WORK R E IN V E N T E D What’s stopping us from doing the best work of our lives? The author of “Brave New Work” has the answer Interview by Meghan French Dunbar
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aron Dignan is the founder of The Ready, an organization design and transformation firm that helps companies like Johnson & Johnson, Charles Schwab, and Airbnb break free of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and a compliance mindset and create cultures built on autonomy, trust, and transparency. We recently picked Dignan’s brain about his new book “Brave New Work,” which outlines a new way of thinking about people and organizations — one that trades the illusion of control for something far better: a more adaptive and human way of working. What is your own personal story of coming to realize that the way that we work isn’t working? Aaron Dignan: Earlier in my career, I worked with really large companies like American Express, GE, PepsiCo, and the Gates Foundation, helping them think about digital change, how it might affect them, and how they could take advantage of it. We got a front-row seat inside really large — and in many cases really old — businesses. What we found was a lot of frustration; people who were stuck in an elaborate set of policies, procedures, practices, and norms that were getting in the way. There was a lot of trapped capacity and trapped human potential.
CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE
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Q3 / SUMMER 2019
59
