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Building More: Promoting Energy With A Desk Toy?

Words: Corey Adams

There’s a Newton’s cradle on almost every executive desk, five chrome spheres suspended in perfect alignment, waiting for someone to tap the end ball and set the whole string clicking. It’s equal parts physics lesson and stress-relief toy, but it also tells a blunt truth about organizations: momentum only survives when every link in the chain gives back exactly what it receives. The moment one ball stalls or drifts off center, the rhythm breaks, the energy fizzles, and the once-mesmerizing dance turns into a lopsided clack-clack-thud that nobody wants to watch.

Think about what actually happens inside that little sculpture. Lift the first sphere and you store potential energy. Let it go, and that energy rushes through the static line, exiting the far end as a clean, mirrored swing. Kinetic becomes potential, potential becomes kinetic, and the cradle could, in theory, tick forever were it not for air resistance and friction. The key is symmetry: each ball must be the same mass, hit the same point, and return the same gift of motion. Take one ball away, or replace it with a lump of clay, and the pulse stops dead.

Swap those steel spheres for managers, foremen, or project managers, and the metaphor sharpens. Every person on the org chart is both receiving momentum from the left and passing it to the right: information, attitude, urgency, hope. High-functioning companies resemble a flawless cradle: a superintendent absorbs the owner’s expectations, translates them cleanly into tasks, and watches energy flash through crews until it surfaces as a finished wall right on schedule. The pulse returns as profit, reputation, or a Friday afternoon high-five, ready to be reinvested in the next swing.

Now picture slotting a negative sphere into that line: a project manager who greets new ideas with an eye roll, a superintendent who answers every question with “that’ll never work,” or a salty employee who was passed over on the last round of promotions, whose goal is to prove their worth by sabotage. The mass is still there, but it’s all dead weight. When the incoming ball smacks that attitude, momentum vanishes as heat, team enthusiasm melts, timelines stretch, and margins bow. No matter how many spheres you lift on the front end, the output on the far side is a sad little nudge. Everyone downstream feels short-changed and starts pulling back their own swing. The cradle’s once-crisp cadence dissolves into random taps and awkward silences, exactly like a Monday meeting hijacked by the resident pessimist. Then the worst happens, the momentum completely stops, and the company comes to a grinding halt.

Owners sometimes treat negativity as a personality quirk, something to accommodate the way you’d tolerate a squeaky office chair. But physics refuses such courtesy. Energy lost to a dampening sphere is gone. You cannot pep-talk it back into existence; you must either reshape the object or remove it. Translate that to people: coach the attitude until it rings true, or invite it to exit the line before it bleeds the system dry. A single unaddressed cynic can turn an otherwise stellar crew into a group of cautious clock-punchers who stop sharing ideas and settle for bare-minimum compliance.

The upside is just as strict. Feed the cradle nothing but uniform, polished spheres, leaders who amplify clarity, celebrate wins, and transfer credit instead of hoarding it, and the chain hums like precision machinery. Momentum passes so cleanly that the owner hardly needs to lift the first ball again; frontline teams self-propel because the return stroke brings them fresh purpose every cycle. Subcontractors notice the rhythm, trade partners sync their own schedules to it, and clients sense a confidence that sets your firm apart from the herd of companies still wrestling with stop-and-go morale.

Maintaining that symmetry starts with hiring. Culture is one of my biggest areas of emphasis in the interview process. We have all dealt with enough negative people to see the signs early.

Even Newton’s Cradle isn’t perpetual. With all the perfect attitude balls you can have, daily friction will slow, impede, or throw off the symmetry. It is up to the owners to come in, address the friction, and then pick the first sphere up and get the momentum flowing again.

What if a fast-growing firm adds a sphere? Expanding into a new region, adding services, or winning a new client. It is the owner’s job to mold that sphere into the cradle. You can’t just shove it in line with a completely different set of rules. We have to make sure these regions, services, or clients fit the current energy, or it can derail the entire company.

An owner’s mood on any given morning has effectively lifted the ball. A snapped comment, an unreturned call, a sarcastic remark about a bid can skew momentum before lunch. If you lift the sphere carelessly, you can’t complain when the far end barely twitches. Positive energy doesn’t mean false cheer; it means deliberate, measured impact, just enough velocity to drive results without denting the next link.

End of day, stand back from the company’s cradle and listen. Do you hear a crisp, even click as goals, resources, and morale move from one team to the next? Or do you catch lopsided taps, energy dying somewhere in middle management, clunks that say a cynical sphere is soaking up the motion? Physics guarantees what will happen next: without intervention, the cradle stops and dust gathers. With symmetry restored, it can tick practically forever.

So polish the spheres, align the strings, and take a moment before you release that first ball each morning. Positive energy given equals positive energy returned. Keep every leader, every foreman, every coordinator tuned to that principle, and the cradle won’t just look impressive; it’ll sound like profit echoing down the line, click after click, swing after swing, without end.


About: Building More
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