Cubing from the Corner Office
Solving the Rubik’s Cube may be a model for approaching complex business challenges.
Emmanuel Pacheco with Cubezilla, Spinmaster's largest Rubik's Cube.
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Ask Emmanuel Pacheco how he rose to become a sales executive at Google, and he’ll tell you that he built his career following the same formula he used to attain the Guinness World Record that is hanging behind him in his Ontario office. And that is the same formula he uses to solve the Rubik’s Cube perched on his desk.
The Rubik’s Cube, the solving of which is considered at once to be a sport, a science, and an art, includes 54 stickers, 26 pieces, six sides, and 43 quintillion ways of being scrambled—more than the number of grains of sand on earth. Only one of those arrangements will result in monochromatic groupings. Pacheco, who teaches leaders at companies around the world to apply his approach to solving the cube to navigating complex business obstacles, is adamant that anyone can learn to solve the iconic puzzle in a week.
Erno Rubik, inventor of the Rubik's Cube, in 1981.
Erno Rubik, a Hungarian design teacher, invented the cube in 1974 to help his students understand three-dimensional movement. It took Rubik a month to be able to disentangle his own creation. As the cube celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the swiveling, rainbow-colored brainteaser is the world’s best-selling toy, with sales increasing year after year. The internet, of course, has helped drive interest by offering how-to tutorials. Netflix also captivated audiences with its 2020 documentary, The Speed Cubers, which dove into the obscure world of Rubik’s Cube competition. Speed cubers—many of whom are young men considered to be neurodivergent, just as Pacheco is—solve the puzzle at unfathomable speeds: The current world record for the 3x3x3 is 3.13 seconds.
Pacheco, who has a diagnosis of ADHD, has been good at solving problems since he was a boy, but he had a hard time conveying his process until he discovered the Rubik’s Cube. First, it was a matter of determining the polyhedron’s fixed constraints. For instance, the centers never move. The white center will always be opposite the yellow center. Green always opposite blue.
Similarly, corporate leaders must also work around immutable truths, such as the laws of physics, governmental policies, or technological limitations. Those realities, or centers, become the guides that the rest of the work happens within or around, Pacheco says. Then it’s about breaking down the overall process into a series of successive steps. When focused on edges, don’t worry about corners—those become what Pacheco calls distractions, and distractions only get in the way. Another lesson: When one cubelet moves, it shifts others. “Everything is interdependent,” Pacheco says. The same is true of business. Every decision affects a spectrum of shareholders. In puzzling and in management, the key is in finding alignment.
To teach Googlers to cube, Pacheco created an internal site, which currently has 13,841 members. Pacheco guides students using seven step-by-step lessons. If anyone gets stuck, he promises to take their call anytime, anywhere to help them get unstuck. But he has one condition: They have to go back to the video lesson of the step they are on and try one more time. Only four people have ever called. “It’s not about solving the problem,” Pacheco says. “It’s solving what is in front of you. That is a way to solve any problem in life."
