That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can

by Thomas L. Friedman

  A decade ago, the army was still trying to instill knowledge through rote memorization, especially in basic training. “We still have that, but now we balance it with outcomes-based training,” said Dempsey. “So the task might be to evacuate a casualty. In the past we might do that with a PowerPoint in a classroom and then take the kids out and demonstrate it in the field. Now we start in the field because we not only want to develop the proficiency [in handling] of the task but we want to develop trust, we want trust to be one of the outcomes. We also have peerto-peer instruction. Before, the drill sergeant was God. If he said it, it was to be believed. And if he didn’t, it wasn’t important. Now the sergeants are alive to the idea that there are young men and women in the ranks who have leadership skills. Now they nurture them. They will tell some of the basic trainees, ‘You are responsible for this task: Here is an iPhone with an app on it. You learn about it and collaborate on it, and on Friday you teach the class.’ We find that the students are more attentive to their peers than to us. It requires a soldier not only to master the skill he is teaching but to be able to add value by teaching it to his peers.”

  The bottom line: “Collaboration is important on the battlefield and trust is the cement of collaboration,” said Dempsey. “And trust is the prerequisite for creativity. You will never be creative if you think that what you have to say will be discounted. So creativity cannot happen without trust, communication cannot happen without trust, and collaboration cannot happen without trust. It is the essential driver. And that is why you build authority now from the bottom up and not the top down.”

  Not so long ago, Dempsey explained, a junior officer would get the intelligence and information from above and then execute on the basis of that information. No one held that officer accountable for understanding or contributing significantly to higher headquarters’ understanding. “Now, in the kind of environments in which we find ourselves, the more important information comes from the bottom up, not the top down,” he said. That means lower-ranking personnel are as responsible for creating and understanding the context in which they are operating as the most senior leader on the field. “We are issuing iPhones to basic trainees so that they can pull down applications and collaborate on coursework,” said Dempsey. “I like to think of us as getting more and more adaptable—learning from what we experience as fast as possible and reacting to it. We have to do that fast and smart … I want this [U.S. Army] to be an adaptable learning organization.”

  Dempsey’s former colleague in Iraq, General Stanley McChrystal, witnessed this evolution in the battlefield at the very cutting edge when he commanded the Special Forces operations in Iraq that fought an underground war with al-Qaeda and Baathist elements and helped the surge succeed. They fought that war with a combination of unorthodox, innovative methods and modern technologies. Here is how McChrystal described his evolution to us:

  “My grandfather was a soldier. My father was a soldier. From the time my grandfather, at the end of World War I, went from lieutenant to colonel, there was a change in technology. But it was not so fast or so great that his experience did not provide him with a body of expertise that made him legitimate and credible with his men. The reality today is that when a general officer speaks to a captain, that general officer has almost never used any of the communications systems, intelligence assets, or weapons systems that the captain has. So when the general or colonel goes down there and tries to be the leader and the captain looks at him, [that captain knows] that this guy has never done the job he is doing, nothing close. So the reality is: How does the leader retain his legitimacy in his big organization? What is the basis for his credibility? Is it his good looks? This is a really big deal. Things go so fast now it is very difficult for people to be experts and still be leading.”

  One way to do both is to be more of an orchestrator and inspirer than a traditional hard-charging, follow-me-up-the-hill commander. As an example of this, McChrystal described special operations commanders in Iraq who adapted their units, turning them from just “shooters”—the people who go out on missions and kill or capture the enemy—into intelligence analysts who are always looking for targets and thinking about targets when they are not in the field. “In the past, when they were not going on the target, the shooters would just have been working out or sleeping,” McChrystal said. Instead, the commanders put them behind desks to analyze and sift through and argue over all the raw intelligence about potential targets. “As a consequence, [those commanders] probably increased their field capacity tenfold. They created guys who were entrepreneurial and always fighting for more information. They owned the mission much more—because they were actually assembling and analyzing the information and selecting priorities … They were careful not to waste intelligence assets, because it affected their productivity, [and] they did not send the assault force on a stupid mission, because they were the assault force that was going on that mission. When we captured people, they would sit in on the interrogations. It made them so much more effective.”

  Blue-Collar American

  DuPont makes a lot of things. To survive for 208 years a company has to be good at making a lot of things. In fact, DuPont makes so many things that if you go to its website and click on “Products & Services,” it shows you the alphabet. If you click on any letter—except J, Q, or X—there is something DuPont makes that starts with that letter. Hit “H” and you get directed to “Harmony® Extra XP herbicide.” Hit “Z” and you get directed to “Zenite® LCP liquid crystal polymer resin.” Given how many products DuPont makes, and the number of blue-collar workers it employs all over the world, there are few executives who can better describe the kind of blue-collar workers needed for the twenty-first century than Ellen Kullman, who became DuPont’s nineteenth CEO in 2009.

