ben damiano 2/1/26 ben damiano 2/1/26

Work: The Four Big Shifts.

This week will mark one year since Rethinking Work was published globally by HarperCollins.

As of this date every prediction in the book on how work would transform has begun to happen.

And in every case faster and deeper than imagined.

Here are the four shifts underway and their implications:

1) Work and Jobs have uncoupled: In many parts of the world, 2025 will have marked the peak of full-time human jobs. Individuals have discovered that work can be done and incomes can be earned without holding a full time job. Companies continue to expand use of contractor or part-time workforces, or even avoid hiring a human worker and adopt use of agentic employees (AI-powered workers).

During the recent earnings call at Meta:

“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta CFO Susan Li said since the start of 2025, “output per engineer has risen 30%, driven largely by adopting AI coding agents, and “power users” have increased output 80% year over year.

Meta did increase employment by 6 percent but that pales in comparison to a nearly 24 percent rise in revenue. Most companies have telegraphed keeping the same number of employees or reducing them despite increased revenue.

The implications of this shift are significant both for society but also for companies which have tended to be organized around filling and managing jobs versus getting work done. As work can get done with fewer full time humans we will see today’s full time jobs being replaced by a mix of a smaller number of full time jobs and an explosion of freelance and fractionalized jobs plus agentic workers.

Just like how people compile playlists to customize music for mood and occasion rather than buying full compact discs or vinyl records, companies are going to compile and access skills and expertise to get work done. Hiring human workers for specific skills to use on term-fixed projects, instead of full-time employment.

This model is widely prevalent in fields such as entertainment where talent gets together around a project whether it be a play, a movie or a tv show and then move on to the next opportunity.

We will all feel the societal impact of the loss of so many full time jobs. In the US, the linkage between full-time employment and health care access will become a key election issue by 2028, if not earlier.

2) The majority of future company employees will be different from who they are now: At the start of this decade most companies’ employees were a mix of full-time employees, contract employees and free-lance employees. Well before the end of this decade the majority of most companies’ employees will be agentic employees and fractionalized employees (individuals with the equity and health benefits of full-time employees, but work for, and are compensated for, 50 to 80 percent of a full-time employee as AI requires less of them and aging populations causes people to work fewer hours).

McKinsey the consulting company today has 40,000 humans and 25,000 AI agents.

Fusing agentic and human work forces is going to be a significant challenge creating challenges when managing and aligning a combination of five types of employees (full time, free-lance, contract, fractionalized and agentic).

3) Leadership will be reinvented: Leadership will matter more than ever, but will have to become more resilient and relevant for the modern world due to three shifts.

Knowledge Implosion: Many managers have huge amounts of knowledge. Much of this knowledge is factual and data-driven. Some of it is crystalized intelligence of being able to recognize and match patterns. AI is making much of the knowledge and data corpus less relevant since it can be accessed and organized by anybody with access to an AI tool. The crystalized intelligence remains important, but can become a double-edged sword since in the new world of AI, old patterns may no longer hold true.

LQ/UQ: To succeed, every manager and leader will have to both learn the new skills and ways of working thus LQ or learning quotient will join EQ to help thrive in an AI Age while unlearning old ways will become important (UQ or unlearning quotient). Imagine spending thirty years learning an industry and its ways, then having to reimagine much of it! The future will definitely not fit in the mindsets of the past.

Workforce Shift: When a majority of employees are not human or full time, and in many cases the human employees are distributed around the world, new methods of inspiring and managing will be required.

Zone of influence will replace Zone of control.

Companies as “teams” will replace companies as “families “(which they almost never were).

It is for this reason that companies that believe the coming change in work is only about technology instead of both technology and upgrading human capability will likely fall behind.

4) Modern Organizational Design will reward AI first/Talent anywhere: A large number of the fast-growing successful companies have the following traits:

A) They begin with AI first: They do not ask how the human can be automated by AI, but rather how the Human can complement and aid the AI. AI allows for completely new ways of working including the fusion of specialties and the melting of silos. Human in the lead as Julie Sweet of Accenture does not mean planning human first.

