作者：Charles Duhigg
出版社：Penguin Random House
原著出版时间：2016年3月8日
来源：下载的 epub 版本

《习惯的力量》作者 Charles Duhigg 的续作，中文版翻译为了《高效的秘密》，因为没有找到格式舒服的电子版，找到英文版就开始读了，读完以后感觉可以把内容压缩为1/3，第5章「Managing Others」居然使用了「插叙」「回闪」的描绘手法，我也是服气，不过也就是从这章开始，书的质量就明显开始下降了，前4章含金量算比较高的

收获最大的是关于 self-motivation（自我驱动） 和 believe in control（控制感） 之间的高度关联性，以及如何训练 internal locus of control（内控点） 这两个部分，非常有启发

摘录：

That didn’t make sense to Delgado. The odds of winning or losing were exactly the same regardless of whether the participant or the computer was in control. Allowing someone to make a guess, rather than waiting for a computer to make a guess for them, shouldn’t have made any real difference in the experience of the game. People’s neurological reactions should have been the same either way. But, somehow, allowing people to make choices transformed the game. Instead of being a chore, the experiment became a challenge. Participants were more motivated to play simply because they believed they were in control.

Self-help books and leadership manuals often portray self-motivation as a static feature of our personality or the outcome of a neurological calculus in which we subconsciously compare efforts versus rewards. But scientists say motivation is more complicated than that. Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.
“The need for control is a biological imperative,” a group of Columbia University psychologists wrote in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2010. When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are, on average, more confident and overcome setbacks faster. People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adults’ attempts at control even if submission is more likely to get food into their mouths.

Krulak began reviewing studies on how to teach self-motivation, and became particularly intrigued by research, conducted by the Corps years earlier, showing that the most successful marines were those with a strong “internal locus of control”—a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.
Locus of control has been a major topic of study within psychology since the 1950s. Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.
“Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012. People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.
In contrast, having an external locus of control—believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control—“is correlated with higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,” the team of psychologists wrote.
Studies show that someone’s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback. One experiment conducted in 1998, for example, presented 128 fifth graders with a series of difficult puzzles. Afterward, each student was told they had scored very well. Half of them were also told, “You must have worked hard at these problems.” Telling fifth graders they have worked hard has been shown to activate their internal locus of control, because hard work is something we decide to do. Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.
The other half of the students were also informed they had scored well, and then told, “You must be really smart at these problems.” Complimenting students on their intelligence activates an external locus of control. Most fifth graders don’t believe they can choose how smart they are. In general, young kids think that intelligence is an innate capacity, so telling young people they are smart reinforces their belief that success or failure is based on factors outside of their control.
Then all the students were invited to work on three more puzzles of varying difficulty.
The students who had been praised for their intelligence—who had been primed to think in terms of things they could not influence—were much more likely to focus on the easier puzzles during the second round of play, even though they had been complimented for being smart. They were less motivated to push themselves. They later said the experiment wasn’t much fun.
In contrast, students who had been praised for their hard work—who were encouraged to frame the experience in terms of self-determination—went to the hard puzzles. They worked longer and scored better. They later said they had a great time.
“Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who helped conduct that study, told me. “Most of us learn it early in life. But some people’s sense of self-determination gets suppressed by how they grow up, or experiences they’ve had, and they forget how much influence they can have on their own lives.
“That’s when training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control, where that internal locus of control is reawakened, then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.”
For Krulak, studies like this seemed to hold the key to teaching recruits self-motivation. If he could redesign basic training to force trainees to take control of their own choices, that impulse might become more automatic, he hoped. “Today we call it teaching ‘a bias toward action,’ ” Krulak told me. “The idea is that once recruits have taken control of a few situations, they start to learn how good it feels.

“I hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,” said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a thoroughly intimidating drill instructor who showed me around the Recruit Depot one day. “You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. If you’re an athlete, I’ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role. We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”

“Technically, we could send them back to start over because each person didn’t hear a direct verbal command from the team leader,” a drill sergeant later told me. “But that’s the point of the exercise: We know you can’t hear anything with the gas masks on. The only way to get across the pit is to figure out some workaround. We’re trying to teach them that you can’t just obey orders. You have to take control and figure things out for yourself.”

