Leaders give everyone an opportunity to do blue work, make decisions and contribute. Here’s David in Switzerland with more.
I’m at this gondola stop, called Schrekfeld and it’s above the Swiss town of Grindelwald. And one of the things that they have here in summertime are these mountain go karts. And you can take the mountain go kart, and you go that way, and you take it down the mountain.
Now the problem is, they’ve got to get these carts back up here, because no one wants to ride the cart up. They only ride them down. I’m gonna show you how that happens.
So basically, they use the gondola to frame the carts up. The cart comes up here, but they use that big robot, pull the cart off the gondola, set it on that little conveyor belt that takes it down. That’s red work. It’s production line work. Assembly line work.
Here’s the point. How hard is it to just hire a guy at minimum wage that pulls the cart off? But here in Switzerland, there’s the robot. It’s worth it to buy a robot for that. The point is all red work – the long-term value of all red work is zero. Because it’s going to be replaced by robots and if I can write a procedure for it, if I can write an algorithm for it, it’s gonna get replaced by something like that. Even something as one off as taking a cart off a gondola and sending it to down for use.
So give your people a chance to do blue work because if all they do is red work they know it, they know their long-term value of their job is going to be zero and they’re not going to be too happy. So give everyone a chance to do blue work. Give everyone a chance to make decisions. Give everyone the chance to contribute.
I’m David Marquet. That’s your Leadership Nudge.