B) They access and hire talent from anywhere: As AI enables billions around the world to now have amazing tools and also turbo charges highly talented people (note aforementioned Meta CFO Susan Li’s comments on power users delivering more than regular users ) finding and retaining the best talent wherever they can be found will be key.

Companies will access talent anywhere and not limit their search to geography . The current backward lurch to fixed locations and five-days-a-week work (though most companies already behind the scene excuse most of their top talent from this) will be seen as a failure of leadership to reimagine and as a guise to eliminate workers without severance versus a winning future strategy.

C) Most organizations will be smaller and far more agile and distributed: With AI enhancing productivity and hundreds of millions of people all over the world accessing AI tools on their mobile devices companies are likely to be less scaled, more distributed and as a result far more profitable. In addition because of agentic and fractionalized talent, most of the employees of a company will be outside of the company’s locations or be virtual only.

Implications for Companies and Talent.

While smart leaders are now starting to plan around these new themes, so are talent.

It is not just people who are coming out of school who experience challenges in finding jobs, but many mid-level and senior leaders are struggling to stay relevant and resilient.

A mindset that every person should adopt is thinking of themselves as a company of one and to actively begin career architecting. (These are the two most popular and possibly useful pieces of career advice you might read or pass on to your kids.).

This mindset is not that people will work for themselves, but that we all need to ensure we are honing our capabilities so that we can get hired or retain our jobs for ourselves and our skills. It will also be important to be known for collaboration and generosity so that we can maximize our options and build reputations and networks long before we are forced to need them.

A question all of us should ask ourselves as we manage our careers and our companies:

Why are we not rethinking every aspect of our work and career when it is highly likely that before the end of this decade: a) we will pursue and be paid for project-based work versus full-time jobs; b) organizations we work with or for will be completely re-architected; c) many existing leaders will fail to reinvent and unfortunately disappear into irrelevance while a new type of forever-iterating leader will rise and; d) much of our existing knowledge and experience will matter very little.

In tectonic times those who move early to reinvent are the ones who will thrive.

To access resources, cases and hear extra-ordinary pioneers (CEO’s, Talent Leaders, Technologists, Architects, and more ) as they reinvent work check out the Rethinking Work Platform and the Rethinking Work Show which are FREE or get the book in hardcover for only $10 at Amazon

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Recent Learnings from Silicon Valley.

On January 15, 2026 a group of 80 leaders across a spectrum of business, medicine, academia, and government convened for the Inaugural Athena Project Silicon Valley Leadership Salon at the SAP Institute in San Ramon California. These included early investors in Tesla and SpaceX, Fortune 500 C-Suite executives, legendary marketing and media leaders, AI trust and safety executives, entrepreneurs and more.

The Athena Project is a membership-by-invitation “tribe” focussed on modern leadership where the emphasis is on the human and not the title or the company. The topics are wide spectrum pivoting from strategy to technology to medicine to innovation to life long learning and addressing fear and weakness. The discussion is under Chatham House rule with attendees being able to share learning but not associate them with the person who shared it. The focus is on honest interaction, spirited conversation and community building.

There were dozens of takeaways but here are six intriguing perspectives:

1. Mercenaries versus Missionaries: The most successful entrepreneurs tend to be missionaries rather than mercenaries. A mercenary will sell at a price whereas a missionary will endure all setbacks and sacrifice everything driven by the an underlying purpose and infinite zeal. Long term exponential wealth and societal impact are driven by the missionaries and finding them is the holy grail of Silicon Valley.

This missionary zeal makes for successful leaders particularly in changing times where the future is uncertain and doubters are everywhere. Purpose is what attracts human capital more than wealth creation. This is because most wealth creation happens on the contrarian and radical bet versus jumping into a trend that has become recognizable.

The belief of purpose vs the belief in profit.

2. Culture is hard and not soft: Research indicates that if one firm performs better than a competitor in the same category, up to half of the gap in performance is attributable to culture.

Culture is best defined as widely shared, deeply held beliefs about acceptable behavior.

In the best companies culture does not happen to a person but rather the person makes the culture.

