The Hiring Process at Next Jump: Super Saturday

Next Jump began recruiting engineers at colleges in 2006, alongside technology heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, companies with far greater resources to invest in college recruiting. “We recruited for similar characteristics that others do—for who was the smartest, the most driven,” explains Kim. “We looked for the most competitive and driven people. We ended up hiring what we later called ‘brilliant jerks.’”

The workforce the company built had too many solo players, people with raw smarts and plenty of arrogance. Next Jump leaders faced a choice. Would they continue to hire the brilliant jerks, whom they would probably lose to poaching anyway? Or would they make a bigger bet on a different kind of workplace culture—and on selecting a different kind of employee? “One day in 2008,” Kim recalls, “we fired literally half of our engineering staff.”

The company’s founders had made a brazen choice. Super Saturday was born soon thereafter.

Throughout the day on Super Saturday, seventy-five Next Jumpers walk around with a custom app on their mobile devices for gathering impressions and ratings about the applicants. Team members try to be as inconspicuous as possible as they record green lights and red flags, thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings. Even in informal settings, the Next Jumpers gather data about how well applicants listen or whether they seem blatantly rude or self-absorbed. The evaluators continuously send comments as well as quick candidate ratings.

As the day goes on, a composite picture of each candidate comes into focus. In the Super Saturday War Room set aside for synthesizing the incoming data, the recruiting team gets a clear sense of how the applicants stack up on the qualities that matter most.

• Everyone at Super Saturday looks technically strong based on the earlier rounds of recruitment screening. But do they have the hard skills in real-life settings?
• Are they humble? Are they willing to learn from others in order to grow?
• Do they have grit—the persistence to see themselves through challenging times and setbacks rather than give up?
• Are they takers? Are they in it only for themselves, or do they have the ability to be givers (helping others grow)?

Next Jump leaders say they’re looking to understand each applicant’s character. As with all companies, the leaders are certainly looking for the right fit between the applicant and the company’s culture and purpose. But like other DDOs, Next Jump is also looking for something more: the kind of person who will grow in an environment of constant practice, failing, and feedback.

When officials have made their selection, based on analyzing and debating the results collected on Super Saturday, the recruiting team will offer jobs only to those candidates who gained unanimous thumbs-up ratings, perhaps one-tenth to one-third of the candidates. As the new Next Jumpers come on board, they will be given their interview profile data from Super Saturday. On their first day of work, they’re provided with concrete feedback about areas in which they can begin improving right away.

Congratulations! Welcome to Boot Camp

The onboarding process gives new employees an intense introduction to Next Jump’s culture. Because the culture differs markedly from that of other organizations, Next Jump has found that helping people adapt as soon as they enter is the easiest time to accelerate their growth.

For their first three weeks, all new employees—including those who come with years of experience and success and are moving into senior leadership positions—attend Personal Leadership Boot Camp (PLBC for short). The program starts with participants learning to identify their character weaknesses—what Next Jump calls their “backhands.” The metaphor comes from tennis: everyone has strengths (our forehand), but to be a great tennis player, you must also work on your backhand, the areas where you feel less comfortable, less natural, less skillful.

After trying to identify people’s backhands by using long lists of psychological and character traits, the company found that most people’s deeper limitations circled back to struggling with being overly confident (for shorthand, the company refers to this, without deprecation, as “arrogant”) or being overly humble (“insecure”). At Next Jump, overcoming an “imbalance of character” in either direction is something everyone is assumed to be working on, from the cofounders to the newest engineer.

Everyone knows everyone else’s backhand, or, if they don’t, it is commonplace to inquire. Working on your backhand might mean, for someone who is on the arrogant side, trying to wait until the forty-five-minute mark to make a first comment in an hour long meeting. In contrast, someone on the insecure side, in that same meeting, might work on offering a contribution in the first fifteen minutes. Either move represents working on one’s backhand—practicing to overcome a deep-seated mind-set.

In the boot camp, participants spend the three weeks in customer service—the bread-and-butter work of maintaining relationships with individual customers. Inquiries managed by the customer service team can include everything from security and log-in issues to ordering to almost any question a customer might have for an e-commerce company.

