In the summer of 2014 the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive American think tank, launched what it called the Next American Economy project, calling on experts from business, government, and academia to identify trends and challenges that would shape the economy over the next quarter century. Within a year these experts had settled on a bold claim: “The U.S. economy,” wrote Institute senior fellow Bowman “Bo” Cutter, “stands at the precipice of a transformation on par with the Industrial Revolution.”¹

The model of the company man—the full‐time, permanent employee who worked his whole life for a single employer and then retired with a gold watch and a comfortable pension—reached its peak in post—World War II society, at the launch of the baby boom. And then things began to get complicated.

The digital revolution brought advances in computing and telecommunications, including the now‐omnipresent Internet, making it easier to automate and reengineer tasks. International trade agreements broke down historical barriers to the exchange of goods and services. By the 1990s, legendary management guru Peter Drucker had coined the term outsourcing to refer to the contracting of processes to others who could do them better and more cheaply. Another term, globalization, came to signify the shrinkage of time and space that had historically separated people around the world and the increasing ease with which people and organizations were able to interact.

We're still in the midst of this transformation, and haven't settled on what to call it: The digital age. The postindustrial society. The gig economy. Today's world includes wild inventions that would have sounded like science fiction to a worker on Henry Ford's assembly line: Rather than take jobs as cab drivers, for example, some people download an application from an online transportation network company, Uber Technologies; connect directly via smartphone with their fares in hundreds of cities worldwide; and earn income driving these fares in their own vehicles. Another online mobile marketplace, TaskRabbit, matches freelance laborers with customers who need help with everyday tasks, such as cleaning, delivery, and odd jobs.

It isn't that the company is disappearing from the world—it's still the dominant force for production and employment. But its dominance is fading. In the face of such competition, from a growing number of people who attach themselves to companies for new and different reasons, The Company is morphing into something other than a lifelong benefactor that calls the shots and signs the paychecks. More and more, working people aren't looking for patronage; they're looking for opportunities to learn, grow, and become happier versions of themselves. The age‐old terms used to denote success—climbing the corporate ladder and breaking through the glass ceiling—are beginning to sound quaint, remnants of a time when people aimed their ambitions and passions in a single direction.

Flourishing in the work environment—becoming more energetic, engaged, focused, and happy—has always been important, for obvious reasons. But in the old world order of the hierarchical company, it was possible for a person to work his or her whole life in a steady state of modest achievement and marginal competence, in a strictly prescribed role and physical space, completing tasks without flourishing.

Obviously, that was never the way anyone would have preferred to live, but our own studies of the working environment have led us to conclude that even if a person wanted to, it's not really possible anymore. Today's organizations can no longer afford to underuse talent and initiative or to think of the word entrepreneur as a term that applies to an elite corps of innovators. The world—and in particular the working environment—has become disaggregated as the stable, cocooning environment of the company is disappearing. Just as companies themselves have had to become more agile and responsive to the rapid pace of change, so too must employees become more entrepreneurial, figuring out for themselves how to make the most of themselves, both at work and in their personal lives. As a result, self‐leadership—10X leadership—is becoming essential for the success and well‐being of everyone, not just those at the top of the corporate hierarchy.

As we've ventured out into the world of work, we've observed an increase in boundarylessness, the disappearance of traditional barriers both within and among organizations—and we think, although this world may be intimidating when you first approach it, it has far more potential to bring people joy than any of the socioeconomic models that preceded it. We've seen this boundarylessness emerge in three interrelated areas: fluidity of people, fluidity of roles, and fluidity of information.

Fluidity of People

Our grandparents were most likely to remain in the same workplace their entire lives. This was considered prudent, wise, and the right thing to do. Today, such loyalty is unusual and is perceived by many as unnecessary, even unwise, akin to stagnation.

