Alive at Work Quotes

“This is the new war for talent—not wooing employees away from competitors, but unleashing the enthusiasm that is already there within employees, but dormant.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“When we personally understand and believe in the why of our actions, we have greater resilience and stamina when the going gets tough.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“Compared with all the other animals, humans are the ones doing all the change. When you look at our species’ behavior relative to the others, we’re the change animals. This seems to be the outcome when our seeking systems (which other mammals share) teams up with the prefrontal cortex (the new part of our brain that lets us simulate the future, which other mammals don’t share).9 Put these two parts of the brains together, and humans are biologically wired for innovation and change.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“when leaders are humble, show respect, and ask how they can help employees do their work better, the outcomes can be outstanding. And even more important than better company results, humble leaders get to act like better human beings. They get to treat other people as they would like their own family to be treated.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“PwC started with a small, wise intervention: take the standard fifteen-minute format for the weekly meeting and have managers start the meeting with a basic servant leadership question: “How can I help you deliver excellent service?”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“Remember what we learned about humble leadership: it is based on serving employees. Because management is an overhead cost, managers do not create value unless they are serving the employees who create the value.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“identify the key “moments that matter” for both customers and staff—key interactions that, if done well, have a disproportionate impact.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“Leader humility is an essential tool in the new war for talent. Employees bring more of themselves to work when their leaders place a priority on activating their seeking systems—by providing tangible and emotional support to them as they explore new ways to improve themselves and their environments.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“When an organization needs to adapt and adjust frequently, humility allows both leaders and followers to be more receptive to new ideas, criticism, or changes in the external environment. As one leader said, “Failure finds its grace in adjustment.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“during the Industrial Revolution, leadership got entangled with hierarchy—leaders were assigned power that was not earned. Humble leadership is more natural, because humble leaders help other people seek their potential, and experiment toward that potential. This is a gift that makes other people want to give back, and want to follow.6”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“humble, servant-oriented leadership improves performance at the individual, team, and organizational level.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“I would argue that “bureaucratic leadership,” with its reliance on certainty, decisiveness, and positional power, is detrimental because it ramps up people’s fear systems, shuts down positive emotions, and stifles the drive to experiment and learn. This so-called executive disease is common because power changes how leaders view other people—research shows that power causes people to see others as a means to their ends rather than as intelligent humans with ideas and emotions.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“humble leadership works not by demanding perfection, but its opposite—by showing that humans are never perfect and must explore, fail, and practice in order to learn and improve.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“As Jungkiu said, “I have found that people do not move much by KPIs and reward/penalty. These cause small changes. People move in larger ways by noble purpose, emotional connection, experimenting with new things, and leading by example.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“Jungkiu’s approach to branch visits is another example of a wise intervention, which we learned about in chapter 3: small but potent changes, like removing the anxiety around the branch visits and replacing it with serving breakfast and talking about new ideas, led to very large-scale changes, including a culture of ownership and innovation.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“The fundamental question I discussed with my executive team was whether the job of a business leader is the “emperor”—someone who rules above you—or the “facilitator”—a vision shaper and bottleneck remover. If we define ourselves as the former, the leader should keep the distance and retain mystique. If we define ourselves as the latter, the leader should be humble, close, and open.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“I suggest that Jungkiu’s new approach worked because it tamped down employees’ fear and encouraged ideation and self-expression, which activated their seeking systems.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“when leaders are trying to activate employees’ seeking systems with experimentation, being humble and trying to learn from employees is more effective than emphasizing hierarchy.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“As Gary Hamel once told me: “Show me what you can get done when you have no budget and no authority. That’s how you know you’re a leader.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“one of the cultural expectations of his job was to visit the branches as a “superior commander.” When the previous consumer banking heads made branch visits, they emphasized the organization’s hierarchy and their power. This put a lot of pressure on the branches, as staff would spend weeks anxiously preparing for the visit.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“Encouraging that many people to spend 20 percent of their time in discovery led to “too many arrows with not enough wood behind them,” as Google CEO Larry Page explained.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“remember the balance: freedom must be within the frame of what an organization needs to deliver.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“about a quarter of GameChanger’s ventures have found homes in a Shell operating unit or in one of the company’s various growth initiatives, while others have been carried forward as R&D projects.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“Any employee with a promising idea is invited to give a ten-minute pitch to the panel, followed by a fifteen-minute Q&A session. If members agree that the idea has potential, the employee returns for a second round of discussions with a broader group of company experts whose knowledge or support may be important to the success of the proposed venture. Ideas that get a green light often receive funding—on average $100,000, but sometimes as much as $600,000—within eight or ten days. Each project goes through a proof-of-concept review, in which the team must demonstrate that its plan is indeed workable in order to win further funding. This review typically marks the point at which the GameChanger panel helps successful ventures find a permanent home inside Shell.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“The Shell teams also were coached to bring their ideas to life using storytelling.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“The teams of Shell employees learned how to scope out the boundaries of their ideas, identify partnerships, determine the competitive advantage of their ideas, and calculate the financial implications. They were coached in developing hundred-day action plans, which formulated ways to learn fast—devising low-cost, low-risk ways of prototyping and testing their ideas in the marketplace.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“To accomplish this goal, they built an Action Lab, designed as an intensive five-day experience to help people develop their ideas into compelling venture plans for launching new businesses.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“So Warren scaled things up by creating a small panel of employees with the authority to allocate $20 million to rule-breaking, game-changing ideas. The new practice, called GameChanger, started with the assumption that ideas could come from anywhere across the company, and did not need to come from a certain department”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“Tim Warren, director of Research and Technical Services, set out to prompt innovation in the technical function of Shell’s exploration business. To trigger innovative new ideas, Tim tried to encourage employees to spend some their time working on “bootleg projects” and “nonlinear ideas” that are outside their normal job scope.”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

“one employee compared Shell to a maze of hundred-foot-high brick walls: access to capital is tightly controlled, investment hurdles are daunting, and radical ideas either die or move very slowly.6”
― Daniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do