New Next Jumpers are given daily targets for customer engagement. They are expected to take risks, to reflect on what they’re learning, and to practice their backhands. They’re also expected to engage in a “plus-1 project”: they identify a way to contribute to improving the customer service process. This personal project becomes a key practice ground that lets new workers exercise leadership in a team setting. Boot campers receive regular feedback from others (peers and managers) to help them identify weaknesses and build their leadership effectiveness.

At the end of the three-week boot camp, each employee shares her learning and experience in front of colleagues and a senior leadership committee, describing the powerful, if often painful, learning of the past weeks. The committee, based on the feedback from peers, coaches, and leaders, decides whether the employee will graduate from boot camp. If you’re voted a graduate, you receive a custom Next Jump team jacket embroidered with your name. Then your journey in the company takes its next steps.

If you don’t graduate, it’s likely because the evidence from your stint in boot camp suggests you haven’t been engaging fully and authentically. Most often, those who don’t graduate are judged to be faking it or not demonstrating that they’re striving to learn about themselves. They fail to have a “face the truth” moment, as Greg Kunkel explains. If the consensus is that you have only been going through the motions, you can accept an offer of $5,000 to leave the company, or you can return to boot camp until you graduate.

After facing their inadequacies and experimenting with new ways of working, Next Jumpers return to their primary job with a practice plan for working on their backhands. Everyone leaving boot camp develops such a plan, highlighting targeted situations to actively practice. They’re given peer mentors, who coach them, hold them accountable, and help them stick to the practice plan. And if they fail, after all this support, to keep working on their backhand? If they choose to continue, they can look forward to a new round of boot camp.

Better Me + Better You = Better Us

Next Jump sums up the belief system behind its culture with an equation:

Better Me + Better You = Better Us

Better Me signals the importance of constant improvement. You’ve seen it in action in the boot camp experience. Next Jump expects its employees to face their limitations directly and practice to overcome them. When you visit the company’s headquarters, it’s clear that the consistent work on self-improvement extends to supporting healthy lifestyles, in addition to transcending the mind-set you bring to the office. With nutritious free snacks and meals, as well as an on-premises gym and trainers, employees are expected to make a habit of good health.

Better You is about the meaning people derive from work through helping others, inside and outside the company. Next Jump’s leaders are struck by the research suggesting human beings are wired to serve others. When jobs are not meaningful, employees are more likely to volunteer outside work to derive that sense of purpose. The Next Jump response? Build service to others, and the resulting meaningfulness people derive from it, into the job. “Bake it into the culture,” says Kim.

As part of their work, Next Jumpers lead and participate in dozens of giving-back initiatives. For example, they can donate their expertise through a range of programs. Engineers can code for a cause, offering up to two weeks a year to help nonprofits in need. But cultural initiatives that lead to a Better You also serve the company’s own employees. They give everyone at Next Jump opportunities to practice leadership in settings that give employees more room to fail and learn with less risk to profitability.

Better Us is the payoff for a company, the community, and ultimately the world, built around both Better Me and Better You; it’s the outcome for everyone in the company of being more fulfilled and better off in a deeper sense. At Next Jump, the organizing belief behind these programs is that when we feel our own growth and when we engage in activities that also help others (including helping our colleagues grow), we can experience true wealth in the form of long-term, sustained happiness. This form of wealth cannot be obtained from a paycheck.

To be sure, Next Jump pays its employees well, but the outcome of sustained happiness, executives insist, can come only from a culture that makes work meaningful. To that end, in the salary review process, contributions to revenue are weighed at 50 percent and contributions to culture at 50 percent.

Next Jump leaders also note that you don’t have to be a charitable or nonprofit organization to give people opportunities for meaningful work. The company’s culture initiatives create opportunities as well as recognition for helping others. Programs range from a team that serves breakfast to Next Jump colleagues, to creating internal engineer skill-development newsletters, to hosting a Vendor Appreciation Day. In addition to giving meaning to work, cultural initiatives provide a place for workers to practice self-improvement and program leadership and even to fail big in circumstances where failure is less risky than it would be on the revenue-generating side of the corporate perks business.