Research from talent agency and outplacement service Lee Hecht Harrison shows that most of us can expect to have at least seven to eight career changes over the course of a working life. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker stays at each of his or her jobs for a median of 4.2 years; younger workers of the millennial generation (born between 1977 and 1997) change jobs even more often.² Most midcareer employees today will have changed jobs between 10 and 15 times by the time they retire.³ Those now entering the workplace for the first time could work at up to 35 jobs during their productive years.⁴ The question these younger workers most often ask each other isn't Where do you work now? It's What are you working on now?

For our purposes—determining what makes people flourish as leaders—the most important takeaway from this trend is that lifelong financial security and a stable, clearly defined role, the cornerstones of employee loyalty for so long, are now off the table for many people. This is true throughout entire organizations, from the shop floor to corporate headquarters, and as a result worker loyalty is, understandably, more transient than in the gold watch era.

Given the enormous costs of identifying and retaining talent, this is a potential nightmare for today's organizations, who are charged with answering the question, What kind of work experience are people seeking when they join an organization in the postindustrial world?

For once, it may be helpful to look to the previous century for insight, to the hierarchy of needs first proposed in 1943 by American psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow's hierarchy is most often depicted as a pyramid: The most fundamental human needs—survival and physiological needs, such as the air, food, water, and shelter needed to survive—form the base of the pyramid (Figure 2.1). As these basic needs are met, people move on to the middle sections of the pyramid to satisfy more complex social needs, such as safety, love, and belonging. The most abstract emotional and spiritual needs—self‐esteem and self‐actualization—occupy the top of the pyramid. By self‐actualization, Maslow envisioned a culminating state of being fully alive and finding deep meaning in life.

We see a remarkable synchronicity between the evolution of work and Maslow's hierarchy: Up to roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, people tended to look for work that would satisfy their physiological needs—food and shelter were enough. As wealth began to accumulate throughout the Western world, around the turn of the twentieth century, workplace safety became more of an issue, and workers who had the option, either individually or as part of labor unions, began to demand better working conditions. As safer and better‐paying jobs became more plentiful, particularly in the post—World War II era, people began to look for a workplace where they also enjoyed a sense of friendship and connection. This marked the birth of the company man who joined a tribe such as IBM or General Motors and enjoyed a sense of camaraderie with fellow employees.

Once the need for belonging was sufficiently satisfied, employees set their sights on the next level, seeking respect, praise, and recognition from their peers—and especially from their bosses. Berating employees, drill sergeant style, became outmoded, and managers were sent to sensitivity workshops and seminars to learn how to treat their employees respectfully, to focus on the praiseworthy, and to treat workers with dignity. Given the transitory nature of work today, workplaces make an effort to provide a respectful environment for employees—certainly compared with the workplaces of a few decades ago.

As more of us have come to expect this kind of recognition at work, we increasingly seek self‐actualization—to continue to learn, grow, and experience personal fulfillment. This is at least part of the reason we see so many people changing jobs so often: Once they feel they've mastered a particular role, once their learning curve flattens out, they move on to a position with a steeper curve. We spend most of our waking hours at work, so it's not surprising that we look for work that will satisfy the full spectrum of our needs.

Empirical studies of Maslow's hierarchy have found the array of human needs depicted in his model to be more complex than he'd imagined—for example, some studies have suggested needs aren't satisfied in a discrete progression, from food to self‐actualization—but in the 1960s and 1970s an American researcher of Maslow's hierarchy, Clayton Alderfer, validated the idea that once a certain need is met, people move on to satisfy others. Where we once looked for work to keep our families fed, sheltered, and clothed, we're now looking for careers that will provide us opportunities for growth, fulfillment, meaning, and purpose.

The principles of the 10X leadership program we present in this book are focused on helping both individuals, to find these opportunities for fulfillment and construct work environments and habits that will help them achieve growth and find purpose, and organizations, in this people‐fluid world, to become places where people want to stay because they can pursue their highest aspirations.