Basic training, like the Marine Corps career itself, offers few material rewards. A Marine’s starting salary is $17,616 a year. However, the Corps has one of the highest career satisfaction rates. The training the Corps provides to roughly forty thousand recruits each year has transformed the lives of millions of people who, like Quintanilla, had no idea how to generate the motivation and self-direction needed to take control of their lives. Since Krulak’s reforms, the Corps’ retention of new recruits and the performance scores of new marines have both increased by more than 20 percent. Surveys indicate that the average recruit’s internal locus of control increases significantly during basic training. Delgado’s experiments were a start to understanding motivation. The Marines complement those insights by helping us understand how to teach drive to people who aren’t practiced in self-determination: If you give people an opportunity to feel a sense of control and let them practice making choices, they can learn to exert willpower. Once people know how to make self-directed choices into a habit, motivation becomes more automatic.
Moreover, to teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals. That’s the reason recruits ask each other “why”—because it shows them how to link small tasks to larger aspirations.

This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.
This is easier in theory, of course, than practice. We all applaud self-motivation until a toddler won’t put on his shoes, an aged parent is ripping a dresser out of the wall, or a teenager ignores the rules. But that’s how an internal locus of control becomes stronger. That’s how our mind learns and remembers how good it feels to be in control. And unless we practice self-determination and give ourselves emotional rewards for subversive assertiveness, our capacity for self-motivation can fade.
What’s more, we need to prove to ourselves that our choices are meaningful. When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves “why.” Why are we forcing ourselves to climb up this hill? Why are we pushing ourselves to walk away from the television? Why is it so important to return that email or deal with a coworker whose requests seem so unimportant?
Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values. We start to recognize how small chores can have outsized emotional rewards, because they prove to ourselves that we are making meaningful choices, that we are genuinely in control of our own lives. That’s when self-motivation flourishes: when we realize that replying to an email or helping a coworker, on its own, might be relatively unimportant. But it is part of a bigger project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do. Self-motivation, in other words, is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.

One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask them to describe what that person is thinking or feeling—the empathy test described previously. This is a “test of how well the participant can put themselves into the mind of the other person, and ‘tune in’ to their mental state,” wrote the creator of the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge. While men, on average, correctly guess the emotion of the person in the photo only 52 percent of the time, women typically guess right 61 percent.

“But now we can say those aren’t right. The data shows there’s a universality to how good teams succeed. It’s important that everyone on a team feels like they have a voice, but whether they actually get to vote on things or make decisions turns out not to matter much. Neither does the volume of work or physical co-location. What matters is having a voice and social sensitivity.”
Onstage, Bock brought up a series of slides. “What matters are five key norms,” he told the audience.
Teams need to believe that their work is important.
Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.
Teams need clear goals and defined roles.
Team members need to know they can depend on one another.
But, most important, teams need psychological safety.
To create psychological safety, Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. There were Google-designed checklists they could use: Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.

“I come from a quantitative background. If I’m going to believe something, you need to give me data to back it up,” said Sagnik Nandy, who as chief of Google Analytics Engineering heads one of the company’s biggest teams. “So seeing this data has been a game changer for me. Engineers love debugging software because we know we can get 10 percent more efficiency by just making a few tweaks. But we never focus on debugging human interactions. We put great people together and hope it will work, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, and most of the time we don’t know why. Aristotle let us debug our people. It’s totally changed how I run meetings. I’m so much more conscious of how I model listening now, or whether I interrupt, or how I encourage everyone to speak.”

But the downside of reactive thinking is that habits and reactions can become so automatic they overpower our judgment. Once our motivation is outsourced, we simply react. One study conducted by Strayer, the psychologist, in 2009 looked at how drivers’ behaviors changed when cars were equipped with features such as cruise control and automatic braking systems that allowed people to pay less attention to road conditions.
“These technologies are supposed to make driving safer, and many times, they do,” said Strayer. “But it also makes reactive thinking easier, and so when the unexpected startles you, when the car skids or you have to brake suddenly, you’ll react with practiced, habitual responses, like stomping on the pedal or twisting the wheel too far. Instead of thinking, you react, and if it’s not the correct response, bad things happen.”