FLO: Growing Leaders

To accelerate people’s growth, Next Jump has a system of clearly defined roles in the leadership teams that implement cultural initiatives. They call this model the follower-leader organization (FLO).

FLO involves four key roles: captain, coach, right hand, and left hand. Heading up a culture initiative is the role of the captain. At the heart of FLO’s design is the role of the coach, which is filled by the person who most recently captained the same initiative. Her job, above all else, is to coach the captain in leadership and provide feedback that will help the captain develop his backhand.

The right hand is the team member who works closely with the captain, knowing that she will someday soon take over as the next captain as the roles rotate. Finally, the left hand is another team member who can contribute to the success of the initiative and is next in line to succeed the right hand.

Meghan Messenger, a Next Jump cofounder, identifies what is unique about the FLO model: the coach role. “You’re sacrificing your number one player and moving them from the doing to coaching,” Messenger explains. After all, the new coach has only just learned how to lead the initiative. Wouldn’t things go better if you let captains keep running a program, to get the benefit of all their experience just when they’re getting good at the role?

This seeming sacrifice of expertise makes sense when you recognize that the main purpose of FLO is not to help people learn the ins and outs of leading a specific initiative or program. Instead, each project is a practice ground for working on your blind spots as a leader. Initiatives come and go, in a constant process of experimenting with new ways to strengthen the culture. For example, rather than develop captains to handle Super Saturdays—people who would then get better and better at leading Super Saturdays—FLO is about developing everyone’s capabilities of captaining and coaching generally.

“The work goes more slowly at first” when there’s a new captain of an initiative, Messenger acknowledges. But the trade-off is another “investment in loss.” Coaches, before rotating off an initiative entirely, develop another captain into a coach and must leave the program itself better off than when they started. Messenger has seen FLO produce consistent results over time, noting, “In the long run, we have a stronger organization with deeper bench strength.”

Jackie’s Journey

Jackie knows the backhand she is working on at Next Jump. But that wasn’t always the case.

A ten-year veteran of the company, Jackie had risen to be leader of the marketing group. Competitive and focused, she excelled in situations when she could contribute individually, such as landing a big sale. She was especially successful working with merchant partners for the company’s corporate perks program and had built a solid track record of accomplishment in sales.

But several months before we first met her, Jackie had been shocked to learn that she had been voted off MV21, the company’s leadership group. The group’s members are not selected by executives but rather are elected by peers, and people are voted off when they either fail to get enough votes or are nominated for removal by their peers. Sitting at the MV21 table is an honor that reflects the perception across the company that a Next Jumper can be counted on to help others succeed. The company’s senior leaders talk about valuing “linebackers over quarterbacks”—rewarding those who help others win rather than the star players identified as formal leaders. Jackie may have been a star negotiator of deals, but increasingly she was seen as someone who didn’t do enough to support others.

Hearing that she was voted off MV21 was “a crushing blow,” Jackie says. But feedback from others about her patterns of work had been accumulating. She was seen by her peers as working entirely for herself. She wasn’t someone you could count on to reach out and offer help. She would answer questions or respond, but she didn’t make time to give to others.

At first, Jackie tried to make sense of her rejection by her peers in ways that kept the focus off herself. She initially resisted introspection, deflecting the impact of the vote by thinking, “Oh, those newbies on MV21? They’ll fail. I’ll probably be back in three, six, ten months, tops.” But soon she saw that the new MV21 group was thriving without her.

It took a lot of reflection, coaching by company executives and peers, and the practice ground provided by working on several culture initiatives for Jackie to see the limitations of her own deep-seated mind-set. Jackie had heard others tell her what her backhand was—not helping others—but they “were others’ words, not mine.” One source of support was her boss, David. The two of them opened up to each other about their weaknesses, giving Jackie another context at Next Jump to question her patterns of behavior. Jackie began to describe her backhand in her own words rather than others’ terms.

At an event called 10X—an all-staff meeting for presenting and getting live feedback on one’s contributions to the company (which you will learn more about in chapter 4)—Jackie shared with all of Next Jump her realization about what she was focusing on in her work of self-improvement.

