So my images of leadership were based mainly on movies and sports. I figured great leaders did a lot of alpha-male yelling and inspirational speechmaking. To me, the epitome of leadership was when a baseball player is yelling at the umpire and about to get ejected and his manager runs out to the field to jump in front of him, so he can yell at the umpire and get thrown out of the game instead. In fact, I always thought baseball-team owners were awful people for not getting on the field in front of both the manager and player and getting ejected in their place. I may have felt this way because my favorite team was owned by George Steinbrenner.

But after spending time with a range of leaders for my new book, Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity, I learned that my vision of what makes a good leader was all wrong. I spent hours working alongside fire chiefs, army captains, Boy Scout troop leaders, and others who guide teams. To my surprise, the best of them tended to be quiet listeners who let other people make most of the decisions. They weren’t particularly charismatic. Or funny. They weren’t the toughest guys in the pack. They didn’t have a Clintonian need to be liked, or a Patton-like intensity. They were, on the whole, a little boring.

Like firefighter Capt. Buzz Smith, whose firehouse in Hollywood is one of the busiest in Los Angeles. For one thing, he doesn’t look like a “Captain Buzz Smith,” by which I mean he is not a plastic action figure. He has a gentle face, an easy smile, a mustache, and a general kindness to him. If he were cast as an astronaut he’d be the guy in charge of mixing Tang.

But what Capt. Smith and the other effective leaders I met have is a code. Capt. Smith isn’t weighing each decision based on a desire to keep his team happy, or to be fair to each guy. Capt. Smith has a way of doing things he believes is right, and he doesn’t waver. His mission is to follow the rules of the city, even if that means driving every 911 caller who asks to the hospital, whether they need to or, far more likely, do not. His job is to run a clean, orderly house so the team can respond with military precision. The calmness Capt. Smith exuded, I eventually realized, was humility. He didn’t need to express everything he felt immediately, because he understood that he wasn’t the most important person. It’s also a lot easier to feel secure in your leadership when you’re named Buzz.

Everyone at his firehouse knows they are doing things exactly right. And that seems to make them both proud and assured. They would do anything for Capt. Smith. Not because they love him — I’m not entirely sure that outside of the firehouse he could inspire them even to switch TV channels — but because his deep belief in his mission makes them also believe in that mission.

What Capt. Smith understands is that inspiring people through your personality is a risky, exhausting endeavor. But if you make people feel like you’re going to help them accomplish something far bigger than you — not just saving lives, but living by a system that provides dignity and pride — you can let your belief do the work for you.

I cannot believe, actually, that there’s not one of those inspirational wall posters about boringness. It’s a lot more effective than screaming.

A few weeks ago, we were taking a walk along a rural road, questioning why we do it. Is all this inner work simply navel gazing? Or does it impact our lives in a real way?

Just as we were exploring the question, we turned a bend and heard a loud party at a house on the side of the road. As we approached the house we could see the deck was filled with about a dozen college-aged men joking around and drinking.

My body tensed and my emotions intensified. I felt a mix of fear, insecurity, competitiveness, and jealousy. I saw them as the kinds of guys Eleanor would be attracted to — big, alpha, confident — and I felt inferior. Which made me feel aggressive towards them. It took me about a minute to realize what I was feeling and why.

I turned to Eleanor and told her what I was feeling. She laughed; she also felt aggressive and had an immediate, instinctual, emotional response, but the opposite of mine. She saw them as obnoxious, uncaring, sexist, and unattractive. She felt superior to them. And resentful that they would probably end up having power in our world.

Two seemingly simple but actually incredibly difficult and crucially important things happened in those few seconds: we recognized what we were feeling, and we talked about it.

Simply being able to feel is a feat in itself. We often spend considerable unconscious effort ignoring what we feel because it can be painful. Who wants to be afraid or jealous or insecure? So we stifle the feelings, argue ourselves out of them, or distract ourselves with busy work or small talk.

But just because we don’t recognize a feeling doesn’t mean it goes away. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Not feeling something guarantees that it won’t go away.

Unacknowledged feelings simmer under the surface, waiting to lunge at unsuspecting, undeserving bystanders. Your manager doesn’t answer an email, which leaves you feeling vulnerable — though you don’t acknowledge it — and then you end up yelling at an employee for something unrelated. Why? Because your anger is coiled in your body, primed, tense, aching to get out. And it’s a lot safer to yell at an employee than bring up an uncomfortable complaint with a manager.

