Competing in the New World of Work

How can you lead teams and organizations through nonstop change when the entire world seems to be shifting under your feet? In Competing in the New World of Work, Keith Ferrazzi, Kian Gohar, and Noel Weyrich argue that the key to surviving—and thriving—in our turbulent, post-pandemic world is to master what they call radical adaptability. This isn’t the same as ordinary flexibility. It’s a mindset and a set of practices that help you and your organization constantly anticipate change, evolve with it, and turn disruption into advantage.

Ferrazzi’s core claim is that the pandemic didn’t just expose outdated ways of working—it obliterated them. He describes how crisis revealed what organizations are capable of when bureaucracy collapses and collaboration accelerates. Like a global social experiment, COVID forced leaders to reinvent teamwork overnight. The lesson, he argues, is clear: we should never go back. Instead, we must go forward to work.

From Crisis to Transformation

The authors open with an intriguing metaphor: Burning Man, the desert festival where creativity and survival go hand in hand. Its community thrives through “radical self-expression” and “radical self-reliance.” Ferrazzi likens this to how teams adapted under the pressure of the pandemic—people collaborated across silos, showed vulnerability, and shared responsibility in extraordinary ways. The crisis, like Burning Man’s harsh desert, forged stronger connections and innovation. This became the crucible for developing radical adaptability as a leadership model.

To capture these lessons systematically, Ferrazzi launched the Go Forward to Work (GFTW) initiative, a global research project involving thousands of leaders and companies such as Dell, Salesforce, and EY. The goal was to identify what the best teams were doing differently. From this research emerged a sustainable framework for thriving in continuous disruption—a philosophy blending emotional intelligence, technological agility, and organizational foresight.

The Blueprint for the New World of Work

Radical adaptability rests on four core team competencies and three scaling practices:

• Collaborate through inclusion – Teams that leverage diverse voices—across geography, gender, background, and function—innovate dramatically faster.
• Lead through enterprise agility – Shifting from hierarchical control to self-organizing, customer-obsessed teams creates speed and flexibility.
• Promote team resilience – Sustainable performance comes from shared emotional health and mutual accountability.
• Develop active foresight – Seeing around corners lets teams anticipate the next shock instead of reacting when it hits.

Once mastered, teams can apply these skills to three enterprise-wide levers: future-proofing the business model, building a Lego block workforce that’s fluid and reconfigurable, and supercharging purpose so that employees rally around something larger than profits. Together, these seven chapters make up a continuous improvement loop of transformation—an infinite cycle of adaptability and growth.

Disasters Don’t Just Destroy — They Reveal

Throughout the book, Ferrazzi insists that crises are teachers. Just as the Great Chicago Fire gave rise to modern fire codes and the Kobe earthquake to Japan’s seismic design standards, the pandemic revealed obsolete workplace assumptions: the overdependence on physical offices, top-down decision hierarchies, and static job roles. In their place emerged networks of empowered teams, empathy-driven leadership, and digital-first collaboration. The old world valued efficiency; the new one values adaptability.

“Disasters don’t just destroy—they reveal.” This phrase encapsulates the authors’ thesis: every disruption exposes what no longer serves us and invites transformation. The question isn’t whether change will come—it’s how courageously we embrace it.

The Courage to Act Before the Wave Hits

The final story in the opening chapter, that of ten-year-old Tilly Smith recognizing the signs of a tsunami, illustrates one of Ferrazzi’s central lessons: knowledge isn’t enough—action takes courage. Like Tilly warning her family on a beach in Thailand, leaders must act decisively on foresight even when others don’t yet see the danger. Radical adaptability, therefore, is not passive resilience but proactive leadership fueled by conviction and humanity.

In the chapters that follow, Ferrazzi and his coauthors provide detailed, research-backed playbooks for applying radical adaptability in practice—from virtual collaboration to agile experimentation, mental well-being, scenario planning, and purpose-driven transformation. Put simply, this book is both a rallying cry and a toolkit for leaders who refuse to wait for the next crisis to remind them what they’re capable of.

Ferrazzi argues that inclusion isn’t just a moral imperative—it’s a performance multiplier. The pandemic proved this beyond doubt: remote teams that embraced diversity of voices, asynchronous communication, and decentralized decision-making became more innovative and productive than traditional office-bound counterparts. As he puts it, “Collaboration has nothing to do with where you work, but with how you show up.”

