WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY “10x”
WE LIVE IN A 10x WORLD
Welcome to the era of 10x talent, where businesses and governments, large and small, are only as good as their very best players.
Today, the exceptionally talented matter more than ever—and they know it.
They have changed the game for all time.
With the rapid digitization of every conceivable product and service—in fact, virtually every human action and interaction—the environment has transformed so fast that nearly everyone you deal with has to be phenomenally gifted and ready and willing to work for you.
Turning back is not an option. The 10xers are at the wheel.
So, what do we mean, exactly, when we call someone a 10x talent?
First and foremost, in our experience, we’re referring to the world’s most sought-after programmers and coding artists, but the 10x concepts we cover in this book will resonate with anyone who cares about exponential self-improvement for themselves or their organization. To be 10x is to be more than great, to deliver more than ten times the expectations. A 10xer is equal parts high IQ and high EQ (emotional quotient; empathy, the ability to recognize and respond to the emotions of oneself and others). A 10xer is in a constant state of evolution and improvement, fueled by curiosity, ambition, and an insatiable desire to do more and do it better. A 10xer is there to tackle your thorniest problems, improve your strongest assets, and cut a path to success.
It’s important to note that 10xers come in all shapes, sizes, genders, races, nationalities, sexual orientations, and ages. (We opted to use binary gender pronouns throughout this book for simplicity, but anyone, no matter how they define themselves, can be 10x.)
Whatever your venture, you’re going to need as many 10xers as you can get.
The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.
—WILLIAM GIBSON, 2003
Over the coming decades, as machines replicate more and more physical and intellectual processes, the need for live humans to deliver exponentially beyond expectation is going to increase. It won’t be good enough to be good. Good will be easily replaced by algorithms and robots. You’re going to need to align with the truly outstanding and, for most of us, that will require a reinvention of mindset. If you’re not striving to become a game changer or your company isn’t upping its game, the automated future will pass you by.
That’s where this book comes in.
From where we stand, the 10x revolution is already well underway.
To even the most casual observer, it’s easy to see that traditional work roles are going, going, gone. Old, entrenched hierarchies, hiring practices, production modes, and managerial styles all face imminent extinction. True, 10xers in the tech sphere have been the first to create and embrace this radical paradigm shift, but the big changes are moving like a wildfire through every sector. The old model employee accepted the role of a cog in the machine. Today, 10x talent knows the machine can’t work without them, and this one switch fundamentally differentiates the old workplace from the new. Now 10x talent knows that it’s on you to get with their program.
Tech and digitization have disrupted the very foundation of all ventures, business, government, or otherwise and in so doing have handed over the controls to those who have the exceptional skills to provide efficiency and meaningful growth. The top six companies as measured by market cap are tech companies, and all of the four US companies that have reached trillion-dollar market caps are tech companies. Nine of the twenty richest people in the world today made their money in technology. And the rest of us, for better or worse, work in tech right alongside them. Whether you are a W2 (full-time or part-time employee) or a 1099 (freelance contractor), whatever your industry, whatever your field, you are now living under the early effects of this game-changing 10x revolution.
THE 10x DIFFERENCE
Excellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over again. You can hit a half-court shot once. That’s just the luck of the draw. If you consistently do it, that’s excellence.
—JAY-Z, 2011
Game Changer is about the dual impact that technology and the people who create it are having on the way companies and governments must approach their greatest asset, their talent. Together, we will uncover the secrets behind 10x performance in any industry, because the ability to attract, hire, and retain 10x talent is a game changer for any company, large or small.
In fact, 10x performance is what you require just to stay in the game.
How literally do we mean that? Here’s a real story from the front lines, more typical than you’d imagine.
We were approached last year by a successful, tech-based, nonprofit founder. Let’s call her Nicole. She had a technical background, but had long since moved out of that role. Nicole knew we managed the kind of top-level coders who could rebuild her company’s product. Since 2011, we’ve built a reputation for finding, vetting, and matching the finest contract tech talent with companies large and small, everyone from Verizon, eBay, BMW, and Amex to MIT, Vice, and even the federal government.
