrive as individuals. Numerous movements for institutional and social change also are working to create environments that will be more supportive of people. But these movements rarely interact with each other, much less integrate their agendas for change. We need to bring them together so they can drive sustainable and scalable change across the board.

This is not just an opportunity. It’s an imperative. The seas we are navigating are becoming more and more turbulent. It is no exaggeration to say that our future is hanging in the balance. We could be sailing toward a future whose wonders would amaze even the science fiction writers I read as a child—or we could founder along the way.

As we make this journey, we will inevitably confront some core questions:

•   How can I move beyond fear and find ways to cultivate hope and excitement?

•   How can I connect with others to make this journey together?

•   How can we amplify our impact in the areas that really excite us?

My goal in writing this book is to bring us together to answer these questions, so we can start to build a world driven by hope and excitement rather than fear.

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