This is a particularly pernicious problem in our hyper-efficient, productivity-focused workplaces, where it often feels risky to feel any emotion at all. We’re expected to get over things, focus on the work, and not get distracted.

But repression is not an effective strategy. It’s where passive aggressiveness is born. It’s the foundation of most dysfunctional organizational politics. And it undermines the collaboration so integral to any company.

A woman I work with interrupted a presentation I was giving and asked me to proceed differently with the sixty people in the room. I made a snap decision not to get into a fight on stage and proceeded the way she asked. The presentation went fine.

But she didn’t need to interrupt me; the presentation would have gone fine either way. I was angry. I felt stepped on. And I believed she prioritized her own agenda over our mutual one.

I wanted to get back at her. I wanted to embarrass her the way I felt embarrassed. I wanted to talk to lots of other people about her and what she did, gaining their sympathy and support. I wanted to feel better.

But I didn’t do anything right away. And, as I sat with the feeling, I realized that while I felt a jumble of emotions, mostly I felt hurt and untrusted.

Mustering up my courage, I emailed her, acknowledging the challenge of making in-the-moment decisions but letting her know I felt hurt and mistrusted. She sent me a wonderful email back, acknowledging her mistake and thanking me for my willingness to let her know when she missed the mark.

And, just like that, all my anger uncoiled and slithered away.

Maybe I got lucky. She could have emailed back that I was incompetent, monopolizing the stage, and communicating poorly. But, honestly? That would have been fine too – because I would have learned something from it, even if it didn’t feel easy in the moment.

Most important to me, our relationship was strengthened by the encounter.

But if I had just railed about her behind her back? Built a coalition of support for me and outrage about her? It would have felt good in the moment, but, ultimately, it would have hurt me, her, and the organization.

It sounds easy to know what you’re feeling and express it. But it takes great courage. I was tempted to write an email to her about my anger, which would have been safer and kept me in a feeling of power. Hurt feels more vulnerable than anger. But being able to communicate my true, vulnerable feelings made all the difference in how we related to each other.

How do you get to those feelings? Take a little time and space to ask yourself what you are really feeling. Keep asking until you sense something that feels a little dangerous, a little risky. That sensation is probably why you’re hesitant to feel it and a good sign that you’re now ready to communicate.

It’s counterintuitive: Wait to communicate until you feel vulnerable communicating. But it’s a good rule of thumb.

Had I not talked to Eleanor about what I was feeling when we saw that deck filled with drinking college guys, I would have gotten clingy to her, looking for some reassurance that she loved me. And, if I had not received it — and why should I since she would have no idea what was going on in my head? — I would have become distant, resentful, and insecure.

But instead, we just laughed and focused on other, more interesting conversation. Apparently, all that navel gazing really does impact our lives in a real way.

I was reminded of this at MTV recently, where I ran into Nick Shore, a brilliant guy with whom I worked years ago. Back then, we were working as consultants for a big American brand and we wanted to talk to teens, teen girls specifically. Nick and I knew one thing for certain: old-fashioned, beat-the-drum marketing was not going to work here. Traditional branding would just bounce off of them.

So we created a fictional character, Sophie. We designed Sophie to be half mortal, half goddess. She lived in Washington with her dad, a member of the American diplomatic corps, and as he traveled on assignment, so did she. Istanbul, Sydney, Cheng Du, Ottawa, Helsinki — Sophie had grown up all over the place.

The human side of Sophie was industrious, playful, thoughtful, questing, a relatively standard-issue adolescent. She kept a journal. She read to Sammie, the family cat. She made dinner for her dad on Friday nights. She was interested in the usual things (clothes, boys, celebrities, celebrity boys) and some things that weren’t so usual (rock climbing, theater sets, volcanic minerals).

Sophie was also a goddess. We never figured out why Sophie was part goddess. We didn’t want to. After all, the best goddesses are sublime and therefore inscrutable to the language and logic of mortals! It’s for the goddess to know and for us to find out… and we can’t.

Of course, we’ll try. And we knew that teen girls would try very hard indeed and that the results were bound to be interesting. The less we said about Sophie the more she would belong to the girls. Fan fiction (aka fan fic) hadn’t been invented yet. But that’s the sort of thing that we were hoping for: a wave of ingenuity, as girls speculated, invented, and imagined — and in the process, Sophie would fluoresce.

