← The PeopleAnalyst Guide to Work Rules·Ch 14
What You Can Do Starting Tomorrow
What Bock argues
Bock closes by compressing the whole book into ten work rules, resting on one belief: that people are fundamentally good, and that if you build a high-freedom environment and trust them, they'll repay it. The ten, in his framing: give your work meaning; trust your people; hire only people better than you; don't confuse development with managing performance; focus on the two tails; be frugal and generous; pay unfairly; nudge; manage the rising expectations; and enjoy — then start again at the top. It's a checklist, deliberately, because the point of the book is to do, not admire.
The Guide's whole argument is that each of those rules is a measurable, executable program — not a slogan — and that's what makes this chapter the index to everything before it.
What the research actually says (and where 2015 needs an update)
The hardest finding in this whole space isn't about any one rule; it's about the gap between knowing them and doing them. Pfeffer and Sutton's knowing-doing gap documents that organizations overwhelmingly know the better practice and systematically fail to enact it — because doing is harder, threatens status quo, and isn't measured. That is the real reason a book of sensible rules changes little: the rules were never the bottleneck. Execution and measurement were. Which is exactly why a companion that attaches an analysis to each rule is the part that matters — it converts "we should" into "here's the number, here's the next move."
So here is the synthesis as an index — each rule → the chapter that runs it → the analysis that proves it, mostly composed from spokes that already exist:
| Bock's rule | Chapter | The executable analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Give your work meaning | 1, 2 | culture/values diagnostic; the felt-fairness/transparency gap |
| Trust your people (voice/autonomy) | 6 | autonomy + voice pulse; CAMS-Motivation |
| Hire people better than you | 3 | selection-utility (validity × volume × performance-variation) + quality-of-hire |
| Don't trust your gut (select on evidence) | 5 | interview-reliability / selection-validity (Consensus Coder) |
| Find the best | 4 | source-quality + funnel analysis |
| Don't confuse development with rating | 7 | rating-variance decomposition + calibration |
| Focus on the two tails | 8 | performance-distribution / star-ID (reliability-attached) |
| Pay unfairly (legibly) | 10 | pay-equity residual × felt-fairness gap (AnyComp + procedural justice) |
| Be frugal and generous | 11 | benefits impact-per-dollar (gift-exchange) |
| Nudge | 12 | experiment/nudge analysis (VoI + honest CIs) |
| Learn (build the institution) | 9 | learning-transfer at the behavior level |
| It's not all rainbows (honest limits) | 13 | experiment registry + obligation-to-dissent / psych safety |
Where 2015 needs the update: every rule now has an AI face, and they share one rule-behind-the-rules that runs through the entire Guide — legibility. AI can scale culture, selection, calibration, pay, nudges, and learning; whether each is an upgrade or a liability turns on whether the people it touches can see how it works (the transparency thesis from Chapter 2, the reliability thesis from Unreliable). The AI-era 11th rule is: build it so it can be seen through, or don't build it.
How you run it — the sequenced program
Don't do twelve analyses at once; that's how the knowing-doing gap wins. Sequence:
- Diagnose the gap. Run the two cheapest, highest-signal reads first — the felt-fairness/transparency pulse (Ch 2) and the rating-variance decomposition (Ch 7). They tell you where trust and measurement are actually broken.
- Pick the two or three rules with the biggest gap for your org and run their analyses.
- Act, measure, and report the nulls (Ch 12/13) — pre-register, run, report what didn't work.
- Then go back to rule one and begin again — Bock's loop, made empirical.
The analysis you can execute
The capstone build is the Work Rules starter pack — a guided Value-Wizards flow that bundles the per-chapter analyses into a sequenced path: answer a few questions about your org → get the two or three rules where your gap is largest → run those analyses → get a rollout sequence. It ties to the rung-1 packs and the toolbox-ify dispatch (the per-chapter analyses are the components). One front door to the whole Guide-as-software.
What to do Monday
- Run the two diagnostic reads (transparency/felt-fairness + rating-variance). Find your largest gap.
- Pick the two or three rules that gap points to — not all ten. The knowing-doing gap punishes breadth-without-depth.
- Pre-register, act, measure, report the nulls. Then loop.
- For every rule you implement with AI, apply the 11th: can the people it affects see how it works?
Cross-refs: every chapter (1–13) — this is their index; Pfeffer & Sutton's knowing-doing gap; the Value-Wizards / rung-1 packs (the starter-pack front door); the toolbox-ify dispatch (the analyses).