Summary:
Reward real work: collaboration, momentum, learning, and novelty that ships. Set strategy above projects and let teams inform it. Use goals to test strategy, not to manufacture motivation. After each cycle ask if you’d extend the work and whether the team stayed healthy. Share risk with clear bounds. Assume trust, start at 50%, and use accountability only as a short-term sauna. Without trust, nothing magical happens.
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Activity can be directed or undirected.
One kind of activity lacks passion, quality, and ownership. That’s vanity work—busywork.
The good kind shows up as high collaboration, steady momentum, growing confidence, controlled adaptability, sound choices, failure that sparks useful inquiry, and implemented novelty.
Trust the people who expect nothing but the best work from themselves and those who are closest to the work and its materials to do their best work. Evaluate them on the quality and cadence of that activity. Reject busywork. Value opportunity-finding skills that lead to intended use in real contexts. Track whether return on effort and the frequency of learning create higher-level value for the organization.
Set direction that sits above the project track where good activity happens. Let local teams inform direction-setting. If long-horizon, point-in-time goals are useful, let them follow from coherent strategy—not drive it. Strategy, then goals. Direction > Destination.
Small choices shape organizational outcomes far more than a few large ones. When teams have clear decision rules and support to handle tradeoffs, they can respond to opportunities and risks much faster, which improves alignment, reduces bottlenecks, and enhances flow.
Management designs strategy; goals test it. Use point-in-time outcomes to judge managerial judgment and to inform the next round of direction modeling.
At the end of each short cycle ask: (1) Would we do it again or extend it once the learnings land? (2) Did the way the work unfolded feel healthy for the team? Be like evolution and double down on what works, not what doesn’t.
At year-end, those closest to the work ask one question: Would I hire this person again? Hell yes / No.
Goals don’t manufacture motivation. People bring it. An act is fully human only when it rises from within. What’s done by pressure, habit, or instruction alone never becomes part of the self; it stays foreign to who we are. Such deeds draw no human vigor; they are carried out with rote accuracy. When we move like machines—answering cues and orders instead of our own aims and capacities—people may praise the result, yet the doer is despised.
Share risk. Leave enough latitude for breakthroughs. Set firm boundaries for alignment. Use specifics when hard-earned knowledge applies. Trust capable people to work it out.
Assume trust; don’t dole it out conditionally. That applies to everyone. Start with a 50% trust battery. If it dips below 50%, use accountability measures briefly. It’s a sauna—get out fast. Accountability is what you need when you’ve lost trust. And when you don’t have trust, you can’t do magical things.