Fluidity of Roles

In their 2013 book, The Rise of the Naked Economy, Ryan Coonerty and Jeremy Neuner, founders of the coworking company NextSpace, use their own story to illustrate the new work environment that's emerging as the trappings of the industrial economy are stripped away. In 2008 Coonerty, then mayor of Santa Cruz, California, and Jeremy Neuner, the city's economic development director, were talking over strategies to grow the city's economy and create jobs. Several big corporations had left the city in recent years, taking hundreds of jobs with them: Wrigley in the mid‐1990s, Texas Instruments in 2001, and Lipton in 2002.

At the time, the great recession had already begun to emerge. Business was slow and the flow of capital was at a crawl. The housing bubble was about to burst. It no longer made sense, Coonerty and Neuner thought, to lure another big, lumbering machine to the West Coast and begin the next cycle of hiring and layoffs. It made more sense to try to lure as many talented, innovative thinkers as possible, to launch their own businesses and create working opportunities—which would be, unlike the predictable job and revenue numbers a new corporate citizen would bring, potentially unlimited.

Coonerty and Neuner opened their first NextSpace coworking location in downtown Santa Cruz in June 2008, and the timing was uncanny: The U.S. economy soon suffered a full‐on collapse, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and many working people found, as their traditional jobs disappeared, they needed to reinvent the roles that had thus far been defined for them by others. In the downtown space, would‐be entrepreneurs came together from all over the country, from different and seemingly unrelated sectors, and invented things in combinations that would have been unimaginable, or at least highly unlikely, just months earlier. In their book, Coonerty and Neuner cite the example of a nutritionist who connected with a former computer science professor, a graphic designer, and a corporate attorney to create a mobile app that advises people with diabetes about what to buy in grocery stores.⁵

Among this ad hoc group of four, it's easy to imagine each team member as a leader, guiding the development of a specific project component. This team‐based model of work is changing the types of employees who do it. There's a distinct trend away from the full‐time worker and toward the free agent. Traditional employment, while still the norm, is quickly giving way to contingent employment: the use of temps, independent contractors, part‐time workers, and other specialists who, although they may work full‐time, may not work full‐time for a single employer for very long—or may not work for a single employer at one time.

Business environments are changing so quickly now that it's no longer possible—or at least no longer worth the time, effort, or expense—to codify the protocols and standard operating procedures of the corporate machine. Not long after they're written down, the circumstances that produced them change. Roles aren't as clear or as narrowly defined as in the past, nor are they as stable over time—and as a result, employees have to be more fluid, flexible, and broad‐minded. Companies need employees, no matter where they might rank in the traditional corporate hierarchy, to generate new ideas. The rote tasks that can be programmed and performed within narrow parameters—product assembly, data processing, sorting, and calculating—are increasingly done by machines.

Interestingly, as workers and their defined roles have gone the way of the nomad, so too has the way leadership often works within organizations. In the industrial world, a person's authority was institutional, derived from his or her position. People did what a manager or supervisor directed them to do because she outranked them; to disregard or disobey was insubordination and carried the very real risk of being disciplined, or perhaps even fired.

But in the role‐fluid postindustrial world, leadership often looks more like it did in many preindustrial tribal societies, such as the Great Sioux Nation, whose seven bands roamed North America's Great Plains. Although the bands did gather each summer to select their highest‐ranking leaders at the meeting of the Seven Council Fires, the smaller groups of extended families chose their chiefs informally. There were no appointments or elections; leaders were chosen because of their wisdom, strength, and obvious love for the community. The authority of these chiefs derived simply from the willingness of people to follow them; none had the power to tell others what to do. When a chief no longer inspired trust or respect—if he made a major mistake, or if somebody emerged with better or more inspirational ideas—there was no impeachment or recall or no‐confidence vote. People just stopped listening. They either found someone else to listen to or began making their own decisions.

