Preface
My leadership journey began with an unexpected phone call from deep within CIA Headquarters. The Spymaster—formally known as the Deputy Director of Operations—oversees worldwide clandestine operations, and he needed to see me immediately.
The call unsettled me. Had I done something wrong? I left my desk and dashed down the navy-blue carpet to his suite at the end of the corridor.
When I entered the room, he looked up. The world at that time was anything but calm. Fighting raged in Kosovo and Kashmir. Russian President Yeltsin had just named Vladimir Putin Prime Minister. An errant NATO air strike in Belgrade had killed three Chinese embassy employees. Yet what the Spymaster wanted to discuss was his own organization.
He asked a question that would change my life:
“Mike, why is it when I pull the levers, nothing happens?”
I reeled. Based on our previous conversations, I understood “levers” to mean reward systems, measurements, communication, and other standard management tools. But his question landed like a punch. How could someone in one of the most powerful jobs in the world feel so helpless?
My shock turned to embarrassment. I was his senior advisor—a Harvard Business School graduate with years of experience at General Electric before coming to the CIA. None of it had prepared me for such a fundamental question. I stammered something about bureaucracy. That was partially true; I had seen firsthand how delays, bottlenecks, and conflicting objectives impeded pre-9/11 CIA operations. But even as the words left my lips, I knew bureaucracy wasn’t the real answer.
We grappled with it for nearly an hour. I couldn’t give him a satisfying explanation, and that bothered me long after I left his office. I kept thinking about data I’d collected showing a CIA full of contradictions—some units highly energized and effective, others mired in low morale and poor productivity. If red tape were to blame for the broken levers, it should have affected all units equally. Something else was going on. I started calling it the Spymaster’s Dilemma.
And it gnawed at me for twenty years.
A decade into my search, I thought the answer was simply “human nature.” Throughout every organization I have studied, traditional management approaches grind against the change resistance built into all of us—a documented psychological state, felt personally and emotionally1. But that framing told me what the problem was, not how to solve it.
So I kept going. I researched, experimented, and tested ideas with clients across industries and around the world. What I eventually discovered was a different way to lead—one that works with human nature rather than against it. When I stopped fighting the brain’s instincts and aligned my leadership actions with them, everything got easier. Change became less painful to implement. Creativity became easier to spark. Feedback became less fraught to give and receive.
These approaches shared a single quality: they created certainty in the minds of the people I was trying to lead. A sense of certainty helps employees overcome innate resistance to change. And certainty, it turns out, is the master lever the Spymaster had been seeking all along.
You may be on your own version of this journey. If you’re a manager, leadership is a significant part of your daily work—and if you’re honest, you’ve probably tried issuing orders, balancing threats with rewards, and hoping inspiration would somehow appear. You may have wondered whether there’s a more effective, practical approach that doesn’t require a decade of research to discover.
There is. It lives inside the human mind, and I’ll show you how to access it. No matter where you sit in the management structure, you can use thirteen Human Nature Levers to harness the best of human nature, energize your team, and create a workplace people actually want to be part of.
Best of all, these techniques can cascade through an entire organization. They answer the Spymaster’s question from the bottom up as well as the top down. The Human Nature Levers work because you’re finally going with the grain of human nature instead of against it.
In the pages ahead, I’ll introduce you to a 5,300-year-old man who will serve as our guide. Ötzi the Iceman2, discovered frozen in the Alps in 1991, has the same brain wiring in his ancient skull that we have in ours. Understanding what drove Ötzi—what he feared, craved, resisted, and responded to3—turns out to be the fastest path to understanding what drives your team today.
Let’s go find him.