The question was: what would we use as our starter kit, to use the language of that other kind of culture, the tiny amount of yogurt from which more yogurt comes? What small artifacts could we push into the world as inducements for Sophie speculation and Sophie construction?

One idea was to put Sophie’s home online, the terraced Washington home she shared with her dad. This was the early days of the Internet, so the home was going to feel more like a sketch than an habitable space. What we wanted was something that visitors could visit and scrutinize. Naturally, neither Sophie nor her dad would be home, so the visitor was free to have a good look around, examining furnishings, art, books, food in the cupboard, things in the fridge. The idea was to encourage the visitor to use this evidence as a chance to construct Sophie and her dad “from the material evidence.”

Dog-eared magazines would be left around the place, indicating a passage that Sophie found particularly interesting. Books lay open, with passages underlined. Sophie’s journal was there for reading. The answering machine had several incoming messages. There were stereos and Walkmans with musical taste on display. There were movies with more taste to be decoded.

But this was just for starters. We were also interested in the idea that Sophie liked to “manifest” in the world. I found a fountain in Mexico City dedicated to Diana, the huntress. Perfect, I thought. If teenage girls are going to find classical inspiration, they can’t do much better than Diana. The idea: send in a team and light the surface of the pool. We would do this in the middle of the night, invite the press, and make a spectacle. We wanted to be completely secretive about the details. We wanted the press to report this sensation as a perfect mystery.

All our plans for Sophie had this quality. Mysterious things would happen all over the world — Istanbul, Sydney, Chengdu, Ottawa, Helsinki. The press would always be invited to attend but no details, explanations or expositions would be forthcoming. We wanted the press to report the mystery and nothing more.

Our hope was that 15-year-olds would hear of these mysteries and reach their own conclusions. Especially after looking at Sophie’s Diana books, the airline ticket stubs, and her passport stamps. We assumed that the girls would eventually conclude that this was Sophie manifesting in the world.

In each case, the manifestation would be accompanied by some extravagant gift to a shelter for the homeless or a local food bank. Was Sophie lighting up fountains to point out a homeless shelter? Or was a homeless shelter suddenly awash in donations to point out the Diana fountain? Was Sophie engaged in self-celebration or random acts of kindness? We wouldn’t say. Again, because we were pretty certain that any 15-year-old, and especially thousands of 15-years-olds, could come up with better ideas than the two of us.

As it turned out, Sophie never made it off of the drawing board. But she was for me an opportunity to rethink branding and marketing. She was built for a consumer who was too smart for the usual “beat-the-drum” marketing. She embodied a less-is-more proposition, opening up an opportunity for the consumer to participate in the creation of the brand. She helped point out the shift from a passive to an active consumer, from a world in which the consumer waits to be told what to think, to one in which the consumers are now only willing to bond with brands that respect their powers of engagement and ingenuity.

Sophie also served as a Culturematic because she was a “what if…” experiment. We had no idea if she would create a response in the world. Things were changing, and we thought we could glimpse a segment that would respond to Sophie. And we thought we saw the cultural winds on which Sophie would travel, if she traveled. Like all Culturematics, the whole thing was designed to be a bit of a gamble. The good news: none of this was going to cost very much, so we could afford to be wrong. As with all Culturematics, Sophie carried the promise of an enormous return on investment. If she worked, Sophie would distinguish the brand from every other brand. She would recruit new consumers and thrill existing ones. Like every Culturematic, Sophie promised to create meaning and extract value in a big way. One of these days, I hope someone will get her off that drawing board. A goddess has gotta breathe!

The drive to take command of a situation is instrumental to a salesperson’s success. Salespeople with a weak dominance instinct are never quite in control of an account. They operate under the direction of customers or are at the mercy of the competition. They also find it more difficult to close the sale because they are uncomfortable exerting their will over the customer.

Dominance is gaining the willing obedience of the customer. The customer listens to your opinions and advice, internalizes your recommendations and agrees with them, and when you close the sales call follows your course of action. Your personality greatly influences the way in which you establish dominance during sales calls.

Nowhere during the sales process does dominance play a more important role than when closing. Take this short test to determine your natural tendencies to dominate group settings. Score your answer after each question with zero, one, or two points.

1. Assertiveness within groups. Let’s pretend you are having a hallway conversation with three colleagues. Do you remain silent the majority of time letting others speak (0), speak an equal share of the conversation (1), or usually find yourself talking the majority of the time (2)?