Often culture can be modeled and spread through “difference makers” who exemplify the right behaviors regardless of their level. Culture spreads through a zone of influence vs a zone of control.

Increasingly cultures that work are more about belonging than autonomy and increasingly the best cultures focus on human principles vs management dictates.

A laundry list of tenets a culture does not make. The fewer and more focused goals and missions the stronger a culture.

3. Health-span vs Sick-span: Lifespan refers to the total duration from birth to death, while health-span is the period of general health within that lifespan, and sickspan is the period of intermittent or continuous morbidity and disability that typically follows the health-span.

The reason health care is broken is that most of the 5 trillion dollars of spending is spent in the sick-span versus extending health-span through prevention. For every year we reduce the US population from spending its time in sick span we would save 38 trillion dollars over the next decade.

The real breakthrough of AI will be in identifying ways to reduce Alzheimers by identifying what combinations of interventions such as are shingles vaccines, GLP-1 drugs, and others work as well as the discovery and scaling of personalized medicine.

A combination of AI-driven pharmaceuticals and bio-tech break throughs and physical AI where physical machines and LLMs and World Models fuse are making exponential advances that are likely to significantly increase both lifespan and health-span.

Courage. Compassion. Craftsmanship. Community. Curiosity. Key pillars at the SAP which resonate with those of The Athena Project. Each stand has a first edition book signed by luminaries like the Dalai Lama for Compassion or Nelson Mandela for Courage.

4. 2026 will be the year of the Fusion Workforce of Humans and Agents working together and the rise of LQ: Comprehensive research across scores of companies by some members of The Athena Project indicated that most CMOs expect that 25 percent of their workforce will be agentic in two years. Many leaders and companies are bifurcating into those leaning into the future and those justify resisting it.

Those embracing the new world are leveraging and addressing human and not just technological challenges. Today every leader is grappling with fear , working to ensure their own relevance and grapple with a speed of change which is impossible to keep up with.

Learning Quotient (LQ) or even Unlearning Quotient becomes a key mental attribute. The ability to upgrade one’s mental operating system while being willing to unlearn and give up old ways is the human challenge in leading in the AI Age.

Lifelong learning was a focus theme at The Athena Project Chicago Leadership Salon hosted by The University of Chicago Graham School in November which continued to resonate in Silicon Valley.

*View from the SAP Institute for Product and Engineering.*

5. Start Again/Reinvent: One of the most powerful examples shared at Athena was a story about the CEO of a software services company who ran an offsite asking their leaders to use some of the newest tools from Anthropic including the Claude 4.5 powered ClaudeCode and Cowork to replace their product! The results of what they achieved were so mind opening that the company is rethinking its entire product line and services.

Another rethinking we workshopped was the transition from search to an answer economy where deep trusted conversations are happening within the chatbots and conversations become the new interface. In such a world of new “zero-moment’s of truth” with agentic and integrated shopping every firms go to market approach needs to be reinvented from the ground up. Smart companies have begun questioning the value of both existing proprietary tools which they may have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and years in developing which now can be replicated for almost nothing in almost no time. Similarly given how personal and specific the information sharing is in real time between a chatbot and an individual, every company needs to evaluate who owns these interactions and if these do not just supplement but may overwhelm the value of first party data!

*A view from the SAP Institute of Product and Engineering*

6. Stakeholdering is a verb: Companies do not transform but people do. However it is people working together within an organization and across organizations that drive reinvention in these tectonic times. In a world of MCP’s ( Model Context Protocols and API’s ( Application Programming Interfaces) allow for machine to machine and agent to agent and other interactions a human based company will need alignment of goals, engendering of trust and a willingness to fail.

One of our leaders shared the big learning he received which was that he should spend much of his time not within his own marketing organization but with the financial, technology and product teams to better understand what they do. His belief is that modern leaders must build relationships and bridges in order to create organizational cultures where the silos of the past are eroded so cross-functional teams can collaborate, communicate and co-invent the future together.

Stakeholders should be replaced by the concept of Stakeholdering.