Nicole confided in us: She knew her thirty-six-member team was simply not delivering the way she needed. We told her we had just the right 10xer for the job and showed her the one person we thought was best suited to lead the project, as well as a couple more developers who could provide the speed and capacity required to turn the company around with finesse.
Nicole liked what she saw—she told us to sit tight for a couple weeks and to not mention our conversation to anyone.
Two weeks later, Nicole returned to our office with the news that she had let go of no less than thirty-three of her thirty-six-person team. More than 90 percent. She was sorry to lay off that many fine workers and was quick to mention that they were well taken care of, but there was no way around this one simple fact: Our three recommended 10xers could deliver a better, stronger, more sustainable product than thirty-three or even a hundred engineers who were just “very good.”
This is only one story among hundreds, but it neatly demonstrates the true power of 10x in a concrete fashion. Within six months, Nicole’s platform was rebuilt with modern everything, as fast at processing transactions as Amazon.com and loaded with new and long-desired features, and Nicole had a new, robust wave of growth on her hands.
Lesson One: In the new talent economy, everybody you deal with better be 10x, or at least striving to be.
EMBRACE 10x OR GET LEFT BEHIND
The game has already changed, but not everyone has acclimated with the same speed or grace. As obvious as the basic fact of the 10x revolution is for us, it has been harder for some to internalize, especially those people working with older, larger entities mired in outmoded policies, bureaucracy, and stagnating cultural standards.
Another true story—the names have been changed but nobody’s innocent.
Picture two companies—make that two desperate companies: an education start-up and a mid-sized pharmaceutical outfit. They both urgently needed a truly gifted coder to step in and rethink the complex technical elements of their businesses from the ground up, so they reached out to us. After some consideration, we brought forward Jake, one of our very best clients.
Jake was a seasoned developer who exemplified the concept of 10x, delivering value way beyond promises on a regular basis. He knew what he wanted, and it wasn’t a full-time W2 job. Jake wanted to work remotely 70 percent of the time. He wanted to give input on the big decisions regarding every build, and he wanted the kind of hourly rate he had become accustomed to as a company-saving, top-shelf programmer. Most of all, Jake knew he was in demand. Every week, we received inquiries for him.
The pharma company, with offices worldwide, balked at Jake’s requests. Why couldn’t he just be grateful for a real job offer from a solid firm? Why wasn’t he overjoyed to take his assigned role in the chain of command? The hiring powers could not understand what Jake was after and, when pressed, they weren’t prepared to give him what he wanted. It’s a core frustration we deal with on a weekly basis—not everybody gets it.
During the negotiation for Jake’s contract, we made our best efforts to convince them of the value Jake would bring to the table, but they simply refused to break with their entrenched employment ideas. In a painful act of self-sabotage, they utterly failed to realize that we are living through a giant sociocultural shift, where the talent has the leverage.
We had better luck convincing the education start-up about Jake. They took him on and accepted his terms because they were on his wavelength; they grasped Jake’s cultural orientation and lifestyle choices. They knew he was a true 10xer, which means they understood what kind of growth Jake could bring them.
Today, the pharma firm in question seems to be in a downward spiral—the last of their prior sheen has all but disappeared. Meanwhile, the ed tech start-up that hired Jake has become a market leader in their field. Jake is still one of their regular on-again/off-again consultants, and they know their big, company-wide advances are directly related to the rare level of excellence he and other 10xers like him can provide.
What the losing company had to learn the hard way was this: To attract, motivate, and retain talent in the new workplace, a deeper understanding of the game-changing 10x revolution is now essential.
THE NEED FOR 10x-LEVEL MANAGEMENT
It should be obvious that the world is now tech-dominated, and that puts 10x talent in the driver’s seat. What has not yet been absorbed by the powers that be is this: Where there is 10x talent, there is a growing need for a new style of 10x-level management.