2. Conformity within situations. Using the hallway example above, if someone said something you disagreed with would you typically remain silent (0), maybe challenge the person to explain themselves (1), or usually confront the person directly (2)?

3. Self-consciousness around people. If a colleague said one of your important ideas was stupid would your embarrassment cause you to remain silent (0), perhaps defend yourself (1), or would you reject the person’s comments outright and criticize their arguments (2)?

4. Candor around people. When speaking with colleagues are you someone who carefully edits your words (0), tactfully speaks your mind (1), or is completely open and honest with all your thoughts (2)?

5. Humility around people. Are you someone who feels genuinely humble and respects all others (0), generally believes you are equal to others (1), or usually thinks you are better or superior in some way to people around you (2)?

Total your score for all questions. A score of six or below indicates you have a low natural tendency to establish dominance in group settings. Consequently, you may have a more difficult time closing. A score of seven or more indicates high natural tendencies. Most likely, you are a “natural” closer who is more comfortable in the uncomfortable position of asking prospective clients for their business.

There are two basic approaches to establish dominance during sales calls:

The direct approach is based upon personal prowess, while the indirect approach is based upon finesse. The approach you should use depends upon attributes of your personality. If you scored a high level of dominance, you are typically well suited to use a direct approach. This approach is based upon first establishing yourself as the focal point of the purchase. In essence, the customer is buying your credibility, your personal experience, and your ability to help them accomplish their goals.

If you scored a low level of dominance, you are more likely better suited to use an indirect approach. This approach is based upon establishing your product and the capabilities of your company as the focal point of the purchase before you start selling yourself. For example, a salesperson with low dominance that transitioned her career from a technical position into sales can have an equally dominant presence as a seasoned sales veteran. However, she has to use a different approach. Instead of projecting a powerful presence in person, her deep-rooted technical understanding of the product draws customers to follow her.

A salesperson’s goal is to gain dominance over a submissive customer. While dominance is commonly associated with brute force, this is not the case in sales. It’s simply how people judge others. People are continually sensing whether their position is superior to yours, relatively equal, or inferior in some way. In turn, this impacts what they say during the conversation and how they behave.

At a time when identities and communities are as fluid as ever, Zuckerberg grasped, before and better than anyone else, the craving for spaces where we can hold on to — or reinvent — ourselves in relation to others. He gave existential questions of uniqueness and belonging a twenty-first century home on the web.

The share of the world population attracted to Facebook, and the time we spend on it, has grown in parallel with the mystique surrounding its founder. Zuckerberg’s appeal has long transcended the boundaries of the business and technology communities. This is nowhere more apparent than in the media coverage of his attire.

When he showed up in a hoodie for a meeting with potential investors in New York City recently, Wall Street analysts and financial journalists turned into fashion critics and psychoanalysts for the day. Depending on whose opinion you read, his signature garment was a signal of immaturity, confidence, defiance, conformity, insensitivity, consistency, carelessness, or calculation. The hoodie was clearly in the eye of the beholder.

The episode was a microcosm of an ongoing collective preoccupation with the motives and moves of the brilliant young man on whose “book” we have become accustomed to writing our own stories. It was one among many attempts to unveil the magic of Zuckerberg’s leadership, which only further revealed our fascination with him.

This is not a new phenomenon. Leaders in every sphere, at every level, have been treated to a mixture of scrutiny and mythologizing since times immemorial. We try to capture and dissect their vision, character, abilities, clothing — their luck, even. But those never fully explain the magic that keeps us enthralled. Because what attracts us — or repels us, or turns us off — is not just how they think and act, or the stories they tell. It’s the stories they represent.

On the one hand, the story Mark Zuckerberg embodies is quintessentially contemporary. He is a poster boy, architect, and beneficiary of the intermingling of our off- and on-line lives. He is a role model for a generation whose members view entrepreneurship as the best avenue to express themselves and serve society with their work.

On the other hand, his story is not entirely new. It is a story of ambition and genius that meet opportunity; of impeccable timing and ruthless focus; of the geek that becomes a star; of the once marginal that makes it to the top. It is a story known by many as “the American dream,” and regarded with as much reverence and suspicion nowadays — salvation for some, illusion for others — as its hooded incarnation.