After making this presentation to the company, Jackie started putting herself into more situations where she could practice helping others be successful. She started small at first, coaching others once a month. “Even that was painful for me at first,” she admits. Pretty soon, she was doing it weekly for offices and people outside her immediate group, such as the London office—peers she wouldn’t have made time for before.

After a while, as Jackie increased her coaching to all-day sessions on Mondays, her peers started to see her taking risks and extending herself regularly for her colleagues and for the good of the company. Jackie says, “People saw where I was spending my time. And still getting my job done, which I didn’t think was possible. I really thought that if I spent too much time with other people, I wouldn’t be successful.” Less than a year later, members of MV21 voted her back onto the group, something she had thought could never happen. She is confident she knows why: it is because she is starting to demonstrate a qualitatively different kind of success. Not only is she spending time developing others, but also she and other Next Jumpers can see the benefits to people across the company that are flowing from her new way of working.

Jackie’s story is one of many similar ones at Next Jump. Running through each is a common thread. People are working on themselves at work as part of improving the company. Jackie sums up the reasons she is growing because of the company and believes that others are as well.

Joining the Community: The Theater Work Group

There is no meeting table this morning for the twenty or so theater work group attendees. Instead, the chairs are arranged to form a large circle so that everyone can see all the faces. As you will see, creating the conditions for people to feel joined together in a community as they work is the foundation of every meeting at Decurion.

Around the room, posters remind employees of the beliefs and values of the company. Decurion calls these its “axioms”—statements of the company’s “fundamental beliefs about people and work.”

1. We believe that work is meaningful, that work gives meaning to people’s lives. For us, meaning comes from three things: developing oneself, creating something excellent and enduring, and contributing to other people.
2. We believe that people are not only means but also ends in themselves. Most businesses view people (employees, customers, suppliers, and others) as a means to some end, such as completing a transaction or meeting a goal. We feel that reducing people to a role in a process dehumanizes them. While honoring the roles they play, we approach people as fellow human beings, as ends in themselves.
3. We believe that individuals and communities naturally develop. Much of the literature on development ends with the teenage years. But we know that adults continue to develop. Our structures and practices create conditions that pull people into greater levels of complexity and wholeness.
4. And while we did not begin with this belief, our experience has shown us that pursuing profitability and human growth emerges as one thing. They are part of a single whole, not two things to be traded off or two elements of a “double bottom line.” We capture this axiom by saying that nothing extra is required.

These axioms offer a common language and touchstone for the company’s bedrock principles. No member of the company (and member is the preferred term for an employee here) is required to believe that these axioms are true. But each member, and especially each manager, is expected to act in accordance with the axioms as part of his job responsibilities.

In the discussion this morning, these beliefs will be put into service. Dashwood knows that the theater work group must join in a challenging conversation. As people take their seats, the room grows quiet. Around the circle, people look comfortable. No one is peeking at mobile devices or laptops. Some are visibly relaxed, settling into a moment of silent reflection, and making a transition from the bubbly chat over coffee a moment before.

Dashwood brings everyone together by inviting them to check in. At Decurion, most meetings begin with a practice of checking in that can take up to an hour with a group this large.

What goes on during a check-in? First, when people choose to speak (all speaking is voluntary), they often begin by saying their name (“Hi, I am Carlos”), even though it would be rare for anyone not to know the name of another team member. They do it to remind themselves, and their teammates, that they seek to stand fully in whatever they’re about to say, that it comes from their person and not their role.

They then say whatever they need to, to bring themselves fully, as whole people, into the work space. They may share an internal state, such as feeling excited or nervous, or they may report where they are on an interior goal—for example, how they see this meeting as a chance to engage their efforts to listen better to others’ competing ideas. Or they might let the group in on something that is happening at home that is inevitably part of how they are “showing up at work” that day—that the celebration of a daughter’s first Communion is coming up or that visiting family members are wearing out their welcome. COO Bryan Ungard explains the practice: “It’s about what the individual needs to do to be fully present—it can’t be scripted. As soon as you script it, you drive the meaning out. Our full humanity is required, and to have that, you need authentic engagement.”