People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they’re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do.
Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.” Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology. All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not.
But some of us build more robust models than others. We envision the conversations we’re going to have with more specificity, and imagine what we are going to do later that day in greater detail. As a result, we’re better at choosing where to focus and what to ignore. The secret of people like Darlene is that they are in the habit of telling themselves stories all the time. They engage in constant forecasting. They daydream about the future and then, when life clashes with their imagination, their attention gets snagged. That helps explain why Darlene noticed the sick baby. She was in the habit of imagining what the babies in her unit ought to look like. Then, when she glanced over and the bloody Band-Aid, distended belly, and mottled skin didn’t match the image in her mind, the spotlight in her head swung toward the child’s bassinet.
Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re not blinded by its glare.

The economists figured the superstars were pickier because they were seeking out assignments that were similar to previous work they had done. Conventional wisdom holds that productivity rises when people do the same kind of tasks over and over. Repetition makes us faster and more efficient because we don’t have to learn fresh skills with each new assignment. But as the economists looked more closely, they found the opposite: The superstars weren’t choosing tasks that leveraged existing skills. Instead, they were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities. That’s why the superstars worked on only five projects at a time: Meeting new people and learning new skills takes a lot of additional hours.
Something else the superstars had in common is they were disproportionately drawn to assignments that were in their early stages. This was surprising, because joining a project in its infancy is risky. New ideas often fail, no matter how smart or well executed. The safest bet is signing on to a project that is well under way.
However, the beginning of a project is also more information rich. By joining fledgling initiatives, the superstars were cc’d on emails they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. They learned which junior executives were smart and picked up new ideas from their younger colleagues. They were exposed to emerging markets and the lessons of the digital economy earlier than other executives. What’s more, the superstars could later claim ownership of an innovation simply by being in the room when it was born, rather than fighting paternity battles once it was deemed a success.
Finally, the superstars also shared a particular behavior, almost an intellectual and conversational tic: They loved to generate theories—lots and lots of theories, about all kinds of topics, such as why certain accounts were succeeding or failing, or why some clients were happy or disgruntled, or how different management styles influenced various employees. They were somewhat obsessive, in fact, about trying to explain the world to themselves and their colleagues as they went about their days.
The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models. They were more likely to throw out ideas during meetings, or ask colleagues to help them imagine how future conversations might unfold, or envision how a pitch should go. They came up with concepts for new products and practiced how they would sell them. They told anecdotes about past conversations and dreamed up far-fetched expansion plans. They were building mental models at a near constant rate.

Imagine you have been asked to complete a questionnaire. Your assignment is to rate how strongly you agree or disagree with forty-two statements, including:

• I believe orderliness and organization are among the most important characteristics.
• I find that establishing a consistent routine enables me to enjoy life more.
• I like to have friends who are unpredictable.
• I prefer interacting with people whose opinions are very different from my own.
• My personal space is usually messy and disorganized.
• It’s annoying to listen to someone who cannot seem to make up his or her mind.

A team of researchers at the University of Maryland first published this test in 1994, and since then it has become a staple of personality exams. At first glance, the questions seem designed to measure someone’s preference for personal organization and their comfort with alternate viewpoints. And, in fact, researchers have found that this exam helps identify people who are more decisive and self-assured, and that those traits are correlated with general success in life. Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs.
But this questionnaire is not intended to test personal organization. Rather, it’s designed to measure a personality trait known as “the need for cognitive closure,” which psychologists define as “the desire for a confident judgment on an issue, any confident judgment, as compared to confusion and ambiguity.” Most people respond to this exam—which is called “the need for closure scale”—by demonstrating a preference for a mix of order and chaos in their lives. They say they prize orderliness but admit to having messy desks. They say they are annoyed by indecision but also have unreliable friends. However, some people—about 20 percent of test takers, and many of the most accomplished people who have completed the exam—show a higher-than-average preference for personal organization, decisiveness, and predictability. They tend to disdain flighty friends and ambiguous situations. These people have a high emotional need for cognitive closure.