Leaders can learn three important lessons from Zuckerberg’s appeal and in the scrutiny that surrounds him:

Charisma and vulnerability go hand in hand. What gives leaders their magic appeal is our collective desire for stories that give meaning and hope to our lives and communities. People for whom your story holds promise will hold you in high regard. Those who are left out, or for whom the story spells danger, will likely vilify you. Your people’s adulation and others’ contempt may push you into becoming an even more fervent advocate of your story — and make it harder for you to challenge it, change it, or bridge it to others. This is how great ideas, over time, degenerate into absolute beliefs.

Scrutiny comes with the job. When you are leading, don’t blame people for questioning your motives and your competence. It’s how they determine whether or not to trust you. Scrutiny reveals your courage and integrity. People will only follow you if you articulate clearly and embody credibly a story that is theirs as much as yours. So make it personal, but not about you.

Leaders need grounding, not insulation. You are going to need support to remain grounded in your story without losing the capacity to question it. Avoid surrounding yourself with people that only protect you and bolster your appeal.

Being bestowed with the magic of leadership can be wonderful, burdensome, seductive, or intoxicating. Using it well requires giving yourself to a story that you and your followers hold dear, but without giving yourself up. Owning it fully without becoming so possessed by it that you stop revisiting it and considering its consequences. Taking your ambitions and others’ expectations seriously without being controlled by either.

Looked at this way, leadership is like a hoodie. How you feel about it, if you care at all, depends on whose shoulders it rests and what that person means to you. If you like it, don’t sit on your admiration. Get one yourself. When it rests upon your shoulders, make sure that it suits you and it helps you show up. You will never be able to predict, let alone control, what others see. You will have to work with it.

Why does this matter? It certainly matters to Google, or to any organization wanting to get people’s attention. Yet this insight also has a dark side that deserves some airtime too.

Here’s how social the brain is: the brain network that is always on in the background is a region involved in thinking about yourself and other people. This network is so ubiquitous it has been labeled the “default network.” When not doing anything else, the brain’s favorite pastime is to think about people. We actually turn this region down when we do any active processing, such as doing math. One study showed that inactivity for just two seconds switched the default network back on.

Many studies have emerged in the last few years about the importance of human social interactions to our well-being. We know that social rewards light up the brain’s reward circuits more than non-social rewards, and that social threats, such as feeling lonely or ostracized, light up the threat center more than non-social threats. We’ve even seen that social pain, like being left out of an activity, lights up the same regions as physical pain. And that taking Tylenol can reduce social pain more than a placebo.

Just recently we learned that where you are in the pecking order of a group of people taking an IQ test has an impact on your own IQ score. We even know that positive social habits are more important for health than diet and exercise. (Surprisingly, moderate drinking is likely to have you live longer than being a non-drinker, probably due to the social benefits.)

These types of findings explain the success of social media. We’re giving people something that deeply excites the brain in highly condensed form, which keeps them coming back. After all, the brain is built to minimize danger, and maximize rewards, and in a modern society with few real dangers, we focus on the most rewarding activities that take the least effort (minimizing effort is also seen as a reward).

Here is the seed of the problem. Social media can be so rewarding, that it overwhelms our ability to focus on other things. Our brain has terribly weak circuitry for inhibiting impulses, especially impulses that look delicious. Like our limited ability to do complex calculations in our heads, impulse control is a limited resource that tires with each use. For decades, food marketers have used this poor impulse control against us, to the point that there are now literally more people overweight than starving in the world, in large part due to empty calories that are all too readily available. Our minds may be going the way of our waistlines, as a result of “empty neural calories”: fodder for the brain that stimulates but doesn’t fulfill.

There is a circuitry for “seeking” and a circuitry for “liking.” The liking response settles down the excitement of the seeking circuitry. Without the liking response, we’re like the rat pressing the level over and over to get a little dopamine hit, forgetting all about food and rest.

The circuitry activated when you connect online is the seeking circuitry of dopamine. Yet when we connect with people online, we don’t tend to get the oxytocin or serotonin calming reward that happens when we bond with someone in real time, when our circuits resonate with real-time shared emotions and experiences. On Twitter, you won’t feel satisfied the way you might if you chatted in person with 50 people at a conference.

An overabundance of dopamine — while it feels great, just as sugar does — creates a mental hyperactivity that reduces the capacity for deeper focus.

If your job is to stay “high” all the time, like a reporter on TMZ, then a hyperactive state of mind isn’t a problem. But forget about trying to focus, think deeply, or perhaps learn something. A study by psychology students at Covenant College found that the more time young people spend on Facebook, the more likely they are to have lower grades and weaker study habits. Heavy Facebook users show signs of being more gregarious, but they are also more likely to be anxious, hostile, or depressed. Almost a quarter of today’s teens check Facebook more than 10 times a day, according to a 2009 survey by Common Sense Media.

