Great work creates more value than compliant work.

If you only have time to read one section, please make it this one: 46. The Generous Audacity of Significance

The philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that humans have three ways to spend their time. The labor required to feed ourselves and survive. The work of doing a craft that we are proud of. And the action of organization and possibility.

As a result, she’d learn more. She wanted to be in a room with people who wanted to be in the room.

A significant organization needs employees who are enrolled in the journey and willing to do this sort of work. In turn, employees who are willing to do this sort of work need an organization that won’t revert to an industrial management mindset, one without regard for the people who built it. The Catch-22 is obvious. You can’t have one without the

innovative performance is almost always related to random events (good or bad), and innovations can always be improved. Valuable contributors aren’t consistently right, they’re consistently contributing.

Telling people what to do is not the same as communicating together to build resilient, powerful systems.

Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s a willingness to do things that are so important they’re worth doing even (especially) when we’re feeling the fear.

Did we seek discomfort in the process of stretching to innovate? Is our theory of change, process, and creation improving? Did we ask hard questions that led to new insights?