It was the late 1980s and GE was the second most valuable company in America, just behind Exxon. GE manufactured everything from lightbulbs to jet engines, refrigerators to railway cars, and through its ownership of NBC, was in millions of homes with iconic shows such as Cheers, The Cosby Show, and L.A. Law. The company employed over 220,000 people, more than many U.S. cities had residents. One of the reasons GE was so successful, its executives boasted, was that it was so good at choosing goals.
In the 1940s, GE had formalized a corporate goal-setting system that would eventually become a model around the world. By the 1960s, every GE employee was required to write out their objectives for the year in a letter to their manager. “Simply put,” historians at Harvard Business School wrote in 2011, “the manager’s letter required a job holder to write a letter to his or her superior indicating what the goals for the next time frame were, how the goals would be met, and what standards were to be expected. When the superior accepted this letter—usually after editing and discussion—it became the work ‘contract.’ ”

By the 1980s, this system had evolved into a system of so-called SMART goals that every division and manager were expected to describe each quarter. These objectives had to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and based on a timeline. In other words, they had to be provably within reach and described in a way that suggested a concrete plan.
If a goal didn’t meet the SMART criteria, a manager had to resubmit a memo detailing their aims, again and again, until it was approved by upper management. “It was about getting concrete,” said William Conaty, who retired as GE’s head of human resources in 2007. “Your manager was always saying, what’s the specifics? What’s the timeline? Prove to me this is realistic. The system worked because by the time we were done, you knew pretty clearly how things were going to unfold.”
The SMART mindset spread throughout GE’s culture. There were SMART charts to help midlevel managers describe monthly goals and SMART worksheets to turn personal objectives into action plans. And the company’s belief that SMART goals would work was rooted in good science.
In the 1970s, a pair of university psychologists named Edwin Locke and Gary Latham had helped develop the SMART criteria through experiments scrutinizing the best way to set goals. In one experiment Latham conducted in 1975, researchers approached forty-five of the most experienced and productive typists at a large corporation and measured how fast they produced text. The typists knew they were among the best in the company, but they had never measured how quickly they typed. The researchers found that, on average, each worker produced ninety-five lines of typewritten output per hour.
Then the researchers gave each typist a specific goal based on their previous performance—such as ninety-eight lines per hour—and showed the typists a system for easily measuring their hourly output. The researchers also had a conversation with each typist to make sure the goal was realistic—and to adjust it if necessary—and they discussed what changes were required to make the objective achievable. They came up with a timeline for each person. The conversation didn’t take long—say, fifteen minutes per person—but afterward each typist knew exactly what to do and how to measure success. Each of them, put differently, had a SMART goal.
Some of the researchers’ colleagues said they didn’t believe this would have an impact on the typists’ performance. All the typists were professionals with years of experience. A fifteen-minute conversation should not make much of a difference to someone who has been typing eight hours a day for two decades.
But one week later, when the researchers measured typing speeds again, they found that the workers, on average, were completing 103 lines per hour. Another week later: 112 lines. Most of the typists had blown past the goals they had set. The researchers worried the workers were just trying to impress them, so they came back again, three months later, and quietly measured everyone’s performance once more. They were typing just as fast, and some had gotten even faster.