Thank you to V. R. Ferose and his incredible team at SAP who have designed the amazing space and were superb hosts that made the Athena Silicon Valley Salon a meaningful mind and heart opening experience.

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Strategic Reset: The 7 Interconnected Forces.

*Image by Ben Damiano for The Rethinking Work Platform*

Strategy is “future competitive advantage”.

As the contours of the future are being reshaped, every individual and firm should revisit their own strategy in light of seven interconnected forces.

These forces impact everything from affordability to politics to the future of work and to the outlook and challenges for every industry.

The Seven forces are AI, American Aspiration, Bio-Pharmaceuticals, China, Demographics, Energy and Immigration.

1. AI: Alien Intelligence (a far more apt name than Artificial Intelligence) in 2026 will surprise with its speed and impact on every job and every business. For those believing it will be a year or two before one sees the impact on the financial contours of business two developments this past week which were 1) the integration of Google Gemini into all parts of the Google eco-system and the integration of its open shopping protocol with Walmart, Shopify and others and 2) the launch of Claude Cowork quantum jumped the rate of change. AI is still under-hyped.

2. American Aspiration: Whether one likes it or not America along with China dominates the world. These two countries account for nearly half of global GDP and almost all of modern AI, Bio-Pharma, and Energy innovation in the world. The total GDP of the next 8 countries ( Germany, India, Japan, UK, France, Italy, Canada and Brazil) combined are that of the US and just over half of the US and China combined. America is now beginning to leverage its weight on its own behalf. And China is unstoppable. This reality is making the EU rethink its past assumptions and structures while creating new partnerships between all the other countries in the world looking to reduce their dependency on the two giants.

3. Unstoppable China: I have travelled to 23 cities in China and spent a lot of time with regional leaders who reinforced their belief that China would regain its place as the world’s most important country. They would do this by never repeating what they believed was the mistake of two hundred years ago when they fell behind in technology. China today in many areas has caught up with and is leapfrogging even American technological prowess.

The chart above shows their leadership in electric vehicles, solar and manufacturing.

Keep in mind that a large part of the future of AI is Physical AI which which will include robotics which needs manufacturing acumen and not just software wizardry. And manufacturing is a Chinese specialty.

China is no longer just a fast follower or copy cat innovator but now leads in many areas of primary and pioneering research.

From the Seoul Economic Daily last week:

Chinese universities are dominating the top ranks in global university rankings based on research output, a shift from the early 2000s when American institutions held all top 10 positions.

In the early 2000s (2006-2009), seven American universities ranked in the global top 10 according to Leiden University’s methodology, with Harvard University in first place. At that time, Zhejiang University was the only Chinese institution on the list, ranked 25th.

However, in the 2020-2023 compilation, Harvard fell to third place, losing the top spot to Zhejiang University. Notably, eight of the top 10 positions are now held by Chinese universities. Harvard is currently the only American university in the top 10. Zhejiang University is the alma mater of Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence company that has shocked the global tech industry.

Chinese pride is also making many Chinese forgo western brands for local brands which is creating havoc with many western companies including the automobile and cosmetic categories who placed all significant bets on China. Last year Luckin Coffee overtook Starbucks in China forcing it to spin off its business.

4. Energy: Energy has always been key factor in the economy of countries which was reflected most recently in the US and Venezuela encounter. India has been careful to stay neutral on Ukraine since it is an oil hungry country and needs to buy Russian oil at lower prices. The Saudis recognize that fossil fuels are not the future and are diversifying into tourism and technology to prepare for the future.

Energy is a key force that interlocks with other forces.

The chart above shows the interlocking of Energy, with the previous 3 forces of AI, American Aspiration and Unstoppable China.

A key input for all the data centers that will be critical to AI is going to be electricity. China today produces 32 percent of all global electricity and 2.5 times the electricity produced by the United States. This cheap electricity combined with open weighted models driving Deep Seek, Qwen and other other Chinese foundational models might provide a long term edge vs. US foundational models.

The drive for energy is increasing electricity prices in the US and creating backlash against the construction of huge data centers in many communities which in turn impacts politics in the US.