Game Changer aims to help redefine the very concepts of talent and management for our new 10x-run world. Through tales from the trenches, we’ll explore how the relationship between talent and its proper management is a symbiotic force that can exponentially ensure the greatest chances for sustainable success for all ventures, large and small, public and private. As we will demonstrate, 10x-level management comes in many forms, but it always brings a separate, seasoned point of view, and the ability to see around corners, delivering a critical advantage in an increasingly volatile marketplace. 10x-level management also knows how to spot the instinct for success or sabotage in all prospective clients.
In Game Changer, we’ll explore a variety of reasons the interplay between talent and management is vital to all of today’s workers, no matter their field. Wherever and however you earn your daily bread, office or remote, full-time or part-time, you can frame your job as talent. But in order to become a 10x talent, you must understand how and why strong managerial guidance is essential.
Perhaps the best argument for a rethink of the talent-management relationship is the most obvious one: In your life, you will likely spend an estimated 40 percent of your precious time at work. For better or worse, the talent-management relationship is now one of your closest personal relationships, and it has the power to affect your life as deeply as any other.
OUR STORY
Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.
—JOHN WOODEN, 1972
Why listen to us? Our breadth of talent management experience grew from a very unusual set of circumstances that nobody could have planned.
In the beginning, we were managers within the music business in the classic mode, and we were quite successful. Our clients included John Mayer, Vanessa Carlton, and other heralded artists. They had hit records, did international tours, won Grammys, and achieved everything a music artist can dream of. We had achieved our dreams, too. Then, without warning, the music industry imploded.
It was not lost on us that technology was the force wreaking havoc on our world.
We knew we had to change to thrive, and so we applied our talent management expertise to the tech world, tentatively at first. The results were spectacular, sometimes mind-boggling, and consistently educational. In the first five years, we managed everyone from Google/Apple/Facebook alums to Ivy Leaguers with multiple advanced degrees and veterans of every tech company at the highest level.
It’s important to point out that neither of us had a lick of programming experience ourselves. In fact, you probably couldn’t have picked two less tech-ready interlopers. We were city kids—byproducts of the hustle-mad New York City of the 1970s. Our paths first crossed at a small Jewish day school in Manhattan. And like many young boys of our generation, we were wildly passionate about music—reading all the liner notes on the LPs, knowing every credit, getting the story behind the story. We went our separate ways after eighth grade—Rishon to the Westside, Michael to the Eastside—but the friendship remained strong through high school. We saw something in each other—the willingness to dream big.
Early on, we both got to view the entertainment business from different angles. Rishon had a close family friend, Dave Hahn, who managed the punk group the Bad Brains. Michael dated Kristen Carr, whose mother Barbara was Bruce Springsteen’s co-manager and whose stepfather Dave Marsh is a noted rock critic, historian, and now radio personality. Neither of us knew what we wanted to do exactly, but we knew this: We both had a crazy hunger to build something, to be in the center of things, to make it happen.
We jumped at every imaginable endeavor, legal and illegal—everything from the proverbial lemonade stand to fake ID businesses to promoting keg parties in high school. We plotted and schemed, learned the angles: We’d find guys in the city to rent a loft, then we’d strike a deal with the beer distributor and promote the party around to all the private schools and charge to get in—five bucks, ten bucks, whatever the traffic would allow. Some of our early partners in crime have gone on to become successful club owners and restaurateurs.
With each new success or flop, every dicey new endeavor, our hunger grew. We started a T-shirt business, printing them up and distributing them through the NYU dorms. Then, the movie The Color of Money came out and we thought, Why not start our own pool hall? We raised four hundred grand and scouted a dozen locations—we even considered the notorious, defunct sex club Plato’s Retreat in the basement of the Ansonia. The deal fell through—a blessing in disguise—but we kept rolling. Rishon left the city to go to Wharton, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania, and ended up running the concert committee there for three years. Michael went to the University of Connecticut and Baruch College, where he became president of the American Marketing Association. But for both of us, college was the backup plan. We wanted to be where the action was.