We've grown accustomed to assuming a person's title and position make him or her a leader. But in the world of social media, of Facebook and Twitter, leadership can be defined as “having followership,” and nomadic workers increasingly have a choice: If they're not inspired, or interested, or they don't see an opportunity for learning or growth, they'll move on. Even full‐time employees—particularly younger ones—expect to have more choices in defining and adapting their roles.

To thrive in today's world, everyone—not just the designated leader of an organization—needs the versatility to move freely and comfortably among departments, job descriptions, and geographic locations. In the disaggregated, boundaryless world, we find an increasing number of role‐fluid organizations, where creativity, innovation, learning, and growing are no longer a luxury reserved for the industry's elites; they're a necessity for individuals at all levels of an organization—billions of people, worldwide. Our 10X approach to leadership focuses on enabling these role‐fluid workplaces to maximize success, cultivating the qualities people need to flourish.

Fluidity of Information

More than 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus became famous for his insistence that the only constant, the fundamental essence of the universe, was ever‐present change. This has never been more obvious than today, when new tools—broadband communications; cloud computing; social media; online collaboration tools; and the computing power to collect, organize, and mine data from unlimited sources—enable businesses to change at a rate that's now accelerating beyond the ability of formal organizational structures to adapt.

Heraclitus used the metaphor of the river to illustrate his idea of constant change: You can't step into the same river twice because it flows, bringing different waters to you every moment—and you, yourself, are not the same person the second time you step into the river; you're new, with different knowledge and history.

If we look at the language we use to describe information in the boundaryless digital age, we see that the river has become too limited a metaphor. When we search the World Wide Web, we surf an oceanic expanse of information whose currents can pull us in any direction. When we type our terms into a search box, we enter an endlessly expanding cyberspace that now reaches beyond our solar system, in the form of data streamed to and from the New Horizons probe that passed Pluto in the summer of 2015.

This information explosion is both a blessing and a curse. Those who are able to harness this vast and turbulent flow of information are able to get things done in never‐seen‐before ways. With the ability to work from almost anywhere in the world—and sharing the opinion that e‐mail is on its way to becoming as archaic and outdated as the office memo—employees collaborate in virtual workspaces, launching improvements to their software products dozens of times a day, while billions of people sleep.

In today's world, this way of working is an imperative. Organizations today need to grow and learn and reinvent themselves constantly. The availability of information, its transparency and the ease with which it flows, mean that when a company releases a new product, that company—and its competitors—are already working on the next version, with new improvements. A single product or service, no matter how ingenious or groundbreaking, no longer allows a company or its employees to set the controls to autopilot. From our perspective, this is a gratifying development: What leader has ever experienced joy on autopilot?

More than 400 years ago, when the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “Ipsa scientia potestas est” (“Knowledge itself is power”), he demonstrated an eerie foreknowledge of the scientific revolution that would introduce the industrial age: To learn and understand new information was to master emerging technology and control your outcome.

The information age, on the other hand, returns us to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, who wrote—over 2,000 years ago—“The more you know, the less you understand.” It's no longer possible to master the ocean of information swirling around us, and even if it were, knowing isn't enough. The key to extracting power from information lies in the ability to synthesize large amounts of data, by recognizing patterns, extracting the essentials, and finding meaning and direction amid the ambiguity and chaos. This is precisely what has always been vital for leaders to be able to do—but in the past there was far less information, and far fewer people were required to synthesize this information.

The traditional metaphor of the organization as machine was never perfect. For one thing, it ignored the essential fact that machines were unaffected by their external environments, which was never true of organizations. The model worked for a while, anyway, in the industrial age, and businesses continue to apply some principles of scientific management.

But the metaphor hardly applies at all anymore. In the 1990s, through the work of people such as systems scientist Peter Senge, it began to shift. Senge, who wrote The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, viewed the organization not as a machine, but a living organism, with interrelated subsystems that work together to make up an entire system. An organism reacts to its environment constantly, adapting and even renewing itself: Cells die and new ones are born. And even when an organism dies, it may survive in a different form, having passed its DNA—an information capsule of sorts—on to the next generation and continuing the circle of life.