5. Bio-Pharmaceuticals: 20 percent of US households have used GLP-1 and now with the availability of availability in a pill form ( vs. injection) it is likely that in a few years up to half of all US households will be on GLP-1. In many ways the reduction in obesity due to the use of GLP-1 will have a positive impact on health care but also create new challenges and for the entire food industry, including fast food restaurants.

But GLP-1 is but one of many major breakthroughs and changes coming. Combine AI, Bio-Tech and modern Pharmaceuticals and we have the age of Bio-Pharma. It is important to remember that the Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Sir Demis Hassabis, and Google DeepMind Director, Dr. John Jumper were co-awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences.

While many of us maybe fixated on AI’s impact on helping us create better content and more impactful marketing, all of this is a side show to the great ambition of AI which are in the world of medicine where drug discovery and personalized medicine are being accelerated and in manufacturing via physical AI ie. Robotics including surgical robots.

6. Demographics: Something as old school as demographics can explain a lot of what is going on in any country. The above chart shows how older Americans are growing as a share of population and how they are now dominating wealth in the US. Those over 65 have doubled from 9.8 percent to 17.3 percent of the US population over the past five decades and now those 60 plus control 65% of all American wealth! They now have 47x the wealth of someone under 35 up from 10x five decades ago. If money speaks then it has the voice of older people. While many marketers and politicians focus on younger folks the money is with seasoned.

Breakthroughs in Bio-Pharma as well as Robotics driven by AI may postpone the great wealth transfer from Baby Boomers to millennials and GenZ as more people live into their 90’s and beyond. This is particularly true for wealthy people who have access to the very best medical care.

Their success in generating wealth explains why 66 percent of Baby Boomers believe in capitalism. On the other hand, only 22 percent of Gen-Z believe in capitalism as they find themselves struggling to get and keep jobs, buy property or pay off their education debts. Two thirds of GenZ who have a full time job have a side gig or side hustle to make money and maximize optionality. In many cases, they see their main job as venture capital money to fund their own business with 72 percent of GenZ wishing to work for themselves.

There are many demographic factors impacting the future,but globally the growth of older people and their wealth is one of two major factors. The other one is the impending decline in population in wealthy countries which is depicted below:

7. Immigration: Everywhere in the world immigration is a critical issue whether it comes to politics, availability of workers, prices of housing and much more. One chart that may provide a sense of the future of immigration is above.

In every advanced economy, population is set to decline. It takes 2.1 children per woman to keep the population the same in any country. Today South Korea, Japan and China are suffering significant population declines and are likely to have half their current populations thirty or so years from now.

All of Europe is well below replacement rate to keep the population the same. The range in Europe spans from a low of 1.1 children per woman in Malta to a high of 1.8 in France. The number for the EU overall is 1.4.

In the US there are 1.6 births per women which is well under the replacement rate and the only reason the population remains stable is because of immigrants and longer lives. The US is now set to becomes an aging and shrinking country without immigration. Today as Japan ages and shrinks it will increasingly need to depend on robotics to replace workers and care givers or be more open to immigrants. France is trying to increase the age for pension eligibility reflecting its aging and declining population combined with a back lash against immigrants. This challenge will accelerate with bio-pharma extending the age of people and the increased rise of nationalist parties.

Everything is Connected: These 7 forces and their interconnection should be front and center for every company and for every individual developing their future strategy. From politics to affordability to positioning careers to how power ebbs and flows can all be clarified by looking through the prism of these seven forces.

The Auto industry is impacted by American Aspiration in the form of tariffs, by Unstoppable China via reduced sales in China as BYD and other local companies dominate the market and now expand to Asia and Europe, by AI and Energy which changes the basic technology of cars.

Similarly Education is impacted by the personal tutoring made possible by AI, the loss of international students due to a clamp down in Immigration.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.” William Shakespeare.

The seven interlocking forces are the tides of change.

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Talent is the Key in an AI Age.

The most important component of long-term sustainable advantage for any firm –regardless of its size--is its ability to attract, retain, inspire, and grow talent.

Talent is the sustainable advantage.