  In an interview at company headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, Kullman summarized in a single word what she looks for in every employee today, from senior vice presidents to production line employees: “presence.” “We want every employee to be present in the room. What I mean by that is that all the rote jobs today are gone—they are done by machines. Now you have to have people who can think and interact and collaborate. But to do that they have to be engaged and paying attention—they have to be present—so that they are additive, and not just taking up space. Whatever job you have in the company, you need to understand how your job adds value wherever you are [in the chain]. Because if you know that, then you can add value. But you will not be successful here if you just come to work and say, ‘When do I arrive and when do I get to leave?’”

  Production-line workers at today’s DuPont plants, she added, have to “collaborate and work in teams, they have to be able to communicate with engineers and tell them everything that they are seeing on the line every day. They have to bring their thinking into what they do—they can’t just go into their little zone and punch buttons all day. It is just a much more integrative and collaborative environment.”

  A line worker who is engaged can save a company millions of dollars with just one insight, as Kullman explained with an example. DuPont invests a huge amount of money every year in factories and equipment, and one key to making profits is having those machines working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “So we are constantly measuring uptime and yields on every piece of equipment,” said Kullman. The company has a big plant in Spruance, Virginia, and on a particular production line of spinning cells that put out Kevlar fibers the machines kept prematurely failing, bringing the whole line down. “So the engineers are sitting there trying to solve the problem in one area of the line,” Kullman recalled, “and one of the line operators broke in and said to them, ‘You know what is strange is that the machines that fail sound different.’ So they started to work with the guy and isolated the problem, which had to do with new units. It immediately increased the utilization of the whole plant. Now, the engineers don’t live there like the line operators do. They are not listening every day … It is why you nee
d every employee to have the mind-set of how they help us make every product better.”

  DuPont recently installed a company-wide production-management system that is based on inviting every employee to help improve a product or manufacturing process. “Every worker has to be engaged,” she explained, “so we now spend a lot of time thinking about how we as leaders create a better environment for that—so we can get the best out of our employees, our equipment and plants, and our company.”

  Kevlar, a synthetic fabric used to make protective vests, is one of DuPont’s signature products. Only by using the assets of the whole company has DuPont been able to maintain its lead in that product area. According to Kullman, “The Kevlar we make today is vastly different from two decades ago in terms of tenacity and how lightweight it is. It took researchers working with engineers and with production employees to make the whole system better. We had to. The world doesn’t wait for you. We have competitors who are very aggressive. I was recently down in one of our plants in Texas and you had a cross section of maintenance workers, operators, and engineers all in one room—ten of them—working on a real problem: How did they reduce the turnaround time for the maintenance of one of their machines and get more production time out of every day? To see them all work together, each getting up at the drawing board and talking about it, trying to solve the problem together, is something to watch.”

  DuPont does not operate with cheap labor. “Our plants are made up of big equipment,” explained Kullman. “One of the big factors we look at in locating a plant is the availability of an educated workforce. Our plant in Spruance that makes Kevlar has three criteria for hiring a line operator: You need to have more than a high school degree, either a community-college degree or a vocational-college degree; or you have to have had experience at another company; or you have to be a military veteran. You have to have two out of those three. And we partner with community colleges to make sure that we have the right opportunities to get that training. [Also], we interview them differently than we did decades ago. They have to be able to communicate with engineers. They have to be able to bring their thinking into the job.”

  Carlson’s Law

  If we step back and take all these stories together, some very important trends in today’s workplace become clear: the people on the bottom rung of the workplace are becoming more and more empowered, which means more innovation will come from the bottom up, rather than just from the top down. Therefore it is vital that we retain as much manufacturing in America as possible, so our workers can take part in this innovation.

  “People think innovation is the idea you have in the shower,” said Ernie Moniz, the physicist who heads MIT’s Energy Initiative. “More often it comes from seeing the problem. It comes out of working with the materials.” To be sure, there is some pure innovation—coming up with a product or service no one had thought of before. But a lot more innovation comes from working on the line, seeing a problem, and devising a solution that itself becomes a new product. That is why if we don’t retain at least part of the manufacturing process in America, particularly the high-end manufacturing, we will lose touch with an important source of innovation: the experience of working directly with a product and figuring out how to improve it—or how to replace it with something even better.

