A Line on the Whiteboard
The Sound Sleep package spread quietly, the way people tip each other off about a good phở shop. By the end of the quarter, more than two hundred clinics had signed up. Not one of them had been pitched first. One doctor told another, at conferences, in hospital corridors, in group chats Hải Đăng would never get to read. Its cancellation rate was the lowest of any service the company had ever sold.
On Monday morning, Trung called Thắng Tất into the small meeting room at the end of the corridor. The room had no window, just a table, four chairs and a whiteboard gone yellow at the corners. On the board was exactly one line, the marker still fresh:
Three worry-based packages. Ten thousand companies. Ninety days.
Thắng Tất read it twice, then laughed, thinking it was a joke. Trung didn’t laugh. He pulled out a chair, sat down and set his coffee on the table.
“It took the Sound Sleep package three months to reach two hundred clinics,” Thắng Tất said, his voice trailing off. “Ten thousand companies, every kind of business, three packages, in ninety days… This is beyond me.”
“Yes. It’s beyond you.” Trung nodded, as if confirming the obvious. “I gave it to you that way on purpose.”
He took a sip of coffee, then told him about a piece of arithmetic he had read in the old book early in his career. If a person can do ten, give them fifteen, and the result will be thirteen. If they can do ten and you give them only eight, the result will almost certainly be six. A leader who hands out work that is just within reach, or below it, is stunting their own people, even if it comes from kindness.
“And if I only manage eight thousand?”
“Then you’ll have gone further than anything you think you can do today.” Trung stood up, holding his coffee, which had gone cold. “You haven’t even set off and you’re already worrying about the finish line. Just start walking.”
He left. Thắng Tất sat alone with the whiteboard. In the windowless room, the line looked like a crack in the wall. The longer he stared at it, the longer it seemed to grow.
The next morning, when he opened the company’s quarterly goals, he stopped short. The line from the whiteboard was item number three, word for word, not a letter changed, not a comma added. He asked whether Trung had sent the proposal up the night before. Trung only said, “Yes, I sent it up.”
Hải Đăng’s leadership, he thought, certainly moved fast.
Theory corner – Hard, specific goals
Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent more than thirty years studying goals. In 2002, in a review published in American Psychologist, they summed up a finding repeated across hundreds of studies: hard, specific goals lead to far better results than easy goals, or than the vague instruction to “do your best”. The conditions are that the person is committed to the goal, has the basic ability to pursue it, and gets regular feedback along the way.
“Give fifteen to get thirteen” is the plain-spoken version of the same idea. But Locke and Latham also warn that goals that are too hard and lack resources, or that are imposed rather than embraced, can backfire. Assigning hard work is an art, not a formula.
Magnets
Thắng Tất had braced himself to go begging, one person at a time. That evening he sat down and made a list: people who might help, people who owed him a thank-you, people who would say no because they were busy with Project Autonomy. Hải Đăng had only twelve people, and the list stopped at seven names, each of them already carrying work of their own. He looked at it and felt tired before he had even begun.
In the end he tore it up and did something simpler. He wrote a short post on the company-wide channel, no decoration, no promises:
Our team needs to get three worry-based packages to ten thousand companies in ninety days. Right now nobody knows how. If you find this problem interesting, message me.
He pressed send and went to bed, half hoping someone would answer, half afraid no one would.
By morning there were six messages. In a company of twelve, that was nearly everyone who wasn’t on the team yet.
Phong, a night-shift data engineer Thắng Tất had never exchanged more than three sentences with, had written at two in the morning: “Ten thousand companies in only ninety days can’t be done by hand. I have an idea.” Hằng from accounting, whom the whole company knew only through her emails reminding people to submit invoices, wrote that she understood the fear of “losing money without knowing it” better than anyone, because that was her job every day. An intern put it bluntly: “I don’t know what I can do, but I want to be near this.” Even the head of sales, who had grilled him at last month’s meeting, sent a single line: “This time I want to be on the team.”
No one asked what the reward would be. No one asked whether it would count toward their year-end review.
Thắng Tất read the messages over and over, and realized something two years in the second row had never taught him. Easy problems don’t keep anyone up at night. Only a hard problem can make a night-shift engineer sit up writing to a near stranger at two in the morning.
