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How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: Become Your Organization’s Most Valuable Kind of Employee, with Neil Irwin, Senior Economics Correspondent, The New York Times, and Author, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World
Work well in teams
For this book, I went to a lot of big companies. To Goldman Sachs, to Microsoft, to GE, to Walmart and asked, okay, what does it take to succeed in this environment we’re in, this highly technological, highly competitive environment? And the thing I heard over and over is the importance of being able to work in teams, and pull together teams. I call it being a glue person. A person who can make a team stick together and produce something more than the sum of its parts.
And so that’s not just about technical ability. You have to have technical ability, obviously. You have to be good at whatever the thing is your core job is. But you also need to understand how what you do fits together with what your other members of that team are. And if you can’t communicate with others effectively, who have very different kinds of skills and background than your own, you’re really not going to be that glue person. You’re not going to that person who actually helps modern organizations propel towards success.
Don’t gum up the works
I had an interview with somebody who works in the digital effects side of the film industry, down in New Zealand of all places. And she mentioned this term, glue person, that she uses for people in that organization called Weta Digital, that are really effective at helping parts of a team work together. And I thought, aha, that’s a great term. That’s a really useful term for what it takes to be effective in this kind of team-based environment. And then I Google it, and it turns out Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has been using this term for years in a negative light. He talks about how Google used to have too many glue people, we need to get rid of them.
And I was trying to make sense of this and figure out what’s the difference between what Eric Schmidt’s talking about and what my source was talking about. And I concluded this; there were, in Eric Schmidt’s view, too many people at a place like Google or his previous employers who just gummed up the works, who weren’t actually making products better, weren’t driving things towards success, but were adding bureaucracy, and layers of paperwork, and steps in process without really adding to the end result. That’s the bad kind of glue person.
So I thought more about, so what’s the difference? What’s the good sort of glue person? And my argument is, they are not just people who gum up the works. There are people who are at the optimal level of whatever it is they do. They are both excellent engineers, or marketing people, or finance people, or product people, whatever it may be. And also are able to communicate well with people with different skills and pull that team together. Those are the most valuable people in the world in modern organizations.
Stretch your experience
I think the key is, you take every opportunity you have in the course of a career, whether that’s in college, grad school, early jobs, even into mid-career jobs, to stretch yourself in new ways that might not come naturally to you. I think the most natural thing in the world is take whatever you’re naturally good at and try and get better at it. If you’re a kid and you’re a good at a certain sport, you’re probably going to keep playing that sport because it’s nice to be good at things.
But what I’m finding is that, in the modern workplace, what you really have to do is find ways to stretch yourself into areas that don’t come as naturally. So if you have a natural mind for numbers and statistics, maybe figuring out how to be a better communicator and public speaker is the key. If you’re somebody who comes up through engineering, maybe understanding, what do these finance people actually do all day? How does marketing fit into figuring out what product I should be building and working on? The key is asking for different opportunities, whether it’s a six-month assignment on another team, working for a different boss who has a different background, always seeking out those opportunities to stretch your own experience beyond where it exists now.