Co-Elevation: Going Beyond Cooperation

At the heart of inclusive collaboration is co-elevation—a deliberate practice of mutual accountability and growth. In co-elevating teams, members don’t just cooperate; they lift one another toward shared outcomes. Mike Dennison, CEO of Fox Factory, cemented this approach when the company’s divisions, strained by wildfires and disrupted supply chains, recontracted around collective responsibility. By inviting everyone to solve the question “How do we grow 30% above plan?” the company ended 2020 with record results. Their mantra: no one succeeds until everyone does.

Recontracting for Trust and Candor

Ferrazzi insists that high-trust teams don’t happen by accident—they must recontract. This process involves explicit agreement on behavioral norms: candor, empathy, peer-to-peer accountability, and conflict courage. Teams that rate themselves on “co-elevating statements,” such as honesty and mutual support, track measurable increases in collaboration and results. (Harvard’s Amy Edmondson calls this psychological safety.)

Virtual and hybrid work make recontracting even more vital. Without hallway check-ins, teams must be intentional about expressing care and giving feedback. Breakout rooms, small-group dialogues, and structured check-ins restore the intimacy digital work often lacks.

High-Return Practices for Inclusion

• Collaborative Problem-Solving (CPS): Replace report-out meetings with sessions focused on one critical question tackled in breakout rooms. The result: more voices, faster decisions, higher buy-in.
• Sweet and Sour Check-ins: Start meetings with a quick share of what’s going well and what’s not to build empathy and candor (a practice similar to Brené Brown’s vulnerability rituals).
• Asynchronous Collaboration: Tools like Mural and Slack let people contribute ideas anytime, ensuring introverts and global teams have equal voice.
• Breaking Silos through Teaming Out: Redefine “my team” to include everyone who can help achieve the mission—even those outside your department or company.

Teaming Out in Action

The insurance company Aflac modelled this when digital transformation stalled between sales and operations. Executive Virgil Miller united both groups through joint goals and peer coaching. By “serving, caring, and sharing,” teams developed shared AI tools that cut call volume by 40% and saved millions. This became a hallmark of inclusive innovation: solving systemic problems without waiting for top-down mandates.

Externally, companies like Dow and Unilever extended co-elevation beyond corporate walls. Dow’s digital pivot brought small-scale chemists into direct collaboration via virtual platforms, democratizing innovation. Unilever’s internal crowdsourcing program, “Every Voice Matters,” let thousands of employees shape post-pandemic growth priorities—elevating engagement and idea flow simultaneously.

Ferrazzi closes with a challenge: if your collaborations don’t feel like a joyful “barn raising,” you haven’t built a safe enough space for authentic inclusion. Inclusive collaboration, he reminds us, isn’t just about getting along—it’s about achieving what was once thought impossible, together.

After collaboration, Ferrazzi turns to agility—the operating system of sustainably innovative companies. The pandemic birthed what he calls “crisis agile”: fast, fearless improvisation under pressure. But real agility, he explains, can’t depend on emergencies. It’s a discipline—a way to make speed and experimentation part of your DNA.

Customer Value as the North Star

When Target’s physical stores needed to regulate customer flow during lockdowns, three cross-functional teams created a working app in just eight days. No executive approvals, no endless meetings—just clear focus on what customers valued: safety and convenience. Agile replaced linear planning with iteration and learning. Agile teams start small, pivot fast, and keep asking, “How can we create more value?”

Driving Decision-Making Downward

Agile collapses hierarchy. Leaders set the mission; teams choose the methods. Mariya Filipova at Anthem exemplified this when she built a secure “data sandbox” so health researchers could safely experiment with patient data. Her mantra: “Better approximate answers to the right questions than perfect answers to the wrong ones.” Empowering teams to experiment reduced bureaucracy and accelerated innovation.

Sprints, Stand-ups, and Peer Accountability

Ferrazzi describes how companies like 3M and Dell sustain agility through two-week sprints, daily stand-ups, and “bulletproofing sessions.” These meetings aren’t report-outs—they’re peer-driven troubleshooting and risk prevention. Self-managed teams decide priorities and hold one another accountable. The leader’s role shifts from director to guardian of flow.

Ferrazzi notes, “If you spend your day keeping everyone accountable, you’re not leading—you’re slowing the team down.”

Scaling Agility across the Enterprise

At Dell, agility operates even in the C-suite. The company plans through customer input, empowers autonomous teams, limits simultaneous initiatives, and updates strategies constantly—a model introduced in the authors’ partner book Doing Agile Right.

Agility, Ferrazzi concludes, isn’t chaos—it’s disciplined adaptability. It’s how leaders turn temporary wartime ingenuity into a permanent operating rhythm. When collaboration and agility converge, you get exponential speed—without burning people out.