Check-ins are part of honoring Decurion’s axioms. If people are to be treated as more than a means to an end and are worthy of unconditional regard as developing adults, then check-ins present constantly threaded opportunities to bring that humanity—and each member’s interior life—to the foreground. The culture as a whole places inner experience in bounds rather than out-of-bounds in the life of the workplace. Decurion exposes and overturns the assumption that work is public and the personal is private, and so the personal should not be part of work. In the same way, Decurion rejects the idea of work-life balance as a simple goal or mantra. After all, if your life is everything outside the workplace, then that leaves a bleak notion of what work is—something that we’re forced to trade off against joyful living.

Everyone who has ever worked anywhere knows that work is intensely personal, with daily opportunities to experience pain, exhilaration, self-doubt, and meaning. We all bring our whole selves to work every day: “Wherever you go, there you are.” In a DDO such as Decurion, practices like check-ins openly welcome the whole person into work every day.

And at the end of any meeting, there is a check-out as well. Checking out is routinely briefer but an important ritual. As they check out—again speaking as they are moved to speak—members share personal reflections or feelings that allow them to end well. Whether it’s an expression of excitement about the work ahead, a sense of having broken through on something challenging, or even a need for greater support from others, check-out brings closure through another moment of focusing on people’s individual presence and humanity. By building checking in and checking out into every meeting, Decurion members ensure that focusing on individual mind-sets and growth becomes a habit. More than that, the habit is part of creating and maintaining a sense of strong community.

In the meeting that day in Hollywood, as people connect to one another and the conversation moves forward, Dashwood continues to create the conditions for authentic and productive dialogue. Decurion members call this “setting the field,” borrowing a term from Joseph Jaworksi, Kaz Gozdz, and Peter Senge that has deeply influenced the company.³ This practice, which is also a part of most meetings, involves taking the time to help people see how the present business challenge is connected with their individual sense of meaning about the work and with the collective power of the group to do the work as a community.

Dashwood speaks with authority but in a spirit of invitation. Her engagement appears total, and she calls people to lean in together for the work ahead.

Dashwood’s work of setting the field for this conversation is designed to create a space for several things to emerge. There is no doubt on the part of the theater work group members that their COO is calling them together to work as a community. But how does that experience at Decurion differ from merely having a clear agenda, or reaffirming the goals of a meeting?

In this case, members of IT and marketing, as well as theater-operations leaders in the division, are working to retire the existing membership loyalty program and develop a new offering, including revitalizing all aspects of the customer loyalty experience. But communication in the organization has ruptured, and it needs to be addressed collectively. Status updates from all sides, a dressing- down, a directed solution—these wouldn’t help meet the developmental goals that Dashwood has just invited everyone in the room to hold on to together.

In the Fishbowl

Instead, Dashwood is doing something that’s common at Decurion. Rather than jump to solve the problem, the group members will try to let the problem solve them, exposing issues and patterns of thinking that go much deeper than the immediate circumstances. Dashwood invites Bob, a senior leader on the operations side, to facilitate a “fishbowl” conversation, and she asks several individuals (whom she has asked in advance to participate) to step forward. These four people—those most directly implicated in the pattern of conflict and misunderstanding in the work-group circle—pull their chairs into a small, tight circle-within-a-circle at the center of the room. This small group includes the head of the loyalty program from the marketing side, the technology lead, one of the general managers from theater operations, and Bob.

Their colleagues remain seated in the outer circle, bearing witness and participating by their active listening and presence and, if required, joining in the inner-circle dialogue spontaneously. Whether sitting inside or outside the fishbowl, everyone is expected to get better at spotting and fully stepping into opportunities for overcoming limiting behaviors and the underlying mind-sets that generate them.

Bob begins the fishbowl by reminding everyone of the shared norms for these conversations. They are a learning community, and he spotlights several ground rules to create healthy dialogue, including speaking from your own experience and not leaping to inferences about what others believe. He frames this dialogue as a discussion of whether people are aligned: “I’m concerned. I can’t tell whether this initiative is on track or not. There are conflicting reports, depending on who I talk to.”