GE’s chief executive Jack Welch had long claimed that his insistence on SMART goals was one of the reasons the company’s stock had more than tripled in eight years. But forcing people to detail their goals with such specificity didn’t mean every part of the company ran smoothly. Some divisions, despite setting SMART goals, never seemed to excel—or they would flip-flop from profits to losses, or seem to be growing and then suddenly fall apart. In the late 1980s, executives became particularly concerned about two divisions—a nuclear equipment manufacturer in North Carolina and a jet engine plant in Massachusetts—that had once been among the company’s top performers but were now limping along.
Executives initially suspected those divisions simply needed better-defined objectives, so factory managers were asked to prepare memo after memo describing increasingly specific goals. Their responses were detailed, precise, and realistic. They met every SMART criterion.
And yet, profits still fell.
So a group of GE’s internal consultants visited the nuclear factory in Wilmington, North Carolina. They asked employees to walk them through their weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals. One plant executive explained that his SMART objective was to prevent antinuclear protesters from harassing workers as they entered the plant, because he felt it eroded morale. He had come up with a SMART plan to build a fence. The goal was specific and reasonable (the fence would be fifty feet long and nine feet high), it had a timeline (it would be done by February), and it was achievable (they had a contractor ready to go).
Next, the consultants went to the jet engine factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, and interviewed, among others, an administrative assistant who told them her SMART goal was ordering the factory’s office supplies. She showed them a SMART chart with specific aims (“order staplers, pens and desk calendars”) that were measurable (“by June”), as well as achievable, realistic, and had a timeline (“Place order on February 1. Request update on March 15.”).
Many of the SMART goals the consultants found inside the factories were just as detailed—and just as trivial. Workers spent hours making sure their objectives satisfied every SMART criterion, but spent much less time making sure the goals were worth pursuing in the first place. The nuclear factory’s security guards had written extensive memos on the goal of theft prevention and had come up with a plan that “basically consisted of searching everyone’s bags every time they entered or exited the plant, which caused huge delays,” said Brian Butler, one of the consultants. “It might have stopped thefts, but it also destroyed the factory’s productivity because everyone started leaving earlier each day so they could get home at a decent hour.” Even the plants’ senior executives, the consultants found, had fallen prey to an obsession with achievable but inconsequential goals, and were focused on unimportant short-term objectives rather than more ambitious plans.
When the consultants asked employees how they felt about GE’s emphasis on SMART goals, they expected to hear complaints about the onerous bureaucracy. They anticipated people would say they wanted to think bigger, but were hamstrung by the incessant SMART demands. Instead, employees said they loved the SMART system. The administrative assistant who ordered office supplies said fulfilling those goals gave her a real sense of accomplishment. Sometimes, she said, she would write a SMART memo for a task she had already completed and then put it into her “Done” folder. It made her feel so good.
Researchers who have studied SMART goals and other structured methods of choosing objectives say this isn’t unusual. Such systems, though useful, can sometimes trigger our need for closure in counterproductive ways. Aims such as SMART goals “can cause [a] person to have tunnel vision, to focus more on expanding effort to get immediate results,” Locke and Latham wrote in 1990. Experiments have shown that people with SMART goals are more likely to seize on the easiest tasks, to become obsessed with finishing projects, and to freeze on priorities once a goal has been set. “You get into this mindset where crossing things off your to-do list becomes more important than asking yourself if you’re doing the right things,” said Latham.
GE’s executives weren’t sure how to help the nuclear and jet engine factories. So in 1989, they asked a professor named Steve Kerr, the dean of faculty at the University of Southern California business school, for help. Kerr was an expert in the psychology of goal setting, and he began by interviewing employees inside the nuclear factory. “A lot of these people were really demoralized,” he said. “They had gone into nuclear energy because they wanted to change the world. Then Three Mile Island and Chernobyl happened, and the industry was getting protested every day and completely brutalized in the press.” Setting short-term goals and achieving them, the plant’s workers and executives told Kerr, was one of the few things they could feel good about at work.
The only way to improve performance at the nuclear factory, Kerr thought, was to find a way to shake people out of their focus on short-term objectives. GE had recently started a series of meetings among top executives called “Work-Outs” that were designed to encourage people to think about bigger ambitions and more long-term plans. Kerr helped expand those meetings to factories’ rank-and-file.
The rules at Work-Outs were simple: Employees could suggest any goal they thought GE ought to be pursuing. There were no SMART charts or memos. “The concept was that nothing was off-limits,” Kerr told me. Managers had to approve or deny each suggestion quickly, often right away, and “we wanted to make it easy to say yes,” said Kerr. “We thought if we could get people to identify the ambition first, and then figure out the plan afterward, it would encourage bigger thinking.” If an idea seemed half-baked, Kerr said, a manager should “say yes, because even if the proposal is no better than what you’re doing now, with the group’s energy behind it, the plan will turn out great.” Only after a goal was approved would everyone begin the formal process of determining how to make it realistic and achievable and all the other SMART criteria.
At a Work-Out inside the engine factory in Massachusetts, one worker told his bosses they were making a mistake by outsourcing construction of protective shields for their grinding machines. The factory could make them in-house for half the cost, he said. Then he unfurled a piece of butcher paper covered with scribbled blueprints. There was nothing SMART about the man’s proposal. It was unclear if it was realistic or achievable, or what measurements to apply. But when the factory’s top manager looked at the butcher paper, he said, “I guess we’ll try it out.”
Four months later, after the blueprints had been professionally redrawn and the plan transformed into a series of SMART goals, the first prototype was installed. It cost $16,000—more than 80 percent less than the outsourced bid. The factory saved $200,000 that year on ideas proposed at the Work-Out. “Everybody gets caught up in this tremendous rush of adrenaline,” a team leader at the plant, Bill DiMaio, said. “The ideas that people come up with are so encouraging, it’s unbelievable. These people get psyched. All their ideas are fair game.”
Then Kerr helped take the Work-Out program company-wide. By 1994, every GE employee within GE had participated in at least one Work-Out. As profits and productivity rose, executives at other companies began imitating the Work-Out system inside their own firms. By 1995, there were hundreds of companies conducting Work-Outs. Kerr joined GE full-time in 1994 and eventually became the company’s “chief learning officer.”
“The Work-Outs were successful because they balanced the psychological influence of immediate goals with the freedom to think about bigger things,” said Kerr. “That’s critical. People respond to the conditions around them. If you’re being constantly told to focus on achievable results, you’re only going to think of achievable goals. You’re not going to dream big.”
Work-Outs, however, weren’t perfect. They took an entire day of everyone’s time and usually meant the plant had to slow down production so that workers could all attend the meetings. It was something a division or plant could do once or twice a year, at most. And though the Work-Outs left everyone feeling excited and hungry for change, the effects were frequently short-lived. A week later, everyone was back at their old jobs and, often, their old ways of thinking.