Resilience, often miscast as rugged individualism, is recast here as a collective muscle. Team resilience, Ferrazzi writes, emerges from shared trust, candor, and compassion—psychological safety woven into performance routines. In the post-2020 workplace, mental and emotional energy are just as strategic as capital.

Diagnosing Team Energy

Using research with WW (Weight Watchers) and Headspace, Ferrazzi identifies behavioral indicators of resilience: candor, empathy, resourcefulness, humility, gratitude (“grati-osity”), and positive intent. When teams regularly assess themselves against these traits, they spot burnout before it spreads. Teams high in resilience bounce forward, not just back.

Practices for Building Collective Strength

• Commit as a team: Establish resilience as part of your team’s social contract. Support isn’t optional—it’s shared duty.
• Model vulnerability: Leaders should share personal challenges publicly; it gives others permission to do the same.
• Check personal “energy dials”: Simple emotional check-ins—“What’s your level today?”—help teams self-regulate.
• Enforce healthy rhythms: Encourage no-meeting hours, real vacations, and mindfulness breaks. Companies like Apple, The Home Depot, and Grey Horse Communications modeled this.

Cocreating Solutions, Not Programs

When Laura Chambers took over as CEO of Willow, she saw her exhausted remote team struggling with childcare and isolation. Instead of designing top-down HR initiatives, she crowdsourced ideas like “purple blocks” (protected personal time) and peer accountability groups. The result: higher morale and performance. Ferrazzi calls this co-elevating empathy—teams solving stressors together.

From WW’s wellness coaching circles to Headspace’s “Mind Days,” organizations are learning that resilience isn’t a wellness perk; it’s a business performance system. Teams that protect each other’s energy outperform those that merely manage output.

Ferrazzi’s charge is provocative: treat emotional well-being as infrastructure. The return on empathy, he argues, may well be the next great competitive advantage.

What separates reactive leaders from proactive ones? Ferrazzi calls it the foresight muscle—the ability to detect early signals of change and act before crisis hits. Through case studies from NASA-linked projects at Lockheed Martin, cybersecurity command rooms at Morgan Stanley, and hockey executives scenario-planning for empty arenas, the authors show how to “see around corners.”

Detect, Assess, Respond, Learn

The foresight process unfolds in four stages: detect signals (using a STEEP scan of sociological, technological, economic, environmental, and political factors), assess and prioritize them, respond with scenario plans, and foster continuous learning through simulations or “war games.”

Rick Ambrose of Lockheed Martin acted on early viral reports out of Asia in January 2020—weeks before U.S. lockdowns—pivoting production to PPE and remote operations. His lesson: waiting for certainty is the ultimate risk.

Scenario Planning that Builds Courage

At the San Jose Sharks hockey franchise, CEO Jonathan Becher led his team through thirty pandemic scenarios, from “no fans” to “suite-only games.” When the worst-case hit, they were ready—with digital fan engagement experiments on platforms like Twitch that drew millions. Scenarios, Ferrazzi explains, aren’t predictions but “practice for courage.”

The Learning Culture Loop

Foresight feeds learning, which fuels adaptability. The best organizations, like Morgan Stanley’s Fusion Resilience Center, treat risk analysis as a companywide sport, engaging employees at all levels in the “fight for risk intelligence.” In short, foresight democratizes strategy. (As Adam Grant adds, great cultures reward “rethinking” as much as performance.)

Ferrazzi’s point is simple but urgent: by the time most leaders react, the future’s already arrived. Radical adaptability requires making foresight everyone’s job—before the next tsunami wave rises.

To compete in constant upheaval, every organization must reinvent its business model before competitors force it to. Ferrazzi urges leaders to “zoom out” ten years to envision their industry’s evolution—and then “zoom in” on experiments that bring that vision to life this year.

Zooming Out: Seeing the Decade Ahead

General Motors’ 2021 commitment to phase out fossil-fueled cars by 2035 exemplifies zoom-out thinking. CEO Mary Barra reframed GM not as a carmaker but as a mobility company. Her question wasn’t “How do we sell more cars?” but “What business are we really in?” Such radical reframing echoes Theodore Levitt’s classic advice from “Marketing Myopia.”

Identifying Exponential Technologies

Companies like Domino’s and NOV show how digital transformation can rewrite cost structures and customer experiences. Domino’s robot deliveries and in-house data strategy kept it profitable as peers outsourced to apps. NOV turned industrial machinery into smart services through Internet of Things connectivity. Ferrazzi also previews frontier technologies—AI-as-a-service, quantum computing, blockchain, and the spatial web—that will reshape all industries by the 2030s. Leaders must experiment early to catch these exponential curves before they explode.

