Well, we can't leave this topic of the master-apprentice relationship and what it means without talking about something that superboss leaders consistently did. That is less so about how they work directly with people, develop people and more so about how they tried to change the environment in the context to get rid of unnecessary stuff that slows them at development process. I call this bureaucracy busting. One of the things we learned during the COVID era is how many organizations and managers move so much faster than they ever did before. Take, for example, telemedicine, you know how many companies and national health services say the NHS in the UK had been debating and commissioning white papers and analyzing the idea of telemedicine and they resisted, it was always very small. Then with COVID, all of a sudden people are working from home, people are not able to go in to see their doctors, and telemedicine starts to take off. Including in the UK where the NHS, who again had been talking about it really for years, in the space of a couple of weeks, started to implement all those plans. The speed was amazing. I also talked to the CEO of Allagash beer. Allagash beer is a small craft beer that's in the state of Maine, are headquartered in the state of Maine in the US. Rob Tod is named the CEO and he told me if you're in the beer business and COVID hits, that's a problem because the bar is closed right away and your revenue is going down. What they did is they got to work on their long-term plans. They had a three-year program to develop new brands, to do new marketing campaigns, to do some rebranding as well. They just greatly accelerate that process and within three months they had done maybe two-thirds of what that three-year project was about. It was incredible, the pace and the speed that they went after. Once COVID started to go into the background, many companies, unfortunately, went back to the usual slow-motion way of doing business, the way they've always done business. It was such a way, not everyone. Some companies kept it going. Allagash beer is a good example. There are others as well but so many. COVID was a forced experiment for a lot of things, many of which were extremely difficult. But when it comes to work, we learned that we could do a lot more, a lot faster than before when we were forced to do it, and keeping that ethos that mindset is essential. Even though the world is different today, the same logic of speed and plowing through bureaucratic barriers still holds. Look around your workplace, do leaders enjoy special parking spots, cafeterias, bathrooms, offices, and the like? Why do many bosses and senior executives, in particular, think of executive packs as reward leaders enjoy for making it to the top. To most superboss leaders, the usual packs and distinctions and hierarchies are just not that meaningful. In fact, they're counterproductive. Superbosses are so focused on engaging with their people that they disdain anything that might create physical or emotional distance. They want person-to-person involvement. They want something that enables everyone to make stuff happens. If all it takes to connect with the superboss is a quick phone call or a knock on the door that's because there's been a disregard of hierarchy and it's not tolerated. It's in fact explicitly discouraged and that's one of the main things that superboss leaders do. Let me tell you a great story. I haven't said much about Robert Noyce another superboss but really it's a fascinating story and legendary person. Robert Noyce is one of the founders of Intel. It gives you an idea. He was the creator of the integrated circuit. He influenced so many tech entrepreneurs. He actually became known as the Mayor of Silicon Valley. The company he helped found before Intel was Fairchild Semiconductor, which in fact spawned a family tree of literally hundreds of companies, including Raytheon semiconductor, Kleiner Perkins, the giant venture capital firm, Advanced Micro Devices, and of course Intel itself. Charlie Sporck, who was Fairchild's manufacturing guru. He later became CEO of National Semiconductor. He said it well, ''It's no overstatement to say that Bob Noyce made what Silicon Valley is today.'' That's something. At Fairchild, Noyce became known for his West Coast management style. Not to be confused with Bill Walsh's West Coast offense in football. But it was much freer, it was more egalitarian than the formal, hierarchical East Coast way of running a company. The West Coast style has since become associated with any number of hugely successful Silicon Valley companies. It suggests that although superbosses influence their industry by unleashing courts of superstar individuals, their impact is far greater. The Silicon Valley culture lends itself so much to Bob Noyce and what he was trying to accomplish. Noyce dispense with hierarchy because to him, it's just didn't make sense for an entrepreneurial business. Just over 30 years old at the time, he was young, Noyce was in fact, one of the oldest people at Fairchild. He hired engineers fresh out of college and graduate school because experience people didn't really exist in that business at that time, which actually sounds a little bit familiar to some of today's Silicon Valley. The transistor, which is what the main technology was, it was too recent technology. Noyce got new employees acquainted with Fairchild by really throwing them headlong into the heart of R&D of research and development and he expected them to learn the job side-by-side with him in this intense. It wasn't privilege or seniority that define the culture. It was intensity, it was capability, it was a meritocracy. On a more basic level, the trappings of titles and distinctions, it really was something Noyce couldn't stand. It just wasn't what he was about. I talked to Gordon Moore, another legendary name. Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Fairchild and Intel. He was a legend in his own right to be sure. He told me a story about when the CEO of Fairchild's parent company came out to California to check on Fairchild Semiconductor. He arrived in a limousine driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Bob Noyce was shocked at what appeared to him to be completely unreasonable indulgence. How could the CEO enjoy himself all day long while the driver, the chauffeur, had to sit in the car for the entire time really doing nothing? It just didn't make any sense. As Gordon Moore told me, Bob Noyce, he just could not imagine somebody sitting around all day long doing nothing. When starting at Intel with Moore, Noyce made a point to again create a flat structure, banishing bureaucracy. There are no executive suites or special parking spaces. Stock options were standard for most office workers and for all the engineers, which is something we see today in Silicon Valley as well. Intel's workspace consisted of a really large room divided into individual low partitions. Everyone including Noyce and Moore could see others. They worked under these conditions. They didn't want any employee to feel that anything stood in his or her way of advancing. At least while Intel was still small, every employee had direct access to Bob Noyce and to Gordon Moore. Under this model, all questions could be asked, all ideas could be voiced. Staff meetings were not the domain of just a few select managers, all employees could attend and share their thoughts if the topic was relevant for them. It's pretty amazing what could be done if you want to take on bureaucracy and formality in your team in your organization. Now with so many people working from home or hybrid, there really aren't any excuses left for retaining the traditional and formal vestiges of power other than someone loving that power for themselves in some superficial way. Look at what Superboss have done, I mean, there are so many example, I'll just give you a couple more. Michael Miles, the former CEO of Kraft, he declared one day that all parking would be on a first come first serve basis with no special treatment for executives. The net result was he parked in the distant lot like everybody else and he took the shuttle bus and he ended up talking to rank and file employees on the bus as they came to the office. Of course, he loved that and he learned a lot and it broke the barriers down. British CEO, Archie Norman, who was the CEO of the supermarket chain Asda, A-S-D-A. He made a whole bunch of changes. Meetings were held standing up, name badges with titles were removed, letters to the CEO from the rank and file, anyone was encouraged. Actually, Archie Norman received amazingly 40,000 letters in the first three and half years that he instituted this policy. Store visits from executives that used to be about ceremony and I think about ribbon cutting and big entourage, totally recast as learning opportunities. You went to the store to learn, not to cut some ribbon that you're opening up a store. There are many more such examples but you get the picture. In an era when people are working from home or in a hybrid situations more than ever before, perhaps the biggest dose of informality one can imagine is, being on a Zoom call with someone and you see family pictures behind them, which is what you see when you're on a Zoom call with me. The idea that we can break down bureaucratic barriers, unnecessary status differentials, and other forms of right and ceremony, I mean, what do they do? They only serve to separate people into classes. It should not be seen as a radical idea. It should be exactly the way organizations work. If you haven't done this, if you haven't gone down that path, you really have to start questioning this. You have to start seeing what are you going to do about this. This brings us to the end of module 3, which is all about the master and the apprentice. It is the way that Superboss leaders develop people around them. It is the way people behave and interact to help each other get better and help people in their team get better. We talked about delegation and that hands on delegation. We talked about the importance of teaching and how leaders really are great teachers. We talked about customizing. How you work with each person on your team and you think about what will make them tick, what will be the best for them, and what do they want in their careers. We talked about opportunity generating and how Superboss leaders are always looking for those great opportunities for people. Opportunities that instill the sense of confidence. Of course, I've now been talking about bureaucracy busting where you're just clearing out of the way whatever you possibly can so that people can do their jobs and do it at a high level and learn and feel like they're really part of something special. Module 3 is an important module because every single thing that I've just been sharing with you are things you can do if you want to. I hope you got some good practice from the application exercises and you've got a much better sense of how to develop the people around you. On to module 4.
