Cascades
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The next day, President Yanukovych met with the opposition politicians and signed the deal that the international negotiators had brokered. But as the group left the room, Yanukovych’s security detail seemed to just melt away. Without allies even in his own government, the former strongman had no choice but to flee. He rushed to his residence, gathered some things, and boarded a helicopter. Yanukovych was never seen in Ukraine again and, within a few days, was unanimously impeached from office. In the end, he was done in not by the protestors, but by his most ardent supporters. At that point, to be seen as allied with Yanukovych was to become a pariah.
Let’s return to the civil rights movement. Its leaders had spent years mobilizing support from southern blacks and liberal whites. During those earlier protests, mainstream America had witnessed scenes on the televisions in their living rooms that they could not imagine happening in their own country. Ordinary citizens were being beaten for exercising their right to speak and to vote. Children were being attacked by snarling dogs and fire hoses. It was unconscionable. Few wanted to be associated with such brutality and injustice.
The March on Washington was designed not to rally the faithful, but to appeal to those in mainstream America who had been watching those enormously powerful scenes unfold on their televisions—those in the middle of the Spectrum of Allies—and to shift some passive opponents to a more neutral position and active opponents to a more passive position. Surely, in the end, it didn’t convince everybody, but it did enough to win civil rights and bring important changes about.
The same strategic approach can be put to use within an organization. The military reformer Colonel John Boyd knew that he would face fierce opposition to his efforts to reform wasteful spending in the Pentagon, which had become endemic by the 1980s. Costs were ballooning, and budgeting was so slipshod that a colleague had calculated that President Reagan’s defense buildup was being underestimated by $500 billion, an enormous sum even in the context of federal budgets.15
At the same time, it was in many people’s interests for the profligate spending to continue. Certainly, the defense contractors who made fat profits on expensive weapons systems didn’t want things to change. It also benefited the generals and the admirals, who earned prestige from overseeing big projects and, not uncommonly, cushy, lucrative jobs consulting for the defense industry after retirement.16 They were, understandably, resistant to change, but especially contemptuous of aspersions being cast by a mere colonel.
Another challenge was that the military is a profoundly hierarchical organization in which orders are not to be questioned. Senior officers in the military are accorded a level of deference unlike anything in the private sector. They are also surrounded by junior officers and staff who depend on their evaluations to get promoted. It’s not like an army officer can just go out and take a job with a competitor. One black mark can send a once promising career spanning decades into oblivion, so subordinates are wary of speaking out of turn.17
With all this in mind, Boyd was careful not to brief the generals directly, at least not at first. He started out briefing a small circle of confidants, known as the Acolytes, who would help check facts, streamline logical arguments, and hone the message. Once he was confident that his argument was unassailable, he would start presenting to junior officers. After he had gained some momentum and polished his pitch some more, he moved on to congressional staffers, who were always receptive to ideas that they could take to their bosses. He then moved on to elected officials, many of whom relished the opportunity to push for reforms. Boyd moved on to the top generals last, only when he had already gathered far too much support to be ignored.
Make no mistake. The only way to create change is to gather support, and the Spectrum of Allies maps your path to victory. If, for example, you are an employee at a major corporation and you want to push for change, camping out with a few confederates outside the CEO’s office would achieve little more than losing your job and being led out of the building by burly security guards. If, on the other hand, you built allies and worked to recruit others, especially those with somewhat higher thresholds of resistance, your chances of achieving something worthwhile would markedly increase.
Still, while mobilizing support is absolutely essential, it is far from sufficient. Attracting adoring crowds might feel good, but that’s not what brings change about. Institutions are what do. And that brings us to the second element of strategy: the Pillars of Support.18 Every tyrant, no matter how powerful, needs others to carry out his or her bidding. Without those, even the mightiest empire will crumble. Successful movements identify these pillars—not to knock them out, but to draw them in.
THE PILLARS OF SUPPORT
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Every political regime needs institutions such as the police to keep order, bureaucracies to administrate policies, business groups to manage commerce, and others to carry out crucial functions of governance. In a private organization, leaders need to maintain the support of a variety of different stakeholders, including shareholders, customer groups, partners, various functional departments, and others. Every situation is different, but one thing is always constant: nobody rules alone. No regime is a monolith.
Figure 5.2 shows what the pillars might look like in a typical nonviolent revolution like the ones we have seen in Serbia and Ukraine. Otpor’s tactics were cleverly designed to bring institutions over to their side. Their pranks were funny and exposed the hypocrisy of the regime, which made great copy for the media. Even arrests were seen as an opportunity to build personal relationships with police officers, some of whom sympathized with the protestors and were receptive to their good-natured banter. Business leaders were already unhappy with the years of war and economic isolation that Milošević’s reign had wrought.