Bob focuses everyone on uncovering data—not quantitative metrics, but the kind of evidence from multiple perspectives that will help the group sort out what is going on and why: “How can we know whether we are on track through looking at the data? A place we can start is to ask what we think is working well and what’s not working well, both in and outside of the circle. Let’s start by surfacing what’s true for each of us.”

As the conversation develops, Bob leans in close, and the four people in the fishbowl seem to be trying to focus on each other’s eyes. Those in the outer circle seem to feel the intensity and vulnerability of those in the fishbowl. This is not a shark tank but rather a respectful and brave space. For everyone in the room, there is nowhere else in the world right now but here.

The fishbowl brings to the surface a range of complicated feelings and candid insights. The marketing manager shares her view that the design and development process of the loyalty program has left her feeling isolated. “For months,” she says, “I felt like I was being tested, pointed at, like I was sent off to a desert island, and I didn’t feel like I had any support of a community in this. When I tried to raise issues, I felt like I didn’t make a lot of headway.” But she also acknowledges her own part in the dynamic—that she herself didn’t do an effective job of communicating clearly what was going on for her. “I should have stood my ground,” she says.

The theater general manager admits that his interactions with the technology lead feel “off.” He says that their phone conversations are rushed, and they’re not getting to the point where he is able to provide his ground-level, operational input to enhance the theater guest’s journey through the loyalty program. He, too, acknowledges his own role and needs in the situation. Working directly with major vendors, he says, is new for him. He feels he needs to ask questions, and he needs his questions to be heard. He also needs to feel joined in a common effort, and he realizes how frustrated he becomes when he is not experiencing that kind of alignment.

The technology lead, for his part, shares his sense of pressing urgency to get the technical work done. He’s trying to navigate the tension between meeting his responsibilities and keeping the theater manager closely involved. In talking about the quality of their phone conversations, the technology lead has his own take. “I’m stuck. Do we push ‘reset’ on the project to bring you in, or do we help you come up alongside us where we already are?” He concedes that he has more to do to build trust. He wants to better understand whether he’s not structuring their check-in calls appropriately or if he’s not listening to others well, despite having the right work structure and routines.

Dashwood has been a silent listener as the dialogue unfolds, taking her place among the other work group members in the outer circle. Now she stands and pulls her chair into the heart of the circle. “I felt the need to join,” she says. “I’ve been trying not to be a bull in a china shop here,” she adds, laughing as she acknowledges how hard it was to listen to the fishbowl without intervening. As you become better acquainted with Dashwood’s inner work in chapter 6, one piece of her personal “curriculum” as a leader is knowing when to exert authority and when to release control and responsibility to others.

Now she is coming to a conclusion. “I’m hearing that we have not structured ourselves effectively to make the best loyalty program. Was anyone pulling the alarm bell here and saying, ‘We’ve got a problem?’” She continues, before the conversation closes, to ensure that everyone agrees that additional customer testing of the online experience needs to happen immediately.

As the fishbowl discussion comes to an end, a marketing manager calls on her colleagues to look more deeply at what has been going on in this fishbowl: “We sometimes think we should keep our heads down and think we are working with intention, but that can be disruptive for the business. This discussion felt like it was doing the right thing for the business. The loyalty program is a huge developmental opportunity for me and for the whole group. But there is something for us to take away about involving the right parties in the right way from the start.”

Another theater manager closes the conversation with a similar reflection: “I felt leadership here. We were dealing with a difficult issue, but we need to do that in order to take the next step that the business needs.”

Decurion’s Approach to Business

Decurion has come to operate in this way more fully only in the past decade, under the leadership of its current president, Christopher Forman. The company is a relative rarity in the business world: a family-owned business that has made a successful transition to a third generation of leadership and growth. Based in Los Angeles, Decurion employs about eleven hundred members and is the parent company of a set of subsidiary businesses that span several industries: movie exhibition, real estate, and senior living.