Welch had given his aircraft manufacturing division a stretch goal of reducing errors by 70 percent, an objective so audacious the only way to go about it was to change nearly everything about (a) how workers were trained, (b) which workers were hired, and (c) how the factory ran. By the time they were done, the Durham plant’s managers had collapsed organizational charts, remade job duties, and overhauled how they interviewed candidates, because they needed people with better team skills and more flexible mindsets. In other words, Welch’s stretch goal set off a chain reaction that remade how engines were manufactured in ways no one had imagined. By 1999, the number of defects per engine had fallen by 75 percent and the company had gone thirty-eight months without missing a single delivery, a record. The cost of manufacturing had dropped by 10 percent every year. No SMART goal would have done that.

Eventually, they collected enough data to conclude that most companies had cultures that fell into one of five categories. One was a culture they referred to as the “star” model. At these firms, executives hired from elite universities or other successful companies and gave employees huge amounts of autonomy. Offices had fancy cafeterias and lavish perks. Venture capitalists loved star model companies because giving money to the A-Team, conventional wisdom held, was always the safest bet.
The second category was the “engineering” model. Inside firms with engineering cultures, there weren’t many individual stars, but engineers, as a group, held the most sway. An engineering mindset prevailed in solving problems or approaching hiring decisions. “This is your stereotypical Silicon Valley start-up, with a bunch of anonymous programmers drinking Mountain Dew at their computers,” said Baron. “They’re young and hungry and might be the next generation of stars once they prove themselves, but right now, they’re focused on solving technical problems.” Engineering-focused cultures are powerful because they allow firms to grow quickly. “Think of how fast Facebook expanded,” said Baron. “When everyone comes from a similar background and mindset, you can rely on common social norms to keep everyone on the same path.”
The third and fourth categories of companies included those firms built around “bureaucracies” and those constructed as “autocracies.” In the bureaucratic model, cultures emerged through thick ranks of middle managers. Executives wrote extensive job descriptions, organizational charts, and employee handbooks. Everything was spelled out, and there were rituals, such as weekly all-hands meetings, that regularly communicated the firm’s values to its workers. An autocratic culture is similar, except that all the rules, job descriptions, and organizational charts ultimately point to the desires and goals of one person, usually the founder or CEO. “One autocratic chief executive told us that his cultural model was, ‘You work. You do what I say. You get paid,’ ” Baron said.
The final category was known as the “commitment” model, and it was a throwback to an age when people happily worked for one company their entire life. “Commitment CEOs say things like, ‘I want to build the kind of company where people only leave when they retire or die,’ ” said Baron. “That doesn’t necessarily mean the company is stodgy, but it does imply a set of values that might prioritize slow and steady growth.” Some Silicon Valley executives told Baron they saw commitment firms as outdated, remnants of a corporate paternalism that had undermined industries such as American manufacturing. Commitment companies were more hesitant to lay people off. They often hired HR professionals when other start-ups were using precious dollars to recruit engineers or salespeople. “Commitment CEOs believe that getting the culture right is more important at first than designing the best product,” Baron said.

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