Some of the companies we've worked with have undergone these kinds of transformations, renewing themselves by assuming a more organic structure. Sainsbury's, the second‐largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom, was founded in 1869, a single shop on London's Drury Lane owned by John James Sainsbury. Sainsbury's was an early innovator, offering a range of its own‐label product lines and a focus on the quality of customers' shopping experiences. A century and a quarter later, in the 1990s, the company suffered a major slowdown and a loss of market share. Throughout its growth in size and reach—there were now hundreds of stores throughout the United Kingdom—Sainsbury's had become slightly top‐heavy, with a concentration of leaders at company headquarters. Meanwhile, the customer focus that had made Sainsbury's famous had dropped off a bit, with store employees having difficulty keeping shelves stocked.

The company began to right the ship in 2004, in part by shifting its focus from headquarters—where 750 positions were trimmed—to the shop floors, where it recruited 3,000 new workers to improve the quality of service.

Jon Hartland, Sainsbury's nonfood operations director, has spent 30 years working for what he calls a “big, proud traditional company,” and he's seen it cycle through success and struggle. A key to Sainsbury's current run of success, he said, has been its adoption of a less formal, more fluid definition of leadership. Sainsbury's is more flexible, modular, and team based. “Today the separation between the chief executive and the shop floor has been collapsed dramatically,” he said. In 2015 the company introduced an internal social network that allowed for direct flow of information among all levels of the organization. “People are talking to our CEO, Mike Coupe, all the time, from part‐time students to people like myself who've been in the business for many, many years,” said Hartland. “We have a ‘tell Mike’ culture—if you have a great idea, you can just say: ‘Why don't you try doing it this way?’ There are more open and freely engaged teams, and fewer directors. We're four times the size we were 30 years ago, and we've got fewer than half the directors.”

Many of Sainsbury's managers work with mobile and modular teams, moving from store to store to help support staff in more than 1,200 retail locations. Di Blackburn, an operational skills manager for the company, oversees a team (and subteams) of 34 people who design and deliver training where it's needed most. “I like to think of myself as a conductor,” she said. “I have a team working over here, a team working over there. I'm field based, so I can work anywhere from Scotland down to Cornwall and London.” It is precisely this type of change that was introduced throughout Sainsbury's that provides the fluidity of information necessary for today's business.

One of the essential tenets of the theory of evolution—a tenet that applies to both the natural world and our manufactured world—is that when an environment changes, only those who adapt will survive. In today's world, where change is constant, only those who build the capacities to adapt constantly—to grow with, or ahead of, the times—will survive and flourish.

If you find the rapid changes described above intimidating, you're not alone. A lot is happening, and it's happening fast. In the chapters that follow, we'll show you the many reasons why we're not scared—why we're really excited about the changes, in fact. In breaking down old barriers, the new disaggregated world does, of course, create much uncertainty. But we think it also creates unprecedented—boundaryless—opportunities for human development, for growing into the kind of joyful, influential people—the 10X leaders—most of us hope to be.

What do these 10X leaders look like in the disaggregated world? In our experience—Tal's work at Harvard and around the world, where he's lectured on happiness and fulfillment, and Angus's work at McKinsey, where he's developed leadership programs in collaboration with the leaders of the world's biggest corporations—we've come to a stunning realization: Most people don't know what it means to succeed and lead. Most aren't reaching their full potential, or achieving lasting fulfillment, because their formula for success and well‐being is almost always completely wrong. Like the inefficient, clunky machines of old, many continue to suffer from outdated ideas of what it means to be a good leader—and why it matters at all.

Our first step in building a program that would help people become happy and successful was to identify the flaws in this formula—the demonstrably wrong, but somehow persistent, myths and misconceptions about happiness and leadership—and what it will mean, in the emerging boundaryless world, to be a 10X leader.