The Song of Significance

The people you hire to follow instructions are rarely the people who will help you build something of innovation and substance.

Work is the expression of our energy and our dreams. We owe those along for the journey the same dignity and connection we would like to receive in return.

And the final quadrant, the most important one, is the work with high stakes and high trust. This is significant work, important work, work on the edge. This is the work that creates human value as we connect with and respect the individuals who create it.

is inconvenient. It was inconvenient for an industrialist to embrace the internet in 1998, for a nonprofit to shift gears and become sustainable, and for a successful corporation to embrace significance. It’s rare that it happens quickly or easily, which is precisely why these changes are revolutionary.

The work of significance embraces the very things that industrialism seeks to stamp out. Significance is inconvenient.

It’s possible to build an organization where every worker is monitored at all times, where every job is sliced as thinly as possible and outsourced to the cheapest possible person. That organization can be centrally controlled, algorithmically managed, and brutal in the way it makes choices. The CEO might earn an hourly wage ten thousand times high

Real value is no longer created by traditional measures of productivity. It’s created by personal interactions, innovation, creative solutions, resilience, and the power of speed.

I surprised myself with what I could accomplish I could work independently The team built something important People treated me with respect Nothing

Corporations have discovered that there’s a profit to be made in giving away points and turning behavior into a game.