It is talent and only talent that creates and/or preserves every other form of sustainable advantage whether it be innovation, new ideas or superior service.

If a Brand is experience it is employees who ideate, create, design, and deliver the experience.

If cost management is a key goal, then focusing on a fewer better paid and trained employees working at their full potential with minimum external monitoring, but maximum internal motivation is likely to yield lower costs than hiring the cheapest labor.

AI is a force multiplier and a form of leverage. It is a tool when placed in talented and trained hands can create exponential value compare to it being placed in less talented and trained hands.

Almost every company will end up with the same AI tools. Many will believe their secret sauce will be their first party data but in a world where decisions will be made by Agents and the depth of interaction with a chat interface reveals incredible insights and motivations in real time this may be less true and many companies first party proprietary information while important may not really be a key differentiator.

It will be well trained, highly motivated and well rewarded people.

Companies that focus on technology and technology partnerships alone, will find that without well trained and incentivized people the technology as well as data does little to provide a differentiating advantage. ( A reason a company like Google and many others succeed are that they have tech and data and amazing talent. Note Meta’s recent efforts on acquiring even more talent even after they have scaled data and tech.)

Julie Sweet of Accenture and recent studies from BCG, Mckinsey and others underline the reality that for every dollar of tech spending on AI , companies will have to spend multiples of that in training, upgrading and re-skilling talent to win.

Talent as advocates.

Today every individual is a media company if they wish to be. No longer do we just have access to multiple platforms for distribution but due to AI a plethora of new tools for creation. Potentially the most powerful influencers and media impact a company has is the aggregated power of the storytelling and reach of its talent.

Employee advocates attract other employees and are the best salespeople to convince potential customers.

So maybe instead of focusing on the next technology and media partnership we should focus on our people.

Talent Satisfaction.

In addition to Net Promoter Scores, ESG goals, ROI metrics we should better understand the people who drive the results we are monitoring.

Let us focus on the players rather than the equipment, the field, or the scoreboard.

Instead of monitoring the coming and goings of talent from the office and other forms of surveillance that makes people believe they are animals reporting into and out of cages we should measure employee satisfaction.

There are several ways to evaluate employee satisfaction from observed metrics such as average tenure, turn over, percent of offers accepted, the premium one has to offer to hire a person, to exit interviews, custom surveys, focus groups, town halls, and tracking comments on third party sites and more.

Regardless of how and what one measures what is key is that every manager up to the CEO recognize and be motivated so that a huge portion of their success and compensation is based on how they lead, nurture, and grow people.

Many studies of the best CEO’s show they tend to focus on three key areas which are strategy, capital allocation and people rather than operations, revenue generation, investor relations or customer management.

What Does Talent Want?

Regardless of industry, country or demographic group, research conducted for Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data and then Rethinking Work identified nine components that drive talent.

Three that attract people to a firm. Three that retain people in a firm. Three that allow people to thrive in a firm.

Three reasons people join a firm:

1. Money: People expect to be paid fairly.

2. Fame (Recognition): We all want to be recognized and feted for what we do even if it is to be acknowledged for a well completed project

3. Power (Autonomy): For some people this is authority but increasingly it is autonomy to be able to get a job done in ways and places that fit versus being monitored and micro-managed.

Three reasons people stay in a firm:

While money, fame and power are important in attracting people to a company many will stay with a firm even when offered more money, fame and power elsewhere because of purpose, values and connections.

1. Purpose: Talent cares about the purpose of the company and people ask about the purpose companies serve beyond making a profit.

2. Values: Over time employees stay with companies whose values they find resonate with theirs.

3. Connection: If someone feels connected to their manager, their clients, and their colleagues they are more likely to persevere through the ups and downs of a career.

Three reasons people thrive in a firm.

1. Freedom: Companies that recognize that they work for talent rather than talent works for them and approach talent as something they access versus own ensure that people have the flexibility and freedom to be who they are.

2. Identity: Great leaders and companies recognize that while work and their firm are part of the identity and story of their talent, they are just a part of far more complex and broader lives. Companies that operate with this insight are more likely to get people to feel a sense of belonging since they are seen as people and not replaceable widgets.

