The game to learn and never play
James Clear, the bestselling author of Atomic Habits, has remarked about how ill-fated advice is. His reason: it’s often tethered to the specific circumstances of the given moment, and when cast from one experience to the next, the advice rarely holds. Maybe. But then there is also a lot of advice that really is helpful. Tossing it all out as unfitting would mean discarding troves of golden nuggets from people who have traveled before you.
When advice is given (and taken) in the abstract, it can stay with you forever: portable, applicable, adaptable. So when I heard Adam Grant ask the great Indra Nooyi what advice she would share from her tremendous career, I was all ears.
Nooyi is an Indian immigrant woman with a sterling educational pedigree and decades of success in the corporate world. She joined PepsiCo in the 1990s and worked her way up through the ranks to eventually serve as CEO for over a decade. She stepped down in 2018, wrote a brilliant memoir, and turned her focus to her personal moonshot, “to build a world where it is easier to mix our work and home lives.”
It’s now been months since I listened to that podcast, and I’ve had occasion to carry, apply, and adapt each of Nooyi's five nuggets of wisdom in different ways. But one of them, in my opinion, deserves some special attention. Maybe because it’s among the most difficult pieces of advice to follow.
“Every company is political,” Nooyi said. “Understand the politics. Do not play in the politics . . . [it] is a death knell.”
Every. Company. So that includes yours.
Often, individual success hinges on the delicate skill of correctly reading an organization. It is a very rare bird who can deliver so much technical expertise – brilliant legal strategy; spectacular code; impossibly sticky copy – that understanding office politics becomes moot. Simple as that. The decision-making processes, the hierarchies and structures, the ways in which information flows up and down, to whom and for whom, even the overall vibe of the place, the tones people set. It’s all baked into the politics.
But reading an organization is largely developing the talent for reading the people around you—building awareness of who they are and what’s at issue for them. This skill is so critical to success (and survival!) that two British researchers, Simon Baddeley and Kim James, created animal characters based on research rendering the most common office archetypes:
There’s the sly fox: the charming, self-centered sort who attaches to whoever’s in charge, and whose insecurities (though you’d be hard-pressed to see them on the surface) make them eager to exploit other people’s weaknesses.
There’s the innocent sheep: a wide-eyed, rule-following, principled-yet-overworked naïf who too often defers self-advocacy to a hope that whoever’s currently in charge will serve as the necessary champion.
There’s the stubborn donkey: one who sees everything in black and white, inept, sometimes unpopular, often conspiring with the powerless.
Finally there’s the wise owl: emotionally sophisticated, creative, imaginative, excellent at listening and soliciting other people’s takes on things, who prefers win-win situations to ones where somebody loses, who shares information widely and is known for being ethical. The one who truly believes that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and acts accordingly.
Over the years, in dozens of workshops, I’ve cited their research and shared their animal characters. What I find completely fascinating is that people almost never feel boxed in by these archetypes. They don’t feel the need to resist or question the categories, or create new mythical characters (“Really I’m half owl, half sheep.”) Instead, people have been comfortable owning the fluid nature of these roles (“In situation X, I was a sheep for sure! But then in situation Y, I was an owl.”), realizing that in each interaction, each circumstance, they had an opportunity to choose.
So here's my advice add-on to Indra Nooyi’s wisdom: recognize that every time you walk into a room (Zoom or otherwise), you’re showing up as one of these animals. Which role you adopt is yours for the taking.
Understanding the politics without playing the politics—that is, knowing they exist but staying away from the water-cooler—is really a matter of building awareness. You get better at recognizing the ways in which you move through the world, how you show up, how you’re perceived to be showing up, and how everyone else is showing up too, all at the same time. It can start to feel like a game of chess. But sitting down to play is exactly what Nooyi cautions against. Instead of playing a game, challenge yourself to be the owl. Maybe you’ll end up as wise as Nooyi.
What golden nuggets of advice have stuck with you?