Cascades

by Greg Satell

  17. There has been an enormous amount of speculation about this meeting, which is described in Gina Keating’s book Netflixed (66–67) as well as in a number of accounts online. Perhaps not surprisingly, different people have different recollections. What is clear is that Netflix had not identified a viable business model at the time and was losing lots of money. It had first begun testing its subscription model in September of 1999 and committed to its subscription model in February of 2000, just a few months before the meeting took place (Keating, Netflixed, 58–60). When I spoke to John Antioco about the event, he remembers it, but says he wasn’t there, although some accounts have him stepping in for a few minutes to shake hands and say hello. He also doesn’t remember any serious discussion about an acquisition, for $50 million or any other amount of money, although he says that it might have come up in passing. He did seem to think, at least from what I could gather, that Netflix didn’t have anything that Blockbuster couldn’t build itself, which seems to be true. Later, after Netflix had identified a sustainable business model, there were serious merger talks, but they didn’t get very far because of regulatory concerns. Lawyers on both sides immediately killed the idea.

  18. Keating, Netflixed, 116–19.

  19. Ibid., 172–77, 180–82.

  20. Ibid. 214–15.

  21. John Antioco, “How I Did It: Blockbuster’s Former CEO on Sparring with an Activist Shareholder,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/04/how-i-did-it-blockbusters-former-ceo-on-sparring-with-an-activist-shareholder.

  22. http://www.biography.com/people/stanley-mcchrystal-578710.

  23. Stanley McChrystal, et. al., Team of Teams (Portfolio/Penguin, 2015), 69.

  24. Ibid. 120–22.

  25. Ibid., 209.

  26. Ibid., 84.

  27. Ibid., 174.

  28. Ibid., 216.

  29. Ibid., 226.

  30. Ibid., 218.

  31. AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard University Press, 1994), 14.

  32. Ibid., 15.

  33. Ibid., 99.

  34. Fox Butterfield, “What You See Is What You Get,” New York Times, May 1, 1988.

  35. Saxenian, Regional Advantage, 75.

  36. Ibid. 69–73.

  37. Ray S. Cline, A World Power Assessment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977). A discussion of Cline’s formulation and others can be found in Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power (Perseus, 2011), 3–24.

  38. R. H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16 (November 1937), 386–405.

  39. Michael E. Porter, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (New York: Free Press, 1985).

  40. https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerbergs-first-book-is-out-of-stock-2015-1.

  41. Innosight, 2018 Corporate Longevity Forecast: Creative Destruction is Accelerating, February 2018, https://www.innosight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Innosight-Corporate-Longevity-2018.pdf.

  42. Perry’s analysis can be found at http://www.aei-ideas.org/2011/11/fortune-500-firms-in-1955-vs-2011-87-are-gone/.

  43. Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (Basic Books, 2013).

  44. Ibid., 11.

  45. McChrystal et. al., Team of Teams, 127.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. For background on the Orange Revolution, see Anders Åslund and Michael McFaul, eds., Revolution in Orange (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006); Askold Krushelnycky, An Orange Revolution: A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History (Harvill Secker, 2006); Adrian Karatnycky, “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005; Timothy Garton Ash and Timothy Snyder, “The Orange Revolution,” The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2005.

  2. For more information about Holodomor, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010); and Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (Penguin Random House, 2017).

  3. Anders Åslund and Michael McFaul, eds., Revolution in Orange (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), 13–14.

  4. IMF database.

  5. The largest news site was Korrespondent.

  6. See: Irina Sandul, “Kuchmagate, Two Years On,” Time, September 26, 2002.

  7. “Post Owner Barred From Ukraine,” Kyiv Post, April 13, 2000.

  8. Adrian Karatnycky, “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005.

  9. Interview with author.

  10. Guy Faulconbridge, Anna Dabrowska, and Stephen Grey, “Toppled ‘Mafia’ President Cost Ukraine up to $100 Billion, Prosecutor Says,” Reuters, April 30, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/30/us-ukraine-crisis-yanukovich-idUSBREA3T0K820140430. https://data.worldbank.org/country/ukraine?view=chart

  11. An amazing assortment of incidents can be found in Yuriy Onyshkiv, “Unruly Untouchables,” Kyiv Post, July 11, 2011, http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/unruly-untouchables-108662.html; and Mykola Riabchuk, “Like Fathers, Like Sons: Ukraine’s Untouchables,” Open Democracy, April 12, 2011, https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/mykola-riabchuk/like-fathers-like-sons-ukraine%E2%80%99s-untouchables.

  12. Thomas Rid, “Cracks in the Jihad,” The Wilson Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 40–48.

  13. John Antioco gives his account of the Blockbuster story in “How I Did It: Blockbuster’s Former CEO on Sparring with an Activist Shareholder,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Strogatz describes the incident in his book Sync (Hyperion, 2004).