Throughout history, whenever a new technology emerged that dramatically changed how people interacted, it took time for our human practices to catch up. When the automobile first came out, people would drive at all speeds, in every direction. Eventually road rules and speed limits were put in place, and the world was a safer place. Facebook per se is not evil, just as cars are not evil. However our relationship with the automobile is safer overall with some rules in place, combined with good driver education.

Perhaps we need to start thinking about some road rules and speed limits for social media use. This is certainly important for our kids, whose self-regulation circuits are just forming. However given that self regulation is not one of our strong suits in modern society, perhaps we all need a better understanding of the impact of this new tool on our very ability to think.

In case you don’t have your pocket dictionary handy, a polymath is a person with a wide range of knowledge or learning. Think people like Leonardo da Vinci (artist and helicopter designer), Benjamin Franklin (founding father, inventor, and all-around lady-killer), Paul Robeson (scholar, athlete, actor, and civil rights activist), and even Steve Jobs (engineer, businessman extraordinaire, and marketing mastermind).

Still, while we admire the select “geniuses” that can do it all, we tend to disparage the regular folk who attempt to spread their knowledge around a little. If they are so foolish as to dabble instead of devoting themselves to a single calling, those unfortunates sometimes earn the time-dishonored label of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

But why? What’s so wrong with trying to learn new things? Here’s what Maya Angelou — herself a polymath (poet, journalist, dancer) — has to say about the saying:

“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Angelou said to the Smithsonian. “I think you can be a jack-of-all-trades and a mistress-of-all-trades. If you study it, and you put reasonable intelligence and reasonable energy, reasonable electricity to it, you can do that. You may not become Max Roach on the drums. But you can learn the drums.”

What’s more, in the digital age, learning has really never been easier — and not just for the “geniuses” that walk among us. Polymath status is accessible to just about anyone with a modem, a library card, and the desire to learn.

Information is everywhere, and it’s often free. iTunesU gives your everyday-Joe an opportunity to get a free, virtual Ivy-league education from his couch. Khan Academy teaches people everything from beginning algebra to cosmology. Sign into Google’s Code University to learn programming languages in the moments snatched during lunch breaks or while the baby’s napping. My company iFixit teaches people how to repair their electronics — no prior experience necessary. And, most recently, MIT and Harvard teamed up to launch edX, a “planet-scale, technology-enabled” online education platform that offers college courses for free. And these types of free online learning institutions are more the rule than the exception these days.

So, why aren’t there more of us polymaths?

We live in an age where deep-specialization is highly encouraged — the era of what tech analyst Vinnie Mirchandani calls the “monomath.” Doctors specialize, lawyers specialize, academics specialize, mechanics specialize … just about everyone professionally specializes. The more deeply you specialize, the more money you’re likely to make.

And that’s fine. Except when it’s not. The problem with deep specialization is that specialists tend to get stuck in their own points of view. They’ve been taught to focus so narrowly that they can’t look at a problem from different angles. And in the modern workscape we desperately need people with the ability to see big picture solutions. That’s where being a polymath has certain advantages.

Was Steve Jobs a better product designer than Apple’s lead designer Jonathan Ive? “No,” says author, entrepreneur, and popular blogger Tim Ferriss. “But [Jobs] has a broad range of skills and sees the unseen interconnectedness. As technology becomes a commodity with the democratization of information, it’s the big-picture generalists who will predict, innovate, and rise to power fastest.”

Polymathism is an idea that I’m pretty committed to (after all, I’ve started two businesses — iFixit and Dozuki — based on the premise of teaching pretty much everything to as many people as possible, whether it’s via work instructions or product manuals). And I look for that same desire to learn new things in the people who I hire. I don’t want coders who are just good at coding, designers who are just good at designing, or technical writers who can only write.

I don’t believe in overly-strict specialization. It’s too limiting. So, we push our coders to learn how to write well. We encourage our technicians to learn programming. We even bought a laser cutter to help our designers tinker. We push them out of their particular specializations to keep them learning. It’s a little uncomfortable, and sometimes they get things wrong the first time around. But, together, we usually discover a solution that we wouldn’t have discovered if we were all stuck in our own little knowledge cubicles.

And spreading knowledge little around can be a great path to innovation.

