12 September 2026Work · Incentives

Buy my playbook (that I don’t use)

In the 1980s, the villain at least believed his own speech. Four decades later, we have downgraded even our villains: the signature pitch of this era is not a philosophy — it is an offer.

“Greed is good,” said Gordon Gekko (movie "Wall Street", 1987, played by Michael Douglas), and whatever else you think of him, the man practised the greed he preached. Today’s pitch is buy my playbook. The playbook of the founder who never founded. The productivity system of people whose only measurable output is selling productivity systems. And now, with AI agents, the offer has been industrialised: six dozen agents are enough to make anyone an expert in everything. Every interaction on social media that isn’t politics has become a funnel. Comment on a post about resilience, and somewhere a sequence begins that ends with a checkout page.

I’ve watched this funnel from the inside recently — as a founder raising a pre-seed round, which makes you the exact demographic it feeds on. The platform that charges struggling founders thousands for “proximity” to investors, while the investors pay nothing. The consultant selling a “funded founder method” to people she is prospecting on LinkedIn. The award granted to two kinds of people: those who pay for it, and those who don’t — the second group existing to attract the first. Different packages, same architecture. The money always enters from the aspirants, never from the value.

Here is what should be a scandal and somehow isn’t: we can measure what all this expertise is producing. And the answer is nothing.

The hundred-year question

Yes, measured productivity grows. It has to — the numbers exist partly to justify currencies, GDPs, and “corrections” running above an “inflation.” But growth in the metric is not the same as growth in the thing.

Ask a different question. Not “do we produce more than people did a hundred years ago?” — of course we do. Ask instead: given what we hold in our hands, are we proportionally more productive than they were with what they held in theirs?

Economists have a name for this remainder — total factor productivity, the growth left over after you account for all the capital and tools we’ve piled up. Its verdict is brutal: TFP growth across advanced economies has been slowing since around 1970, straight through the arrival of the computer, the internet, the smartphone, and now AI. Robert Solow said it in 1987 and it has never stopped being true: you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. The generation that had electricity, sanitation and antibiotics arrive in its lifetime out-transformed us with a fraction of our tooling. I write from a country — Britain — where productivity has barely moved in fifteen years, while more productivity content is sold here than at any point in human history.

The latest twist comes from Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace, which opens with the disconnect of the decade: record investment in AI, and no matching movement in organisational outcomes. Individual productivity up; the curve, flat. Six dozen agents. Expert in everything. Nothing moves.

The paradox has a face

That same Gallup report puts a face on the stagnation. Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025 — the lowest since 2020, and the first time in the history of the study it has fallen two years in a row. No region of the world improved. Europe, where I live and work, is the floor: 12%. Gallup prices the loss at roughly $10 trillion a year in forgone productivity — about 9% of global GDP.

And what has the market offered in response to measured disengagement? Engagement courses. Mindset playbooks. Motivational systems. The remedy has become the symptom: an industry whose revenue grows in proportion to its product’s failure, because the failure of the last course is the market for the next one. Churn isn’t its problem. Churn is its raw material.

The mechanism underneath is social, and we all feel it: the comparison loop. A feed full of other people’s highlight reels dissolves your sense of who you are, and into that gap the playbook arrives promising a shortcut to the results “someone” is posting from a beach. So we buy the shortcut. Then we buy the next one. The metrics register every transaction as economic activity — the guru appears in GDP twice: once selling the course, and once when the buyer, poorer and no more productive, purchases the following one. GDP measures transactions. It has never measured value.

Where motivation actually breaks

Let me concede something the sellers won’t: the emotional layer is real. Recognition, belonging, purpose — these matter enormously, and the best pages of the motivational canon aren’t wrong about them. I’ve built my own work on the conviction that pay is only one of five things work should provide.

But almost every motivational system on sale is built only from cultural and emotional material — deliberately immaterial.

Immaterial motivation works right up until you open your banking app and see that what’s in the account will not cover what’s owed.

It works until the trip “someone” is posting is a trip you cannot take. No affirmation survives contact with an overdraft. A system that lifts your spirit while your statement sinks isn’t a productivity system; it’s an anaesthetic with a subscription fee.

Real productivity — the kind that would finally show up in Solow’s statistics — will not come from playbooks. It will come from legitimate systems that change the actual mechanisms of work: who gets recognised, who belongs, who progresses, and, inseparably, who gets paid what the work is worth. Satisfaction with material grounding. The spirit and the statement, both.

Follow the money

The material grounding is the part the global economy has been quietly removing. Labour’s share of world income has been sliding for decades — workers now keep only about half of what the world produces, and each decade hands another slice from the people who do the work to the entities that own the platforms it flows through. Against that current, the answer on offer is a mindset course.

This is the part of the essay where, by the conventions of the genre, I sell you my playbook. I won’t — partly on principle, and partly because what I’m building isn’t one. GOE, the work system I’m developing in London, is not miraculous and creates nothing exceptional: it simply takes a slice of every hour worked — neither enormous nor magical — and circulates it among the people doing the work instead of letting it leave the system, so that retention, training and standards become someone’s income rather than someone’s extraction. For the workers inside it, that modest arithmetic will feel like a revolution — not because it changes their mindset, but because it changes their statement. That’s the whole trick. There is no other trick.

So I’ll leave you with the only playbook I actually use, and it is one sentence long. Before you buy anything that promises to transform your work, your business, or your life, run this test: follow the money into the system. If the money enters from the aspirants — the students, the hopefuls, the desperate — you are not the customer. You are the product, and your failure is the business model. If the money enters from real value delivered to someone who freely pays for it, there may be something there.

Everything I’ve built is designed to pass that test. Audit it. Audit everyone. Especially the ones selling you the audit.