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The Process Fallacy Slowly Killing Large Companies
I had the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle, long-time senior Google executives and authors of How Google Works and Trillion Dollar Coach, for an episode of the Future Squared podcast.
Trillion Dollar Coach unpacked the leadership playbook of legendary Silicon Valley coach, Bill Campbell.
Campbell mentored the likes of Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos, among other tech luminaries, and played a major role in the success of their companies.
In order to empower great people to succeed, Campbell knew that an environment that liberates and amplifies their energy is critical.
To do that, managers must support, respect and above all, trust their people.
Human Flourishing Requires Trust
As author David Rose argues in Why Culture Matters Most, prosperity requires large group cooperation. This requires trust, but as societies grow larger this becomes more difficult to sustain.
Human flourishing, he says, requires the general prosperity that comes with a free market system. Without trust, the foundations of said free-market system come crashing down.
There is a danger of ‘redistributive favoritism’, which undermines trust in the system generally. This is manifest nowadays in inequality, political tribalism and left-leaning voices demanding the redistribution of wealth due to a withering away of trust in the capitalist system and financial markets — especially on the back of 2008’s financial crisis.
Workplace Flourishing Requires Trust
A 2014 report by Interaction Associates on trust in the workplace found that just four in 10 employees have a high level of trust in management and the organisation.
