The Results Paradox (1000X)

So you’re faced with a challenging problem (X) at work. At the eleventh hour, right before deadline with minimal resources and fierce departmental friction, you stitch together an innovative and brilliant solution. Boss response: Make you in charge of all of X, without changes in your compensation, team or workload. Granular details of how you arrived at the innovation are lost and now you have to deliver results again at scale. As I move through life and career a funny observation of mine is that good bosses are ones who can find the innovators and give them just enough work that they don’t explode but the right amount to challenge and inspire them. There is of course a fine line between such a boss and a lazy one or or boss with limited vision; all bosses will reward results with more work, but only good ones have strategy as a motive.

So almost immediately in my career I began to temper my results or at least the appearance of them; so as not to invite this kind of response. It is very frustrating to come to the top of a mountain peak and be told, OK, now we [you] need to do 10X more of these, at 10X speed or the same cost. Especially if it was a process not in the core of your workflow. Capable people who are bad at saying no often get stuck managing several incompetent coworker’s workloads (but not payscale). Freshly tasting success, if you say No to the 10X challenge, you risk being classified as A) an ass, having scaled the mountain soley to make a point, or B) incompetent, since you are unable or unwilling to replicate past success.  Helplessly, I find myself playing this role in our outsourcing management. As soon as I find a competent developer, I end up overloading him and smoke will soon be coming out of his head.

More often than not, those who respond to this challenge have the deck stacked against them. Since management is really mostly concerned with profit and organizational politics, they will not really have attention, desire or interest in properly setting the stage for things to be 10x. As with everything corporate resources are finite and scarce and in the aftermath of a victory and a “mandate” other departments will be even more indifferent to your purpose. This is the part where the boss turns to you and says through a smile “I’m busy, you figure it out”. A true innovator will figure out if he can do it, in a way that keeps him moving towards his end goals. As Steve Jobs said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are“. There is a level of end game Zen when one might have the Results Paradox factored into every task at hand.

PS if you are an entrepreneur or startup founder simply replace “Boss” with “Investors” or  ”Customers”. In

those situations the pressure might be not 10X but 100 or even 1000X; the principle rings true not only for individuals or small groups but also for fully established organizations on the world’s stage like Apple.

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