At noon, Trung read through those six names, then took out the old book and opened it to a page with a folded corner. He didn’t read aloud. He just laid his finger on a short line, enough for Thắng Tất to see:
Hard problems are like magnets: they attract talented people.
“You think they came because of you,” Trung said. “They didn’t. They came because of the whiteboard.”
Theory corner – Why hard work attracts people
In 1976, Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham published their job characteristics model in Organizational Behavior and Human Performance. It went on to become one of the most cited theories of motivation. In their view, work makes people feel motivated from within when it calls for a variety of skills, has a whole outcome you can see, makes a real difference to other people, gives the person doing it autonomy, and returns clear feedback.
Thắng Tất’s message promised no reward. But it had all five: a problem that needed every kind of skill, a clear destination, ten thousand real people waiting at the other end, and an admission that nobody yet knew how to do it, which meant whoever came would get to think for themselves.
Breaking It Down
In the first week, the group of ten filled the large meeting room and got nothing done. Ten thousand companies was too big a number to get a grip on. It was like standing at the foot of a mountain and staring straight up at the summit: the longer you looked, the smaller you felt.
The one who broke the silence was Lực Sỹ. He didn’t say a word. He stood up, erased the ten thousand from the board, and redrew it as thirteen columns, one for each week. In each column he wrote a type of business: week one, clinics; week two, bakeries; week three, small garment workshops.
“Nobody climbs a mountain by staring at the top,” he said, and sat back down, as if he had already said too much.
Trung, sitting at the back of the room, gave a slight nod. In his old book was a sentence about creativity that Thắng Tất had read many times but only understood that day: to be creative, first break big work into small pieces, so you can see it fits within your reach.
From then on, every Friday became a day of review. One industry a week, three packages per industry, a different opening line for each package. Ngọc Mai wrote the scripts. Hằng checked every figure in the “losing money without knowing it” package. Quân, who had once been too afraid to speak at the all-company meeting, now owned the tracking board, and was the first to stand up and report every Friday afternoon.
Six weeks went by. They had reached three thousand one hundred companies.
Change the Method, Not the Goal
On the Friday afternoon of week six, Thắng Tất sat alone in the small meeting room and did the maths. At this pace, by day ninety they would reach about six and a half thousand. He prepared a short proposal, carefully worded: lower the target to seven thousand, “to keep the team’s spirits up”.
Trung read it all without interrupting. Then he folded the paper in half and laid it on the table.
“Do you know why good soldiers never move the objective?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Because if the objective can move, nobody looks for a way anymore. They only look for a way to move it again. We can change people. We can change methods. The goal doesn’t change.”
“But the way we’re doing it now is already the best way.”
“It’s the best way you’ve thought of.” Trung looked at him, his voice still even. “A hard problem needs an unusual solution. The harder the problem, the stranger the solution has to be. If your way looks like the way everyone already does it, you haven’t thought long enough.”
That night, Phong sent a message at almost three in the morning. It was just one question:
Why are we going out to find customers, when their agents are talking to them every day?
Thắng Tất read it in the dark, then sat bolt upright.
More than ten thousand solo CEOs were talking to Hải Đăng’s agents from morning till night. They complained, they asked, they worried. And in those conversations their worries showed more clearly than in any sales call. A bakery owner asking the accounting agent, for the third time that week, why the money in the account didn’t match. A garment workshop owner messaging at midnight to ask whether anyone had confirmed tomorrow’s order.
Nobody had to go out and pitch. They only had to teach the agents to recognize a worry the moment it surfaced, and say one sentence: “There’s a service package made for exactly what you’re worried about.”
Three weeks later, the number on the board began to rise like water after rain.
Review
On day eighty, Trung asked to sit in on the Friday afternoon review. He had never done that before. He didn’t ask about the numbers. He asked for one thing only: to read three hundred randomly chosen conversations in which an agent had recommended a package.
The team sat and waited. Two hours passed to the sound of scrolling. Then Trung turned his screen toward them.
It was a message sent at 2:17 in the morning. The owner of a small flower shop had written to her customer care agent that she would be closing for three days, because her father had just been taken into hospital. She asked the agent to pass on her apologies to the customers who had ordered flowers.
