I wonder how many of those "sour grapes" commenters have actually read the thing–my guess, not many.
Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.
Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).
Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.
IME people are actually quite bad at thoroughly reading and absorbing onboarding material. Adding incentives so that they actually do it is probably pretty valuable.
I think there's at least some of the cliched HN behavior of "I read the title and used it as a prompt to write about my opinions on one of the nouns it contained".
I don't really care for Mr Beast (but don't think about him much either) and I don't think this is especially revelatory stuff, but I think most of it is pretty sound advice for how to be effective.
If you think this is some genius business advice, find the nearest 20 year old marketing major on stimulants and your mind will be blown.
Props to this guy for producing popular content and piecing together some management concepts, but this is so far from anything corporate leaders “need” to read.
Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.
Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).
Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.