Take the burgeoning field of biomimicry, for example. Biomimicry looks to nature for solutions to modern problems — after all, Mother Earth has had 3.8 billion years to work out all the design kinks. Biomimetics requires practitioners to be more than engineers, more than biologists, more than ecologists, more than designers, and more than inventors. In true polymathic fashion, they must inhabit the mindframe of all of the above. And incredible innovation has come out of the field: a burr stuck in a dog’s fur became the design inspiration for velcro; the brilliantly-hued blue wings of a Morpho butterfly inspired a better television display; fabrics and paint that dramatically cut down drag were inspired by shark skin.

And that’s just the beginning. What insights might physicists bring to international relations? What might plumbers bring to cardiology? Polymathism is largely untapped force in business practice, but it’s also the future of problem-solving.

Those are the perks of being a polymath. May they inherit the earth.

Or something like that.

What is it really like to work at a company when it “goes public?” And what happens afterward? How will Mark Zuckerberg hold on to the people who make the company what it is, now that many of them will be independently wealthy — perhaps intoxicatingly so? How will he hold them together to make the company what it can be next? How will he align the “haves” and the future “have not so much” hires to pull on the same oar?

That’s what the new investors — the new owners — will depend upon. That’s what users will depend upon. And fortunately, there is something a leader can do at this junction. I’ve seen it happen once, and I hope Facebook’s incomparable visionary will make something like it happen again.

I had a front row seat to one of the most successful IPO’s of the dot-com boom. In July 1999, I left a law firm for a business development role at a startup with a strange name — Akamai Technologies. On day one, because we did not yet have a general counsel, the company told me — the only ex-lawyer then on staff — to manage the IPO. Because of the phenomenal technology, timing and team, the Akamai IPO became one of the most successful IPOs of that era.

So what actually happens inside a company on IPO day? Here’s what happened in my experience (which, granted, was over a decade ago). Several of the company leaders reappear, having spent the prior two weeks flying around Europe and the U.S. on private jets, spinning the company’s prospects to potential investors. Before that, there’s a lot of government-regulated preparation. Bankers and lawyers write a document that describes the business and the risks of investing in it to potential investors. They build a financial model of existing and expected revenues. They file it with regulators, wait for comments and respond to them. Then the company leaders start the roadshow, which hopefully creates enough excitement about the company among large investors that the bankers can line up buyers — if you’re lucky, stacks of buyers — for a chunk of the “book” of available shares. Then, in a seemingly unscientific frenzy in a paneled room on Wall Street, the bankers decide what price to place on the opening shares, and when to start selling them.

For the employees, the actual day of “going public” is very strange. At Akamai, in the early afternoon, we left our desks and met in a conference room to watch. There was not much to see. A large TV monitor sat above eye-level on a tall rack. Plates of cheese cubes and crackers covered a table. We squeezed in, shoulder to shoulder, heads tilted up to the screen. Most of our faces were unfamiliar to one another; the company had hired a lot of top people leading up to the IPO with the lure of pre-IPO options.

The screen flickered. Then, green numbers appeared. We cheered! AKAM stock was then available for purchase on the NASDAQ. Just like that. We watched the green numbers change — just simple rows of green numbers. Someone explained that the numbers represented the “bid” and the “ask” — what someone would pay for a share, and the price at which someone else would sell it. The bankers priced the shares at $26. They opened for trading at $114.50, and buyers chased it higher and higher until it settled down and finally closed at $145.19 at the end of the trading day.

As those green numbers changed on the screen, we cheered more, and ate cheese, while some colleagues had just become immeasurably wealthy — at least on paper. By law, vested employees were “locked up” and could not trade their vested shares until several months later. (Several months later, the boom would bust and much of that paper wealth would flutter away, but no one wanted to see that coming). Akamai was so young, and the boom so frothy, that most employees had not yet vested any shares. Facebook employees will be locked up for months too, but many employees have worked there long enough to have fully-vested their employee stock options.

Our co-founder and CTO, Danny Lewin, had suddenly turned from a struggling graduate student to a staggeringly wealthy man. His share of the company was worth over a billion dollars at the end of the day. It would have turned anyone’s head. But at 29, somehow Danny knew that the IPO — this moment of triumph — could also destroy his company. This was because, ironically, the collective efforts of his employees had created value that had made many of them independently wealthy. They did not need to be there anymore, even if the company still needed them.