The movie exhibition business provided the seed corn. Pacific Theatres, founded in 1946 and for decades the name of the company, was a major regional exhibitor on the West Coast and in Hawaii, even recognized with a technical Academy Award (an “Oscar”) for its pioneering practices. The company was a leading owner-developer of drive-in movie theaters as well as cineplexes. As the business for drive-in movies declined and the company invested in growing its walk-in theaters, it held on to enviable real estate assets: large former drive-in parcels in the heart of California’s metropolitan landscape, the Pacific Northwest, and Hawaii. These properties allowed Decurion’s Robertson Properties Group to grow. In 2011, Retail Traffic magazine named it one of the one hundred largest shopping center owners in the United States.

ArcLight Cinemas, launched in 2002 as a new subsidiary, was founded to provide a structure for rethinking the quality and experience of going to the movies. The guest’s experience from start to finish is central in every way—from the quality of personal engagement in guest service, to reserved seating for every show, to the concessions, bar, and restaurant offerings. ArcLight’s success was not immediate, but Forman and his senior team (including Dashwood) stuck by the concept to see it take off. Revenues grew by 72 percent, to $81 million, from 2009 to 2013. Pacific and ArcLight combined now have the highest gross per screen in North America, and in 2012 Forbes magazine named the ArcLight Hollywood location one of the ten best movie theaters in the country.

Forman describes those early days of creating ArcLight as similar to the origins of Saturn Corporation, which was protected from the culture of General Motors. In ArcLight, Forman was attempting to create a place to practice a new way of doing business, distant from the gravitational drag of the Pacific Theatres group. The way of doing business in the family company in 1989, when he took an increased role in its leadership, lacked the compass it needed, Forman explains.

COO Ungard echoes Forman in describing the change that took place. Caring for people would no longer be about loyalty between company and employees, about protecting people. Rather, Decurion’s purpose—its reason for existence and its deepest “why?”—is to create places for people to flourish. But flourishing isn’t about having fun or keeping people sheltered from threat, challenge, or risk to the self. Ungard explains.

Working life at Decurion is organized around this idea of community. There still is a hierarchy; this is a profit-making, privately held business, and not a cooperative. There must be accountability in individual roles for decisions that affect the business.

That said, what’s different at Decurion? Members of the company participate in communal governance structures such as the theater work group because they provide a setting for deep personal learning and improved business decisions for the company. These structures are not only a necessary support for individual growth but also a form of collective wisdom. The groups share responsibility for the success of the business, even if individual business leaders hold accountability. Communities have a say; they’re expected to help seize opportunities and spot problems at their source.

The collective wisdom in a community, Decurion executives say, also grows and develops over time. People still report to one another, people are let go, and people are overruled on decisions, but the structure of a learning community like the theater work group pushes every member to “hold the whole of the business” and to be “businesspeople first,” looking at the wider success of the company, rather than being trapped myopically in a particular role or function.

Ungard underscores the power of community at Decurion, and he cautions that outsiders may be tempted to reduce this idea to the familiar concepts of “team” or “committee.” That would miss something.

This emphasis on learning communities enables another feature of Decurion’s culture. Because people are joined together in common responsibility for running the business, it’s possible for people to be more detached from titles and roles. When you attend meetings, you generally don’t hear references to titles. It’s not that roles and titles don’t exist but that Decurion’s strong ethos pulls against attachment to one’s expert role, particularly in the context of learning communities.

A saying at Decurion is that you should always be “giving your job away.” Rather than stand on the authority of expertise or title, everyone should try to share hard-earned wisdom. It’s an alternative to the view that an individual’s knowledge is power and that one should take advantage of information asymmetries to gain the advantage in a corporate jungle. That framing, however apt a description for many business contexts, is anathema to Decurion’s leaders—even a description of organizational failure to live up to the beliefs that undergird the company. But it’s not collective naïveté about power and status that motivates this view. Rather, the company wants to help every member break with the instinct to hoard information, to seek advantage by protecting one’s base of authority and power, and to squander time managing others’ favorable impressions. Jobs here are designed not to be “person-dependent.”

Dashwood, for her part, sees the power for achieving business results in weaving together peer-to-peer communities with hierarchical leadership, as everyone sheds the safety of being the indispensable expert.

