Here's author Dan Pink describing his view on Bob's superpower.

I'm gonna say that it's, it's clarity, uh, more than anything else, um, that, you know, you can, you can see.

I find him always exceptionally clear, straightforward, and simple.

Uh, and also, I think that his communication style, I think part of the clarity is that he communicates with the listener and the reader in mind.

He's not a communicator who is trying to shine a light on himself and show how smart he is.

They still trust authorities and like people who are similar to them.

I think it has the perfect combination in that it offers a way for us to understand what's going on.

You know, if we think about our day-to-day lives, we are, I'm going to be overly academic here, but we are Um, we have a, we have a lot of text, we have a lot of s- I don't, I don't mean text messages, but I just think about, like, text and context, all right? We are, we are text rich.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, but it, it's not f- it, it, it's not determinative.

And then when you think about things like effort, whether it's grit, whether it is deliberate practice, um, I think what that does in my read of it is that that will move you to different parts of the range.

And so that's, that's the very, that's the very sim- that's the very simple way of looking at it.

I think that what's more complex at a layer above there is that both of these things are quite dynamic and interactive.

Yeah.

He's talking about the, he's talking about the external environment.

And so I think that the external focus about the environment that you're in can be advantageous, but when you're an expert and it's about like your own particular mechanics, I think that's deleterious.

Dan Pink is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, including Drive, When, Regret, and To Sell Is Human.

I think Influence came out in 1984.

So you think about all of the books that came out in 1984, and most of them were forgot- I mean, 90% of them were forgotten by 1985.

And there are, you know, how many books that came out in 1984 do, do people still read and care about? And, uh, I think the ans- uh, and I think this is, I think it's, this book is one of them.

But I see the free agent culture coming into companies, and I think it's a really tough leadership challenge.

Yes and no. I'll give you a yes and no on that.

So I think part of it, if you actually talk to employees, people actually do really like being part of a team, really like being part of a high-performing team, and that's something that they value.

I think one of the interesting things in the last 20 years since that book came out was that exactly what you're describing, which is that inside of companies work, it seems a lot more like free agent nation than it did 20 years ago, that the difference between corporate America and free agent nation isn't that vast.

And I think part of it is actually economics.

In a generation ago, certainly two generations ago, the organization would shield a lot of the risk from the individual.

And so the individual made this bargain where they were giving loyalty in exchange for security.

And