The best leaders realize that their people are wise, that they do not need to be coerced into alignment through yearly goal setting. These leaders strive instead to bring to life for their people the meaning and purpose of their work, the missions and contributions and methods that truly matter. These leaders know that in a team infused with such meaning, each person will be smart enough and driven enough to set goals voluntarily that manifest that meaning. It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent, not coerced. Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism.

Your company is a maximization machine—it wants to make the best use of its finite resources—so it is greatly interested in identifying precisely who to invest in, and how.

The problem with this stems from the way your company executes on these good intentions. Why, for example, does it assume that it will net a good return only from certain people? Surely, the cliché that “Our people are our greatest asset” applies to all of the people in the company. As we’ve seen, every human brain retains its ability to learn and grow throughout adulthood. For sure, each brain grows at a different speed and in a different way, but this implies only that each person learns differently, not that—categorically—some people do and some don’t. Therefore, the best course of action for any maximization machine worth its salt would be to figure out where and how each brain can grow the most, rather than zeroing in on only a select few brains and casting aside the others.

Whether you go to the concert or stay and work is really a small part of an effective decision. You might make the same choice with a number of other centers. But there are several important differences when you are coming from a principle-centered paradigm. First, you are not being acted upon by other people or circumstances. You are proactively choosing what you determine to be the best alternative. You make your decision consciously and knowledgeably. Second, you know your decision is most effective because it is based on

principles with predictable long-term results.

1.4. The Social Default

Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same result that everyone else gets. Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition they’re average.

If you don’t know enough about what you’re doing to make your own decisions, you probably should do what everyone is doing. If you want better-than-average results, though, you’ll have to think clearly and thinking clearly is thinking independently. Sometimes you have to break free of the social default and do something differently from those around you. Fair warning: it’s going to get uncomfortable.

Knowing how to use these tools depends on keeping your defaults in check so you can reason. If you can’t, you’ll just react with one of your defaults. While you might get the outcomes you desire for a while, it's only a matter of time before lack of thinking catches up to you. It’s only after you’ve mastered the defaults that the tools I describe become useful.

If you can’t keep those in check— if you’re easily swayed by emotion, if you can’t adapt to change, if you value being right more than doing what’s best— then all the tools in the world aren’t going to help you. The defaults will overwhelm you, rout your decision making-making process, and seize control of your life.