FIGURE 5.2 The Pillars of Support
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All of these would eventually become decisive in the end game, when Milošević refused to honor the results of the election he lost. Support from the business community proved essential to help organize and supply the protests. Police and security forces were forced to decide whether to shoot into the crowds or obey the will of the people. They chose the latter. Professional journalists were needed to report events to the Serbian people—and the world. Otpor activists, for all of their energy, savvy, and talent, could have done little of this alone.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, a similar dynamic played out during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. As we stood in the freezing cold on the Maidan hoping for a new future for Ukraine, 10,000 Interior Ministry troops were gathering outside Kyiv to crush the protests. Armed with live ammunition and tear gas, they were fully mobilized and ready to strike. Martial law was to be declared in Ukraine.
The events that came next were fit for a John le Carré novel. The Ukrainian security service, the SBU, moved to thwart the Interior Ministry’s efforts. They informed the opposition leaders of the impending danger and then conferred with the army. As C. J. Chivers later reported in the New York Times, a message was relayed to the Interior Ministry that they “‘are on the side of the people, and will defend the people, and that the M.V.D. [the Interior Ministry] will have to deal not only with unarmed people and youth if it comes to Kiev, but with the army’ and the special forces inside the intelligence agencies.” The troops were turned back and no action took place.19
In his quest to reform the Pentagon, Colonel Boyd also recognized the importance of the pillars of support. Notice how while building his Spectrum of Allies, which represented increasing thresholds of resistance, from close allies, to junior officers, to congressional staffers, to elected officials and political appointees, he was also skillfully navigating the institutions that supported corruption within the military.
He actively leveraged his Spectrum of Allies to win support of officials in both the legislative and executive branches of government, both of which had constitutionally mandated authority over senior military leaders. Talk of the findings
of Boyd and his “Acolytes” eventually found its way to the media, and unclassified briefings were prepared for journalists. One of these, termed the “Spinney Report,” landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1983 with the seductive headline, “U.S. Defense Spending: Are Billions Being Wasted?”20 A few years before that, a young journalist named James Fallows spent hours interviewing Boyd and his Acolytes, which led to a story in the Atlantic entitled “The Muscle-Bound Superpower.” It was read widely, led to further articles, and eventually a book, National Defense, which won numerous awards and launched Fallows’s career as one of America’s premier journalists. Other media outlets also began covering the story of America’s “hollow military,” which led to congressional hearings and drove real change at the Defense Department.21 Popular support is essential, but to drive through change you need the institutions that make up the Pillars of Support.
Boyd and his small band of followers had taken on the Pentagon, one of the most powerful and change-averse institutions on the planet, and won. At the heart of his movement was the notion that first you need to subvert your ego to the cause. “To be somebody or to do something,” he would tell his Acolytes. “In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”22 Boyd chose to do, and that meant mobilizing his Spectrum of Allies to influence the Pillars of Support with a laser-like focus on creating the change he wanted to see. He wasn’t interested in just making a point; he wanted to make a difference.
“You need an institutional shift,” Srdja Popović told me, “It’s not only a mind shift.” When he works with activist movements in his capacity as executive director of CANVAS, Srdja walks groups through an exercise called “power graph,” in which they chart where key institutions stand related to the vision for change as the movement progresses and see what influences their attitudes. “It’s a dynamic exercise,” he explained, “in which you say, ‘This is the change I want to achieve, these are the constituencies I want to talk to, and these are my early allies and these are my later allies. . . . And these are the pillars that the status quo is standing upon,’ and then you need to ask yourself, ‘what influences the change in the pillar?’ You are still examining the battlefield; you are not fighting yet. You are still learning about your opponent. You are still learning about the terrain. You need to understand which social groups you need to pull and which pillars you need to change.”23
On the other side of the coin, we have already seen how John Antioco at Blockbuster had his plans thwarted because he failed to gain the support of powerful institutions connected to his organization, such as the franchisees and the shareholders. He won a battle against Netflix by formulating a shrewd market strategy, and in doing so he won some favor with customers, but when it came to the battles within his own organization, he didn’t make the same effort. When I talked to him, it seemed to me that his earlier success overcoming critics, such as when he switched to the revenue sharing model for acquiring movies at Blockbuster, had convinced him that if he just kept pushing through everybody would see the wisdom of his plan and everything would be okay. After all, his approach had proven successful time and time again. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the same way this time. Uncertainty about his plan crushed the stock price, which attracted the corporate raider Carl Icahn. That led to the compensation dispute and his departure from the company.