  “A lot of innovation now happens on the shop floor,” said Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, Léo Apotheker. Indeed, if you open a factory, and are doing things right, “it will be more productive a year later because the workers themselves on the factory floor are critical thinkers and can improve processes along the way,” said Byron Auguste, the McKinsey director. In any factory or call center, he noted, “there is often dramatic variation in productivity in different parts of the system. If you have continuous learners on the shop floor or in the call center, there is a constant opportunity to learn and spread the word, and then everyone improves. If you are doing that in every node of your production, design, and aftersales service, you will have a system that delivers three percent productivity growth every year and is not dependent on new inventions coming out of Carnegie Mellon University or Silicon Valley.”

  In the past, companies had ‘‘innovation centers” off in the woods, where big-thinking R&D teams devised new things that were then produced on the assembly line. Some companies still have such centers, but others are opting instead for continuous innovation that includes frontline workers as well as top management. Now every employee is part of the process, often using social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. The assembly-line worker today not only has more information than ever before, but also the capacity to communicate what he or she is learning instantly to upper management and throughout the company.

  Continuous innovation is not a luxury anymore—it is becoming a necessity. In the hyper-connected world, whatever can be done, will be done. The only question for a company is whether it will be done by it or to it: but it will be done. A breakthrough product, such as the iPhone, instantly generates competition—the Android. Within months, the iPad had multiple competitors. So a company that does not practice constant innovation by taking advantage of every ounce of brainpower at every level will fall behind farther and faster than ever before.

  Before the world became hyper-connected, American companies moved jobs around the world—that is, they outsourced parts of their business process—to save money that they then reinvested in new products, services, and people in the United States, because they could. Now companies move jobs around the world to do “crowdsourcing” and distributed innovation, because they must. They find the most creative brainpower, the most productive workforce, the most inviting tax rules, and the best infrastructure in or near the fastest-growing markets, because they must. They must use the whole global “crowd” to invent, design, manufacture, improve, and sell their products. If they don’t, their competition will. We repeat: In the hyper-connected world, whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is, will it be done by you or to you?

  Ask Curtis Carlson, the CEO of SRI International, which serves as an innovation factory for governments and companies on topics ranging from education to clean energy to homeland security. Government agencies and private companies come to Carlson and his teams of scientists, engineers, and educators; they describe what they want—often blue-sky wish lists or solutions to seemingly insoluble problems—and ask SRI to invent it for them. When he gets a request, Carlson’s first step is to assemble a team of SRI scientists, engineers, and designers, along with outside experts—fitting the people to the problem as best he can.

  “There are few problems left today where one person with one skill can solve them,” he explained. “That means you had better assemble the best team. Not a good team—the best team. You don’t want to be ‘world class.’ That just means there are a lot of others like you. You want your team to be best in the world.”

  Given the rising innovative power and knowledge that can so easily move from the bottom up now—the power to invent, design, manufacture, improve, and sell products—and not just from the top down, Carlson sees the following mega-trend barreling down the highway: “More and more, innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.” Therefore, “the sweet spot for innovation today is moving down.”

  We call this Carlson’s Law: Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. This makes it all the more important for every worker to be a creative creator or creative server and for every boss to understand that the boss’s job is to take advantage of Carlson’s Law—to find ways to inspire, enable, and unleash innovation from the bottom up, and then to edit, manage, and merge that innovation from the top down to produce goods, services, and concepts.

  “We had a group visiting SRI from Japan the other day,” Carlson told us in March 2011, “and one of them asked me: ‘How man
y big decisions do you make every day?’ I said, ‘My goal is to make none of them. I am not the one interacting daily with the customer or the technology. My employees are the ones interacting, so if [moving ahead on a project] has to wait for me to decide, that is too slow. That does not mean I don’t have a job. My job is to help create an environment where those decisions can happen where they should happen—and to support them and reward them and inspire them.’”

  Carlson said he thinks of himself more as “the mayor” of his company, orchestrating all the departments and listening to his constituencies, rather than as a classic top-down CEO.

  So there it is: This is not your grandparents’ labor market anymore. It is not even your parents’. Each and every one of us has to be “present” now, all the time, in whatever we do, so that we can be either creative creators or creative servers. That’s where the jobs will be. This is why our schools need to prepare all students for careers in which they not only do their assigned tasks but offer something extra. For everyone to find his or her “extra” will require both more education and better education. The next two chapters are about how we can deliver this so every American can adapt to the merger of globalization and the IT revolution.