Zooming In: Experimenting Fast

“Zoom-in projects” are six- to twelve-month experiments testing your future in miniature. Sleep specialist Dr. Dan Rifkin, for example, built Ognomy, an app born from his vision of democratizing sleep diagnostics. When clinics shuttered during COVID, his agile team launched a working telemedicine platform in 30 days—turning disruption into opportunity. Each experiment, successful or not, refines the path toward your long-term vision.

Building Communities as Defensible Moats

Ultimately, Ferrazzi argues, what will protect your model isn’t technology but community. Organizations like Swipe Out Hunger and Make Your Mark grew stronger during crisis by rallying networks of mission-aligned participants. In decentralized markets (think Reddit’s WallStreetBets or Clubhouse), power belongs to engaged communities. The future belongs to companies that invite customers inside the tent.

Future-proofing means building organizations as living experiments—fluid enough to evolve faster than external change. “The next decade,” Ferrazzi warns, “won’t reward companies that adapt—it will reward those already built for adaptation.”

Ferrazzi’s metaphor of the “Lego Block Workforce” captures the new era of modular, reconfigurable talent. Work itself is being pixelated into tasks; teams are assembled and reassembled as needed, mixing employees, gig workers, algorithms, and AI. The question isn’t just who does the job but how, where, and through what kind of contract.

Reimagining What Work Needs Doing

Mariya Filipova, an innovation leader at a major health insurer, faced pandemic budget cuts and massive project backlogs. Her solution: break work into “jobs to be done” and build hybrid teams combining employees, crowds, and technology. This task-level thinking—what Ferrazzi calls pixelating—helps leaders see where automation, outsourcing, or reskilling create the most value.

Decision Dials for Designing Work

• Augmentation: Human or algorithmic?
• Employment: Traditional or gig?
• Ecosystem: Internal or external?
• Presence: In-person or remote?
• Location: Onshore or offshore?
• Environment: Open or closed?

By “tuning” these six dials, leaders can custom-build a workforce for speed, cost, creativity, and resilience. For instance, Wellmark Blue Cross augmented its internal tech teams with 150 global crowdworkers through TopCoder, creating a truly 24-hour innovation cycle without layoffs.

Executing the Workforce of the Future

Ferrazzi encourages leaders to test changes through Scalable Wins (SWINs)—small, real experiments that validate new models. As always, culture comes before structure: retraining, learning platforms, and performance reviews must evolve too. He cites Patagonia’s pandemic pivot, reskilling retail staff as online service reps, as a case study in purposeful agility.

The “Lego block” vision isn’t just about flexibility—it’s about human potential. When work is designed as modular, purposeful collaboration between people and machines, organizations become living systems that can endlessly reassemble for whatever the future demands.

Ferrazzi ends where true adaptability begins—with purpose. Purpose is the emotional engine that makes all the other practices stick. It connects strategy to meaning and turns change from a mandate into a movement. As the authors put it, “Purpose is the North Star that aligns every pivot.”

Purpose as Strategy, Not Slogan

Companies like Salesforce and Etsy respond to crises faster because they know why they exist. Salesforce’s immediate COVID response—helping governments build vaccine logistics—flowed from its value “to improve the state of the world.” Etsy’s mask-making campaign and $133 million windfall in April 2020 stemmed from its purpose: “to keep commerce human.” Purpose guided action long before financial incentives could.

Making Purpose Personal

Purpose isn’t delivered by HR memos; it’s lived by individuals. At Best Buy, then-CEO Hubert Joly led workshops inviting employees to define what it meant to be an “inspired friend.” Through shared stories of empathy and courage, employees found meaning in enriching customers’ lives through technology—a shift that turned a retail giant into a purpose-driven organism. (Joly later captured these insights in The Heart of Business.)

Purpose as an Engine of Innovation

Purpose also fuels experimentation. Discovery Health’s mission “to make people healthier” drove its Vitality program—an insurer that rewards wellness instead of illness. GM’s transition to electric vehicles (“Zero crashes, zero emissions”) and Equinor’s pivot from oil to renewables similarly show how future-proofing and purpose intertwine.

From Inspiration to Movement

To supercharge purpose, Ferrazzi suggests crowdsourcing its definition across employees, customers, and partners. When people own the “why,” they bring their energy and creativity to the “how.” Purpose, he reminds us, is the antidote to burnout—it energizes just as fear drains. That’s why companies like BlackRock now demand it from their portfolio firms: without purpose, there’s no long-term adaptability.

Ferrazzi’s final exhortation is deceptively simple: treat purpose as a system, not a statement. When leaders activate purpose through collaboration, agility, foresight, and empowerment, their organizations become—in his words—“radically adaptable organisms, alive to possibility.”