That day, Danny did something remarkable. In the midst of the IPO celebration, Danny invited everyone to a conference room to discuss his grand vision of the company’s future. While green numbers still rose on the monitor, the party room emptied. The conference room filled. Danny, another young red head who wore faded jeans and white T-shirts, covered whiteboards with his vision. He spun us all up on the immense and powerfully exciting challenges ahead. The same big idea that made investors buy the company would make employees stay to build it.

With his compelling vision, Danny raised us above the distractions of wealth. He knew — and I hope Mark Zuckerberg will recognize the same — that the chance to achieve a big goal, alongside a compelling leader, is stickier than any stock promise could ever be. It is the grand vision — and only the grand vision — that will bind people, through distractions and unsettling change, to work together to reach the other side of possible.

Congratulations, Facebook! Thank you for what you have built. Enjoy the rocket ride, and still keep your eyes fixed above the horizon.

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A written transcript will be available by May 24.

To get started, be clear what culture to learn about. In a large institution, there may be big differences across departments. Cultures also can be moving targets. Large institutions may change with their environment. In start-ups, expect everything to be different a year later.

Be sure to understand the role you’d have, what you could accomplish, and what you’d learn. A strong culture will set people up for success, and you need to be sure that’s in place. In discussing your role, you’ll also get insight into how the place works.

Then, ask questions that point the discussion to how the organization works. General questions — “What’s the culture like?” or “Are people treated well?” — seldom work. I’ve come up with specific sample questions you can ask as you’re interviewing for a job or talking with others who know the institution. They’re grouped into six topic areas.

1. Purpose. Seek an institution whose purpose you could find inspiring. Consider asking:

• Is the institution’s purpose being met? What happens if there are gaps?
• When has the purpose changed a decision? What if purpose conflicts with financials?
• Who are the heroes?

Form an opinion whether people are proud of their product or service, and of their institution. Do people use the word “we” when mentioning it?

2. Teamwork. Consider how people work together, especially if you prefer to work in a highly collaborative environment or more independently. Ask:

• How much do you work with your colleagues? What team accomplishments make you proud?
• Are there special activities to promote teamwork? Are they voluntary?
• Are people mostly competing for promotion and credit, or are they selflessly united behind the institution?

At their best, teams can be a strength, but some can be a problem. Weigh the answers to these questions against what you want out of your work environment.

3. Colleagues. Who you’ll be working with and how they interact with each other is an important aspect of culture. Find out:

• Who in your institution do you spend time with outside work? What do you do together?
• Who in your institution do you expect to be part of your professional network over time?
• Who are your mentors? Do leaders continuously engage with you or coach you?

Judge how much deference people give to senior people and whether that feels right. Consider your past experiences, and ask yourself how the talent compares to your classmates in college or in earlier positions.

4. Communication. How people communicate with others — and how they expect you to communicate with them — will affect your day-to-day life. Consider asking:

• Except for sensitive information, do people know what’s going on?
• Do people say what they think? Are they direct and blunt, even if others are offended?
• Is everyone encouraged to participate in discussions and have dissenting opinions? Does the boss listen?
• Are people careful what they say and how they say it? Do they avoid controversial issues?

Consider how well people’s communications styles fit with your preferences. See if the communication during the interview matches the answers to your questions.

5. Performance. Before taking a job, you need to know how fair or demanding performance management is and how supervisors will be looking at your work. Ask:

• How would I be successful here?
• What determines performance evaluations?
• How is negative feedback communicated? Is it private, respectful, and focused on improvement, or negative and embarrassing?
• Do performance measures reflect differences in difficulty? Are measures adjusted when employees have limited influence on results?

Some like it when there’s no doubt what’s on the line. Others prefer a more nuanced view of performance. How do they compare to your preference?

6. Productivity. A good match of process and policy against your preferences will significantly affect your productivity.

• Are the right people involved in decisions at the right time? What steps must be taken before a big decision is made?
• Do supervisors have an open-door policy? Can people drop in with questions, or do they require appointments?
• What policies does the institution have on day-to-day activities (e.g., dress code, work hours, office environment)?

Look around the office while you’re there. Is it orderly or disorderly? Is the hiring process professional and respectful? Are there any red flags?

Cultural characteristics can be more or less appealing to different people. You might want an institution where performance is king, while others feel that isn’t fair. You might seek the clarity that formal structure and process provide, while others want a wide open environment. The culture you want is part of your aspirations, and understanding culture is part of deciding whether to accept an offer.

How do you suggest people evaluate organizational culture?