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Humans Are the System
You don’t need better frameworks—you need to create better conditions for people to do great work.
Mary Alice Duff
October 20, 2025
Hey reader,
Coming to you this week from the City of Lights—Paris, France.
Over lunch at a café with my daughter, she remarked how lovely our waiter was.
“He must make a lot of money,” she said.
Objectively, I knew that wasn’t true. A living wage, sure—but a lot of money?
Mais non.
But it got me thinking about cultural stereotypes, motivation at work, and what really drives people to show up and do their best.
This week, I’ve put pen to paper to give structure to “the way I work”—in hopes it helps you think differently about how you lead, grow, and manage exceptional teams.
Onward,
Mary Alice
Table of Contents
Humans are the System
As an American living—and working—in France, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with culturally blended teams: folks from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Croatia, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and the U.K.
Once you learn the quirks of cross-cultural communication (she didn’t use an exclamation point—is she mad at me?), you start to see the deeper layers: how people think about work, what motivates them, and what “doing good work” actually means.
American colleagues are often praised for their tireless work ethic—the drive, the urgency, the self-imposed standards. Meanwhile, their European counterparts take long lunches and longer vacations and seem to have cracked the code on actually enjoying life. Somewhere in the middle, I often joke, lies the sweet spot: I want American work ethic with European labor protections.
It always gets a laugh—and an eye roll. But the longer I live here, the more I find myself asking: what really motivates people to do exceptional work? Does fear drive the so-called American work ethic more than we like to admit? And how do you motivate European workers when they know firing isn’t exactly simple?