  2. Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W. W. Norton and Company, 2004).

  3. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (October 1963): 371–78.

  4. Michael Luo, “Excuse Me. May I Have Your Seat?,” New York Times, September 14, 2004.

  5. Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (Plume, 2003), 27–30.

  6. Peter Sheridan Dodds, Roby Muhamadú, and Duncan J. Watts, “An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks,” Science, August 2003, http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/dodds03search.pdf.

  7. For a more extended discussion of Euler and his creation of graph theory, see Barabási, Linked, 9–13.

  8. For a fascinating and fabulously entertaining account of Paul Erdős’s life, see Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth (Hyperion, 1999).

  9. Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 34.

  10. The formula for potential links is N(N – 1)/2, and the formula for calculating the number of random links needed to connect the whole network is ln(N)/N, where N is the number of nodes in both cases.

  11. Many believe that 4Chan played a similar role in promoting memes to benefit Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

  12. A full account of Rapoport’s life and work can be found in his autobiography: Anatol Rapoport, Certainties and Doubts (Black Rose Books, 2000).

  13. Watts, Six Degrees, 57–59.

  14. A. Rapoport and W. J. Horvath, “A Study of a Large Sociogram,” Behavioral Science 6 (1961): 279–91.

  15. Buchanan, Nexus, 45–46.

  16. Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 34.

  17. Ibid., 53.

  18. Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May 1973), 1360–80.

  19. Watts, Six Degrees, 139.

  20. Watts, Six Degrees, 49.

  21. Ibid, 68.

  22. D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” Nature 393 (1998). />
  23. Watts, Six Degrees, 20–25.

  24. Watts, Six Degrees, 236–43. Interested readers might also want to read: Duncan J. Watts, “A Simple Model of Global Cascades on Random Networks,” PNAS 99, no. 9 (April 30, 2002), 5766–71, https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/260-FMIE/Papers/watts.pdf.

  25. A full account of Orpheus’s management model can be found in, Harvey Seifter and Peter Economy, Leadership Ensemble (Times Books, Henry Holt and Company LLC, 2001).

  26. Gary Hamel, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers,” Harvard Business Review, December 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Vintage, 2004), 206.

  2. Duncan Watts wrote that to me in response to a fact check.

  3. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Company, 2000), 33.

  4. Paul Lazarsfeld, The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (Columbia University Press, 1948).

  5. A good summary can be found in Elihu Katz, The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-to-Date Report on an Hypothesis, University of Pennsylvania Departmental Papers, 1957.

  6. Peter Sheridan Dodds, et al., “An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks,” Science 301 (2003): 827.

  7. Eytan Bakshy, et. al., “Everyone’s an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter,” WSDM ’11, Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining.

  8. Duncan Watts in particular emphasized this point. In response to a fact check e-mail, he wrote, “I agree that the mechanisms you describe are closer to the truth of what is happening than ‘special individuals’ (obviously—after writing two books about it). However, I think there’s a big and important difference between describing the nature of the mechanisms at work and being able to say that one particular instance ‘worked’ and another did not . . . explanations of the sort ‘the reason A succeeded and B didn’t is because of X’ (ex-post) vs. explanations of the sort ‘A will succeed and B will fail because of X’ (ex-ante). Although both sorts of explanations are common, in principle the latter can be checked for accuracy, whereas the former—benefitting as they do from knowing the answer—cannot. As a result, only ex-ante explanations (i.e. predictions) count for evaluating a theory. Put another way, it’s fine to use ex-post explanations to generate theories but not to test them.”

  9. A description of the account can be found in Asch’s obituary in the New York Times: David Stout, “Solomon Asch Is Dead at 88; A Leading Social Psychologist,” New York Times, February 29, 1996.

  10. Solomon Asch, “Opinions and Social Pressure,” Scientific American, 1955.

  11. Katz, The Two-Step Flow of Communication.

  12. Mark Granovetter, “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 6 (May 1978): 1420–43.

  13. There is an overwhelming amount of literature regarding informational cascades that is too broad to catalog here; however, interested readers can look to Chapter 16 of David Easley and Jon Kleinberg’s definitive textbook, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Suzanne Lohmann’s analysis, “The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989–1991,” World Politics 47, no. 1 (October 1994); and M. E. J. Newman and D. J. Watts, “Scaling and Percolation in the Small-World Network Model,” Physical Review E 60, no. 6 (1999): 7332–42.

  14. Valuable insights into strategies that lower thresholds can be found in Jonah Berger’s excellent book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On (Simon & Schuster, 2013).

  15. A comprehensive summary of diffusion of innovations research can be found in n Don Stacks and Michael Salwen (Eds) (in press), An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research (New York: Routledge), Chapter 27, 418–34.

  16. E. M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1962).

  17. Stacks and Salwen, 2008, 219.

  18. Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Harper Collins, 1991).