Now imagine how different things could have been if the Occupy protestors, instead of rushing to take over Zuccotti Park, had instead courted local Chambers of Commerce (there are roughly 3,000 in the United States)24 whose members had been harmed by the malfeasance of large banks. Or if instead of disrupting political rallies, the Black Lives Matter movement had worked to gain the support of even a few dozen of the over 15,000 police departments in the United States,25 or forged a common purpose with organizations like the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.
Criminal justice reform is not just important for the minority communities most directly affected, but has serious consequences for the nation as a whole. Consider that today, amid a serious labor shortage that hamstrings major industries, 6 to 7 percent of prime working age males have a history of incarceration,26 which renders them all but unemployable, often due to minor, nonviolent convictions. Or that it costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to incarcerate an inmate (estimated to total about $80 billion in expenditures and $1 trillion in indirect costs for the country as a whole),27 meaning that our overly aggressive criminal justice system means fewer cops on the beat and teachers in classrooms.
Or, as President Harry Truman put it, “We have learned that nations are interdependent and that recognition of our dependence upon one another is essential to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of all mankind. So long as the basic rights of men are denied in any substantial portion of the earth, men everywhere must live in fear of their own rights and security.”28
Gathering the support of law enforcement officials sympathetic to their cause, making the argument for the common cause of economic competitiveness, and invoking the words of a revered president—Black Lives Matter had the opportunity to do all of these and many other things. Sure, none of that would have been as thrilling as holding a public demonstration and denouncing the powers that be, but it would have helped inoculate them from being portrayed as anarchists or antipolice and might have pointed the way to a strategy that could actually make a difference.
A successful strategy matches the key constituencies in the Spectrum of Allies and the key institutions that make up the Pillars of Support with the tactics that are most likely to bring them into the fold. That’s how you win and bring about the change you want to see.
Let’s return to our corporate example. Once you’ve decided not to camp outside the CEO’s office and begin to recruit allies, your attentions would turn to the various stakeholders that support the business, such as internal departments, shareholders, customer groups, and so on. Which ones stand to gain from the change you want to see? Which stand to lose? How can they be convinced that change is in their best interest or, at the very least, so inevitable that resistance is futile? If you want to make change happen, these are the questions you need to ask.
Successful movements recognize that the Spectrum of Allies and the Pillars of Support intersect because, after all, institutions derive their power from people. Otpor saw the inevitable arrests they had to endure not merely as an inconvenience, or even as a way to test their courage and conviction, but also as an opportunity for infiltration. They recognized that the policemen were, ultimately, just people with a job to do, not necessarily malevolent figures. So they used their time in police stations to build relationships with the officers, while also gathering the media outside the police station and gaining more exposure. It was these relationships that became crucial in the end game, when police had to make the decision of whether to shoot into the crowds to keep Milošević in power or throw in with the protestors.
As we saw in the last chapter, when Paul O’Neill was named CEO at Alcoa and set out to turn around the struggling company, he started by putting worker safety first. His efforts not only led to a better workplace and improved product quality, but also forged a common purpose between managers and workers. By winning over these constituencies in his Spectrum of Allies, he made inroads into important Pillars of Support, such as the unions and the media, which helped him also pull in other pillars, like customers and shareholders. After all, who could argue with better safety? What O’Neill understood was that the same culture and practices that promote a safer workplace could also lead to operational excellence and a much more profitable company.
Look at any successful movement for change, and it contains the three elements we’ve discussed: a clear vision for fundamental change, breaking through increasing thresholds of resistance within the Spectrum of Allies, and institutional shifts within the Pillars of Support. Those are the building blocks of strate
gy through which you design your tactics.
To understand how this all works, let’s take a close look at one of the lesser-known, but still crucial, campaigns in the struggle for civil rights, the Nashville sit-ins.
HOW A STRATEGY COMES TOGETHER
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It was 1958 and John Lewis was a sophomore at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, when he met James Lawson. Thirty years old, but worldly beyond his years, Lawson had already been to jail for refusing to report for the draft. Although he would have been eligible for a ministerial or student deferment, out of principle he never sought to obtain one and entered captivity willingly. After being released from prison, he went to India as a Methodist missionary, where he studied the principles of Satyagraha with several of Gandhi’s disciples. He came to Nashville with the dual purpose of pursuing a doctorate at the Vanderbilt Divinity School and serving as a field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization active in the civil rights movement.29
Lewis was immediately taken in by Lawson and began attending his Tuesday evening workshops, which indoctrinated students in Gandhi’s methods. Before long, Lewis convinced his friend Bernard Lafayette to join the slowly growing coterie that included future civil rights luminaries such as Diane Nash, James Bevel, and Marion Barry. Eventually, the students organized themselves into the Student Movement. They wanted to make a difference through a direct nonviolent action, but what kind of action they would undertake was still unclear.30