Ben Guttmann
This spring, my wife and I made a trip to Copenhagen. It’s a gorgeous city, and I highly recommend visiting. However, the destination’s most famous tourist attraction, a bronze statue of the Little Mermaid, is a bit of a tourist trap.
I mean trap literally. It’s hard to get to. Between the downtown and this diminutive statue lies Kastellet, Danish for “The Citadel,” a pristinely preserved fortress that once guarded the city. Now it’s a park, but it still features the same walls, moats, and ramparts that made it an imposing fortification centuries ago – and a schlep to get around today.
This type of defense infrastructure is what military strategists call a “force multiplier.” A force multiplier is a way to achieve leverage, a tool that empowers people to do things that they couldn’t do without. It’s a factor that is said to increase a military’s ability by multiples. An impenetrable fortress, like the Kastellet, is a force multiplier, allowing a small defensive force to repel armies of attackers. Air support is a force multiplier. GPS is a force multiplier. Force multipliers make you stronger than the sum of your parts.
It’s cliche to use military analogies in business. (We get it, you own a copy of Sun Tzu.) But I do believe there’s a version of this concept that we can all apply to our own work.
I’ve seen these factors at play in both the professional world and the classroom. I’ve personally benefited from them countless times. Here are the four force multipliers in professional life: writing, speaking, networking, and design.
I’m biased. I just wrote a book, and I’m writing this article now. The power of writing to organize your thoughts and to share them with the world is very present in my mind.
But for good reason! If you can write a clear and muscular email, you can boost your profile and rally your team. If you can write a compelling proposal, you’ll win more business. If you can write punchy ad copy, you’ll sell more stuff.
And if you write articles or blogs, white papers or books, you can immediately rise to the position of expert. You wrote about the thing, so therefore you are the guy that knows the thing. It's true in perception, but it's also true in reality: Because we never do anything alone, by being really good at writing stuff down and sharing it, you’re inherently better at whatever it is you do.
So many people hate public speaking. Fear of getting up in front of a crowd is such a cliche that it’s the butt of one of Jerry Seinfeld’s most famous bits:
“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
Because most people don’t want to do it, those who can and do want to speak and present immediately find themselves in rarefied company. Like writing, speaking helps you organize your thoughts and develop a deeper understanding of your work. But it also makes you more visible – literally.
Work needs to be presented, and conferences need keynotes. If you are comfortable speaking, you’ll often find yourself in situations where the eyes and ears of important people are trained on you. If you want to advance a cause, or even just your career, this is what you want.
We love our friends and family, but the most important people to us professionally actually aren’t that close. Researchers call this the “paradox of weak ties” – our weaker connections are much more useful when helping us find new jobs and opportunities than our stronger ones.
The data points to an upside-down U-shaped distribution: Our strongest connections are actually the least helpful, our moderately weak connections are the most, and the helpfulness diminishes again as you reach the far end of increasingly weak relationships.
This is because weaker ties introduce new ideas and information to our network. Your work-bestie knows most of the same people and companies that you do. But the person you met on that one panel you did last year knows a whole new universe of people, places, and things.
If you can become comfortable with meeting and building relationships with a wide range of people, you can quickly grow your universe of potential opportunities. (I’m particularly adamant about this part though when I speak to my graduating students: build your network with an eye towards generosity and kindness, not transactions and extraction.)
Within certain parameters, at least, everybody can make use of the first three force multipliers. While some might be better at one of these skills than others, we can all be better writers, speakers, and networkers.
This last one though, design, is more dependent on aptitude. Some people are built to be designers – and they often end up with a business card that lists that title. Design school or online tutorials can get everybody pretty far, but some people are just wired to be more or less naturally talented in this domain. But everybody can benefit from good design.
Good design can make a proposal stand out in the pile of competitors. A well-built landing page can validate your latest entrepreneurial concept faster and cheaper than a clunky one. Whether it’s a product on a shelf or you as a product, well-designed packaging can make people give you a second look.
If you can up your design skills, then great, do it. If you don’t think this is for you, find somebody that can help you.
All of these force multipliers can seem like the decoration around your work, like fluff that doesn’t matter. You might say that the real work is what happens in the lab, in the field, or in the market. But that’s a myopic view.
Every job has two parts: the stuff, and making the stuff matter. Getting buy-in on your ideas, raising money for your vision, and working with others is part of the work. Getting better at that part makes everything in the lab, field, or market matter more. That’s when your work is greater than the sum of its parts.