  19. Duncan Watts, “A Simple Model of Global Cascades on Random Networks,” PNAS 99, no. 9 (April 30, 2002): 5766–71.

  20. See Zeynep Tufecki, Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press, 2017), 96–99.

  21. Joan Walsh, “The Man Who Blocked John Lewis Speaks,” Salon.com, October 13, 2011, https://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/the_man_who_blocked_john_lewis_speaks/.

  22. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/10/8/1429460/-Setting-the-record-straight-on-OWS-and-John-Lewis.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century (Praeger Publishers, 1994), 169; a full text can also be found here: http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute-memories/read-contributions/major-events-pre-1950/283-purna-swaraj-the-demand-for-full-independence-26-january-1930-.

  2. Louis Fischer, Gandhi (Signet; reprint edition, Penguin Group, 2010), 103.

  3. Mark Engler, Paul Engler, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (Nation Books, 2016), 125.

  4. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 84.

  5. Fischer, Gandhi, 5–9.

  6. Ibid., 18–19.

  7. Mohandas Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Beacon Press, 1993), 105–117.

  8. Ibid., 131.

  9. Fischer, Gandhi, 35.

  10. Ackerman and DuVall, A Force More Powerful, 65.

  11. Gandhi, An Autobiography, 148.

  12. Fischer, Gandhi, 35.

  13. Ibid., 30–34.

  14. Ibid., 22–23.

  15. Fischer, Gandhi, 36–49; Ackerman and DuVall, A Force More Powerful, 64.

  16. Ackerman and DuVall, A Force More Powerful, 66–67.

  17. Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (Penguin Press, 2018), 139–44.

  18. Ibid., 72.

  19. Fischer, Gandhi, 58.

  20. Accounts of the Champaran Satyagraha can be found in Fischer, Gandhi, 62–65; Gandhi, An Autobiography, 405–24; and in Judith Margaret Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (Yale University Press, 1991), 109–13.

  21. Gandhi, An Autobiography, 409–10.

  22. Ibid., 412.

  23. For more on Thurgood Marshal, see Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (The New Press, 2009); Rawn James Jr., Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation (Bloomsbury Press, 2013); and Gilbert King’s thoroughly excellent—and Pulitzer Prize–winning—Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America (Harper, 2012).

  24. Fischer, Gandhi, 64.

  25. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, 129–31; Ackerman and Duval, A Force More Powerful, 73; Fischer, Gandhi, 68–69; Gandhi, An Autobiography, 454–62.

  26. Fischer, Gandhi, 69–71, Ackerman and Duval, A Force More Powerful, 73–74.

  27. Fischer, 2010, p. 72.

  28. Gandhi, 1993, p. 470.

  29. Ackerman and Duval, 2000, p. 79.

  30. Fischer, Gandhi, 106.

  31. Ackerman and Duval, A Force More Powerful, 86.

  32. Ackerman and Christopher, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, 179.

  33. Ackerman and Duval, A Force More Powerful, 89–90.

  34. Ackerman and Christopher, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, 181–83.

  35. Ackerman and Duval, A Force More Powerful, 99.

  36. Ibid., 103–4.

  37. Ibid, 108.

  38. McChrystal, et al, “Team of Teams.”

  39. Chris Fussell and C. W. Goodyear, One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams (Portfolio, 2017), 58.

  40. Louis V. Gerstner
Jr., Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? (HarperCollins, 2002), 195–96.

  41. Interview with author.

  42. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, 68.

  43. Ibid., 163.

  44. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and in Business (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014), 97–99.

  45. Interview with author.

  46. For more on the women’s suffrage movement, see Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, A Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1959); Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008); Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of American Suffragists (Hill and Wang, 2005); and Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (St. Martin’s Press, 2010).

  47. For more about the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, see Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton, “The Ergonomics of Innovation,” McKinsey Quarterly, 2008 no. 4; and David Hoyt, “Institute for Healthcare Improvement: The Campaign to Save 100,000 lives,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, Case: L-13, 01/07/2008.

  48. Interview with author.

  49. Isaac Weinberg, “Wyeth Pharmaceuticals: Changing the Mindsets and Behaviors of 20,000 People . . . One Person at a Time,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, Case L-15, September 16, 2009.

  50. Satell, “How Experian Embraced the Cloud and Transformed Its Business,” Inc.com, November 4, 2018, https://www.inc.com/greg-satell/how-experian-embraced-cloud-transformed-its-business.html?cid=search.

  51. Clayborne Carson, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Hachette Book Group, 1998), 60.

  52. John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (Simon Schuster, 1998), 215.

  53. Joe Nocera, “Two Days in September,” New York Times, September 14, 2012.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. See John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (Simon & Schuster, 1998), 203; Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (The New Press, 2009), 254–56; Rawn James Jr., Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation (Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 181–83.