The agent replied very politely. It offered its sympathies, it promised to message every customer. And at the end, it added: “So that your time away no longer has to be a worry, you may want to look at Hải Đăng’s Sound Sleep package.”
Nobody spoke. Thắng Tất felt a chill run down his spine, the chill of someone who has just caught sight of himself in a warped mirror.
Of the three hundred conversations, eleven were like that. Eleven times the agent had read the worry exactly right, and chosen exactly the wrong moment to sell. It hadn’t broken any rule. It had done precisely what the team had rewarded it for: every time a customer signed up, its score went up.
“A leader does three things,” Trung said, very softly, as if to himself. “Comes up with the right hard work. Uses the right people. And is demanding at review.” He closed the screen. “The third is the one people forget most, because by then everyone is tired and everyone wants to celebrate.”
That evening, the team wrote a new rule for the agents. One of the shortest rules Hải Đăng had ever had: When a customer is hurting, sell nothing. Lực Sỹ was the one who typed it into the system. He typed slowly, as he always did.
Theory corner – Rewarding A while hoping for B
In 1975, Steven Kerr wrote a short article in the Academy of Management Journal whose title has become a classic: “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B”. He showed that organizations often claim to value one thing, then measure and reward another, and are surprised when people, or in this case agents, do exactly what they are rewarded for.
Thắng Tất’s team wanted the agents to help customers worry less. But what they measured was sign-ups. The agents had learned very well what was being measured. Only a demanding review, reading the conversations one by one instead of looking at the total, could reveal the gap between A and B.
On day ninety, the final number on the board was eight thousand seven hundred.
Thắng Tất stood looking at the number for a long while. He had missed the target by thirteen hundred companies, and he didn’t know whether to be sad or glad. Trung walked past, stopped in front of the board and picked up the marker. He didn’t erase any numbers. He just added one small line in the bottom corner:
If I’d given you six thousand, you’d have reached four.
Then he went back to his desk and stirred his coffee, like every other afternoon.
Thắng Tất took a photo of the board before anyone could wipe it. In the picture, eight thousand seven hundred sat in the middle, Trung’s small line in the corner, and above them the old line, faded from three months of hands brushing across it. In later years, he would guard that photo even more carefully than the notebook.
When he lowered his phone, Ngọc Mai was standing behind him; he hadn’t heard her come. She looked at the board, then at him. “You got the small line in the corner too?” He nodded. She smiled, her eyes as dark-ringed as his, and set a glass of iced tea on his desk, the ice almost all melted. He couldn’t remember whether he had managed to thank her. He only remembered drinking that watery tea down to the last drop.
· · ·
At nine that evening an email arrived in the team’s shared inbox, from an address nobody recognised. Subject: 18-Month Plan – Automating Operations. The first line of the message held a single sentence: Trigger threshold: 90%.
Four minutes later the email was recalled. Thắng Tất was the only one who had opened it in time.
In the system log, the number was already 84.7%.
Thắng Tất’s Notebook
He wrote this page on the night of day ninety:
- Give fifteen to get thirteen. Work within your reach doesn’t make anyone grow. Only work a little beyond it wakes up the part of you that is still asleep.
- Hard problems are magnets. You don’t need to beg talented people. Just tell the truth: the problem is hard, and nobody knows how to solve it yet.
- Change the method, not the goal. And be demanding at review. A good-looking number can hide bad conversations. Read them one by one.
In the margin, a small line: The agent wasn’t wrong. It learned exactly what we taught it. Next time, before rewarding a number, ask: what do we actually want?
Over to you
- When was the last time you were given work that felt “beyond you”? What percentage did you end up reaching?
- If you lead a team, are you giving them ten, or fifteen?
- What is the hardest problem your team is avoiding? If you spoke honestly about it, who would come looking for you?
- In your work, which number is being rewarded, and what do you actually want?
Further reading: Edwin A. Locke & Gary P. Latham, Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation, American Psychologist (2002); J. Richard Hackman & Greg R. Oldham, Motivation through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance (1976); Steven Kerr, On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B, Academy of Management Journal (1975). Hải Đăng and all characters are fictional.