In particular, Michael’s experiences watching and working with Bruce Springsteen’s management team opened our minds to the power of talent management, all that it can be. The relationship between Bruce and his managers had been going strong for almost two decades when we came along. It was a well-oiled machine. The lifestyles of all involved—not just Bruce and the musicians and the managers but the crew and everyone else—were like nothing we’d ever seen anywhere. It wasn’t just about the money, the power, the privilege, the comforts of affluence. It was about the family sense—the deep mutual respect and gratitude. These were people who were incredibly articulate and not afraid to challenge and help one another. Bruce and his team weren’t Us Against the World. They were Us With the World.
What we didn’t know at the time was that we were beginning our real education in the power of 10x. You might even say Bruce was the first 10xer we saw up close. And the lessons we learned would prove invaluable when we dared to enter the tech landscape.
PLAY FOR KEEPS
In Game Changer, we’ll juxtapose the worlds of entertainment, tech, megacorporations, start-ups, nonprofits, government, and high finance to reveal how trends are spreading across industries and professions. We’ll deliver durable skills and perspectives that anyone who touches the talent economy can apply. And we’ll bring firsthand testimony from some real-life Game Changers, everyone from start-up mavens and top show-biz players to blockchain experts, Silicon Valley swashbucklers, and others to whom we’ve had access from our unique vantage point as tech talent managers.
Our core discoveries may surprise you. Here are just a few in shorthand:
With automation eating up more and more jobs that involve predictable repetition, the new workplace is not a place at all, but a state of workflow that requires far greater flexibility for all parties involved, including openness to third party feedback, group efforts, greater horizontality, greater freedom for the 10xer, and openness to differing generational attitudes.
In the new and utterly revamped work world, tech 10xers control the heart and soul of all businesses, governments, and ventures of every stripe. Don’t underestimate their influence.
Great talent becomes 10x when it develops the quality of manageability—the ability to seek out and internalize powerful outside guidance, built on an insatiable desire for growth and improvement.
10x managers understand that all talents live on a continuum between Success and Sabotage Impulses—the internal tendency to make positive choices that steer them toward their goals at one end and a denial-based cycle that inadvertently destroys chances for success at the other. The 10x manager knows how to identify the strains and act accordingly.
10x managers must also provide two kinds of Super Vision—Inner Vision, the ability to catch and expose a talent’s blind spots and develop strategies to overcome them, and Future Vision, the ability to help talent see around corners.
Not only do all key members of the team need to be 10x and perceive themselves as talents, key members need to also learn how to become strong talent managers themselves, through active practice.
This makes for a Double-Hat World, where talent and management roles switch depending on setting and situation. To cite one simple example, consider a lean start-up where one moment a CTO is writing code and, the next, is managing the team. That flexibility shapes the new world.
Becoming adept at wearing both hats is the surest shot at success in this volatile new work terrain.
Most of all, the talent-management axis requires high EQ, empathy, and the ability to always work with all aspects of a talent’s life and personality. These strengths always mattered—today, they are nonnegotiable.
This book is divided into two main sections. In the first half, we approach things from the manager’s side, exploring all the ways you can attract, develop, and keep 10x talent and make your company itself more 10x. In the second half, we see things from the talent’s POV and show how the roles of manager and talent are inextricably linked.
Most important, every step of the way, there are stories and lessons about how you can become 10x yourself. Whether you’re a mid- to high-level manager, a CEO, entrepreneur, or a secondary audience of those talents seeking work in the diverse terrain of the modern office, this book will bring you a fresh way of seeing things, as well as practical strategies for success. We have lessons for readers on the tech frontier, but also for anyone interested in the future of work and the nature of success. We have useful advice for those seeking to improve their own path, as well as for those currently involved with STEM both domestically and abroad. On the larger scale, our lessons can help to provide a roadmap for companies, nonprofits, and governments around the globe who want to understand what tactics are required to employ and retain 10xers. And for the individual, we aim to expose aspiring 10xers to the many nuances they’ll need to master in order to thrive in an increasingly unfamiliar working world.
Wherever you stand, the game has changed. If you want to be competitive as an entity or as an individual, read on.