3. Growth: A career lasts for four or five decades in a world that is changing fast. Skill sets need to be continuously refreshed and kept relevant. Companies that focus on the future and constantly transform ensuring their growth will always be able to access talent since people care about ensuring they are growing and remaining relevant and will work at firms who allow them to grow skills that are valued outside the firm. By making talent highly attractive to the outside is the way to ensure continued access to them.

Talent plus Technology will allow companies to win and not just technology alone and definitely not threatening talent that they will be replaced by technology.

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On Rules and Rulers.

*Image by gemini to prompt ‘‘rules and rulers”*

We all have people who rule over our work lives and sometimes other part of our lives.

We have internal rulers we measure ourselves and others with.

We research for rules that make a good life.

Three thoughts to consider:

1. Not all rulers are leaders. Many leaders are not rulers.

True leaders tend to exhibit six key behaviors:

a) Competence: They have expertise and capability in their field.

b) Realism: They accept, acknowledge and deal with facts, hard data and the reality of situations.

c) Integrity: They engender trust. They are transparent in their dealings.

d) Empathy: They care about others including institutions and not just themselves.

e) Vulnerability: They acknowledge mistakes and surround themselves with expertise they can lean on or who can speak truth to them.

f) Inspiration: They realize people choose with their hearts and justify what they do with numbers. They move people to see beyond the challenges of today to a better tomorrow.

Leaders may not have titles, employees or zones of control but they are likely to have respect, followers and zones of influence.

Rulers often have leadership qualities but sometimes they do not.

Some come to rule not through the talent and disciplined behaviors of leadership, but primarily though some combination of power brokering, fear mongering, ignorance peddling, or inheritance.

If you strip away the trappings of power, the ability to punish, the pomp and circumstance of an office, an institution or a company from a person, can they continue to influence, motivate and make an impact?

Leaders often worry they are not good enough to the challenges at hand and so we build scaffolding teams around them and constantly work to improve.

Rulers tend to fear that they will lose power and often turn to intimidation to offset and distract from their internal hollowness which are chasms echoing with insecurity.

2. We all have different rulers with which we take measure of ourselves and others.

We all have different measures and definitions of success.

Money. Fame. Power. Family. Creativity. Expertise. Connections. Peace. Charity…

We evaluate ourselves and others according to these different benchmarks.

It is important to understand what drives us and what drives other people.

This allows for different people to find common areas of motivation and therefore co-operation.

Not understanding the internal rulers that we gauge and measure ourselves with, or other peoples’ benchmarks of success often leads to conflict.

As important is how we are to be measured by others.

Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago has stated if you understand someone’s incentives, you can do a pretty good job of predicting their behavior.

Three simple questions one should ask in order to enhance partnerships, relationships, teamwork and understanding of other people.

a) How do you define success?

b) How are you being measured/evaluated?

c) How can I help you succeed?

If you are a parent, you may be able to influence definitions of success. If you are a boss, you may be able to influence measurement and evaluation metrics. Everyone can help everyone else achieve their goals.

In most cases it is really difficult to convince people that their measures might be wrong.

You either align with, come to understand, accept or try to work with them.

Or help them come to some form of self-understanding and realization through stories and emotion. It is unlikely that facts or figures or demeaning and making fun of them will work.

3. Some “rules” for a good life that have stood the test of time and are worth considering:

In the end one realizes that all the advice on health, wealth, career, and life can be distilled down to a few “rules”:

a) Health: Sleep enough. Move more. Ingest in a balanced and moderate way.

b) Money: Spend less than you earn. Reduce expenses so you do not price yourself out of your dreams. Diversify assets. Invest for the long term by buying and holding and leveraging the power of compounding.

c) Career: Find mentors. Celebrate connections. Continuously learn. Be patient keeping in mind that one will have a multi-decade career. Align with technological trends.

d) Life: Understand that life brings with it loss. Be grateful. Be true to your word. Care more.

The challenge then is in the doing.

In the living the imagined life vs imagining what it might be.