Which is worth more, Kind of Blue from Miles Davis, or the third Boston album?
It depends on your taste. I hope we can agree, though, that the fact that Miles spent four days on his album and Tom spent eight years on his is irrelevant.
Sometimes, we buy the story of inconvenient creation. The carrots at the farmer’s market or a hand-crafted piece of pottery is worth more because we know the focus and care that went into the creation of an item.
But software isn’t worth more when it’s hand-coded, and WhatsApp didn’t get acquired for billions of dollars because they had thousands of employees.
On the other hand, when British Petroleum paid Landor millions for a new logo, the meetings and effort and deniability were part of what they were paying for. The Nike logo isn’t powerful because they spent a lot of time or money on it…
Freelancers are close to their work, and it’s easy to tell ourselves that what we sell is our effort. That’s an error. There’s rarely a correlation between effort and value.
Even if you charge by the hour, you’re not selling hours. You’re selling something clients can use.
Clients will pay more for something useful than something that was difficult.
Marshall Sahlins and others showed that early hunter gatherer societies generally didn’t work very hard. Two or three hours a day were spent gathering food, and the rest of the time was for social engagement and family.
With all the technology and innovation that has followed, why do we work four times as hard?
One reason is leverage. The tools we have offer apparently bigger prizes in exchange for the next unit of incremental labor. There wasn’t a point in working harder to get more berries, because you already had enough berries.
And the second reason is that the systems that created our culture have their own needs in mind. Landlords don’t provide housing as a public service–they do it to make a profit. And the wedding-industrial complex makes happy brides as a byproduct of making a profit. They’re the side effect, not the point.
Systems use status and affiliation within culture to motivate individuals to play along.
When it’s working as we hope, the system of systems produces possibility, civility and achievement. It increases health, connection and even joy.
But no one is in charge of these systems, and, especially as they become concentrated and powerful, they often fail to produce the outcomes we might be hoping for.
Many are intransigent and sticky, and they work hard to remain invisible. When we see the systems, we have a chance to do something about them. The hard part is organizing the community to push back before the new normal becomes permanent.
Every one of the pings, dings and clicks on this page gives me the hives. Run them in a quick sequence and I need to leave the room. They are our Pavlovian bells, designed to trigger us into action.
At the bottom right is a button that says ‘stop all.’
That’s a useful idea.
We didn’t sign up for this all at once. We were seduced into becoming trained seals gradually, fish by fish.
Important work might not be quick or automatic or easy.
If someone hands you a deck, you can be sure there are 52 cards covering four suits.
The universe is finite. The cards are the cards, and games work precisely for that reason. Every deck is the same, and all the players have the same options.
Some of the systems we compete in have a limited number of cards, known to all.
More often, though, there is the possibility of surprise. Options that weren’t considered by others, paths that are still unexplored. Technology mints new cards, but so do brave decisions and commitment.
It’s rare to know all the available cards, and rarer still to have them all.
I’m not sure this is the right word for it, but we certainly need one.
Not ‘entrepreneurship’ which is a distinct skill. That term is usually reserved for people who start at zero and get to one, and mostly for people who operate in small businesses creating financial value through assets and equity.
But what about the person who navigates an important non-profit through changing times?
Or a product manager you can trust to not only ship the next solution on time, but to do it with unexpected improvements and a team that ends up better as a result of the journey. Some salespeople have it, guiding a complex transaction, and others don’t.
Captaincy describes someone who doesn’t just go to meetings–they change the outcome of the meeting. Someone who doesn’t depend on authority but is eager to take responsibility. It’s not about having a great idea… it’s about leading when the great idea collides with reality.
Winston Churchill and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf showed up as captains when that skill was really needed. So did Alexander Hamilton, for a while.
Captains set the agenda, create tension and lean into possibility. Captains aren’t just doing their job, they’re creating something that others thought was unlikely. They rarely have all the answers, but they’re very good at asking questions.
The difference between a successful artist and a painter is that the artist becomes captain of the creative arc, determining where and when to show up and what impact they seek to make.
You might not always want to choose a captain to join the team. A founder-led organization thinking about succession plans might prefer to hire a capable, persistent bureaucrat, someone who can reliably follow the model that’s already in place. A restless search for a new problem to solve might not be as valuable as simply doing a really good job on the existing problems.
Alas, we don’t teach ‘captaining’ in school. Sometimes, it arises, almost accidentally, in school sports and clubs. In fact, the culture of high school usually fights to make it go away. We don’t make it easy to describe on a resume, and there are no good tests for it.
It’s a skill, certainly, and ultimately a choice. We can model it, support it and create an organizational culture that makes it more likely to occur.
First, let’s name it and go looking for more of it.
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