Sometime after I finished this first set of experiments on Legos and Bionicles, I
went to talk to a big software company in the northwest of the US.
And there were about 200 engineers in this room and we arranged it like six months in
advance. And what happened was that a week before I
came to present to these guys, they met with their CEO and this was not a happy
meeting. This group worked on what they thought was
the next visionary project for this big software company.
They worked on it for two years. They had an office that was outside the
rest of the campus of this company. They were in downtown.
They were working hard in creating the new vision for that company.
And the week before I came, the CEO sat with them and cancelled the project.
And this was the most demotivated group of people I've ever seen.
It was really amazing. And they all said they felt like they were
in the Lego experiment. They felt they were working for a long
time on something for two years. They thought it was incredibly meaningful,
incredibly important for the company and all of a sudden somebody just destroyed
that. And I asked them, I said how many of you
show up to work now later than you used to?
And everybody raised their hand. I said how many of you go home now earlier
than you used to? And they all raised their hands.
I said how many of you play more at work and work less seriously?
And they all raised their hands. And I said how many of you now play with
your expense reports these days? And no body raised their hand.
They laughed a little but, but then they took me for dinner and showed me what they
could do with expense reports. But the reality was that their CEO, I
think much like the consultant experiment, did not appreciate the meaning.
Imagine you are a CEO and imagine that you think about your employees like rats in a
maze. All you need to worry about is how you are
organizing the incentives because the rats would just figure it out.
There's no meaning, there's no purpose. Rats just work.
And from this CEO's perspective, I think he did not think about the meaning of
these people's labors. He just said OK, I made them run in this
direction for two years. I don't think it's a good direction
anymore. Let me just get them to run in a different
direction but not appreciating the importance of all those.
And by the way, these were some of the most creative, valuable people for that
company and many of them left afterward. Now, I did ask them another question.
I said, imagine that your boss had to cancel this project.
Let's say, for whatever reason, that was the right decision.
Could he have canceled it in a way that wouldn't have demotivated you to such a
degree? And they all came with interesting stories
or interesting ideas for that. They said, what if he allowed them to
present their project in front of the whole company?
What if he allowed them to create a few prototypes?
What if he allowed them to think about what aspects from this technology that
they were creating could be useful for other parts of the business?
Now if you think about all of those suggestions, they would all take some time
and money. Doing a presentation in front of the whole
company would take time from all the company.
Building prototypes and getting them to run around the company and seeing in a
year or so, how people use them, would take even more money.
Getting them to think about how parts of this technology could fit in other aspects
of the business would, again, take time and effort.
And if the CEO doesn't think that meaning is important, then why waste this time and
effort. But if you understand how important
meaning, is then it must mean that you should invest some in it.
Now how much? It's hard to tell because it's important
to understand how big meaning is but I think in general we haven't a way to
underestimate the importance of meaning. And by the way, other companies are doing
it as well. Companies like Google, for example, take
their employees, and give them 20 percent of their time to work on other projects.
Now, one of those things is to get these 20% of this time to make useful project.
But another part of it is to make people feel valuable and useful and make sure
that they have something meaningful that they're pursuing.
So, that's incredibly important.