Bridgewater: Getting to Root Causes

If you sit in a meeting room at the Bridgewater headquarters in Westport, Connecticut, it’s apparent that you’re in an environment designed for transparency. Floor-to-ceiling windows let in sunlight and offer treetop views of the Saugatuck River, which flows through the middle of the campus. Meeting rooms have the same open windows onto the hallway. Anyone can see who’s meeting, and there’s no such thing as a private meeting. People at Bridgewater—the world’s best-performing hedge fund—use sunlight as a metaphor for the kind of culture they value, one that prizes transparency as the best disinfectant.

As you meet some of the people at Bridgewater, you learn how an unrelenting search for truth—including the often painful truths about one’s own limitations—is at the heart of every meeting, indeed every exchange of ideas. The company’s leaders will tell you this search for radical truth and radical transparency is not merely an important aspect of the culture but the heart of the culture and the reason for the company’s unparalleled success.

Summing Up

One thing is clear: none of these companies is formally in the human potential business. They are not universities filled with professional educators, or clinics or personal growth centers staffed with psychologists. They aren’t management consultancies. None of these three companies markets services related to helping people overcome their limitations. They manage hedge funds, movie theaters, and e-commerce transactions. Their businesses and products are as diverse as the companies are distant from being human services organizations. Macroeconomic investors, software engineers, and movie theater operators would probably not be your first choice of people to naturally take to the continuous levels of self-examination you’ve had a glimpse of here.

And that is the point. Although these companies develop their cultures as principled investments in their own business success, they also refuse to separate the people who make up the business from the business itself. Their big bet on a deliberately developmental culture is rooted in the unshakable belief that business can be an ideal context for people’s growth, evolution, and flourishing—and that such personal development may be the secret weapon for business success in the future.

In each of these DDOs—Next Jump, Decurion, and Bridgewater—we see a seamless integration of two pursuits as if they were a single goal: business excellence and the growth of people into more capable versions of themselves through the work of the business. Each company has its own approach, but, interestingly, what each emphasizes can be found in the others as well. Next Jump’s culture puts helping others explicitly at the forefront, including the central importance of coaching as a way to grow while serving others. Decurion builds the strength of next-generation learning communities (really, development communities) as a way to create conditions for people to both grow as individuals and seize business opportunities fully. Bridgewater stands for the pursuit of what is true, no matter how inconvenient, both as a business necessity in the financial markets and as a path for personal evolution and cultural integrity.

But underlying these approaches is a shared and surprising reversal of the most fundamental agreement in ordinary organizational life: the separation of the personal and the public. The ordinary organization is like the “old Brené Brown” as she described herself at the beginning of this chapter: it doesn’t “do” vulnerability, and it doesn’t hang out with those who do. The ordinary organization conspires with that part of its employees’ psyches that believes the place for imperfection and vulnerability and shame and unworthiness is somewhere far away from work.

(The ordinary organization says, in effect, “If vulnerability does have to come into work from time to time, then we will make provisions for it: let it go on in a private room, with others who will keep whatever they see and hear to themselves, and let it be tended to as quickly as possible, and let us do the person the courtesy of pretending it never happened”—in other words, just the way some people think we should treat nursing mothers.)

No doubt you have had a variety of reactions to what you have seen in this chapter, but almost certainly, whatever those reactions are, at their core is one thing: the way you feel about vulnerability. Your reactions may be about the way you feel about experiencing vulnerability yourself in the company of others; the way you feel about being in the presence of others’ vulnerability; and, especially, the way you feel about any of that going on at work. You can be assured that whatever your current thoughts and feelings are, every one of them has been shared—is currently being shared—by people working in a DDO. In that way, this chapter helps you meet a DDO in more ways than one.

Now that you’ve generated a variety of first impressions, the next two chapters create spaces to help you hold on to them, to turn them around in your hands, and to consider them in the context of the underlying theory of the DDO. We begin with an exploration of what development means in a deliberately developmental organization. There exists a well-worked-out theory about the trajectory of psychological development in adulthood, based on forty years of research, that we believe can help you understand the deep structure of a DDO. In essence, a DDO is working on ways to provide people the maximum exposure to those experiences likely to help them continue—when they are ready—the ongoing journey of adult development.