The Little Big Things

by Thomas J Peters

  Deployment #2 brought Captain “Night,” whose name shall not be mentioned (sort of like Voldemort). He had a different style of “leadership” entirely. It’s often called “by the book.” He was a stickler for the formalities. My de facto membership at the Chiefs Club, by invitation only to officers, was frowned upon as inappropriate. I sometimes thought and think that he was more interested in typo-free reports of jobs not yet done than hell-and-high-water-completed construction with hurried documentation. I had a crappy time, as did pretty much the whole set of junior officers; and our track record in getting things done for our customers was less than sterling. For me, the quintessential event came when I was summoned to the CO’s office and lectured on the difference between “tangible” and “palpable” in a report I’d prepared that was going up the chain of command—to this day, 44 years later, I have no idea what the difference is between the two words. But I damn well know the difference between “day” and “night”!

  AN “A.A.” (ACTION ADDICTS) TWO-STEP GUIDE

  There was a set of “eight basics” that were the heart of In Search of Excellence. The place of pride … #1 … went to: “A Bias for Action.” After three years of research, Bob Waterman and I concluded that a proclivity for “trying it out” rather than “talking it to death” was the most important attribute of winning (EXCELLENT) companies. As competition has heated up and heated up and heated up, the validity of this finding, to my mind, has become ever more clear.

  Implementing it? “A bias for action” is an attitude, not a program or a strategy. Hence there is no 10-step implementation guide. However I would recommend a two-step guide:

  Step One: I know you’ve heard it-read it a hundred times. Here comes #101. Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” You want an “action attitude” in your six-person IS subunit. Be or become Mr./Ms. Hustle. An idea that sounds promising comes up in a meeting—you approve a little seed money on the spot and ask for a progress report on “stuff done” one week from now.

  Step Two: A-n-y-b-o-d-y who gets s-o-m-e-t-h-i-n-g done with dispatch gets recognition to die for … ASAP. Said recognition becomes a weekly ritual, perhaps … “Action Addict of the Week”?

  Try it.

  (That’s the whole idea, ain’t it?)

  78. If You Want to Find Oil, You Must Drill Wells.

  There’s General Chapman.

  There’s Mr. Churchill.

  There’s Captain DAY.

  There’s Captain NIGHT.

  And …

  While walking on the treadmill one morning—I hate treadmills, but it was–8°F outside—my straining eye caught the cover of a book I’d surveyed and taken aboard for In Search of Excellence. It was The Hunters by John Masters, a successful Canadian O & G wildcatter. Here is the excerpt I underlined 25 years ago and have battered seminar participants with ever since:

  “This is so simple it sounds stupid, but it is amazing how few oil people really understand that you only find oil and gas when you drill wells. You may think you’re finding it when you’re drawing maps and studying logs, but you have to drill.”

  Message: You have to drill!

  Yup.

  You have to get done what is necessary.

  You have to build come rain or shine or the presence of menacing bad guys.

  And if you want to find oil, you have to drill.

  I sometimes, and not in jest, call “it” “the only thing I’ve learned ‘for sure’ in the last 44 years”—since the start of my Seabee experience.

  Namely:

  She or he who tries the most stuff … wins!

  44 years.

  One idea.

  Not bad.

  ACTION WORDS

  Naturally I’ve collected a ton of supporting quotes to buttress my bias for a “bias for action.”

  My favorites:

  “We have a ‘strategic’ plan.

  It’s called doing things.”

  — Herb Kelleher, founder, Southwest Airlines

  “Experiment fearlessly.”

  —BusinessWeek, on the #1 tactic of innovation stars

  “We ground up more pig brains!”

  — Nobel winner in Medicine, on his “secret” of success, performing more experiments than his peers

  “Ready. Fire. Aim.”

  — Ross Perot (and others)

  “Intelligent people can always come up with intelligent reasons to do nothing.”

  —NPR host Scott Simon

  “Andrew Higgins, who built landing craft in WWII, refused to hire graduates of engineering schools. He believed that they only teach you what you can’t do in engineering school. He started off with 20 employees, and by the middle of the war had 30,000 working for him. He turned out 20,000 landing craft. D. D. Eisenhower told me, ‘Andrew Higgins won the war for us. He did it without engineers.’”

  —Stephen Ambrose, Fast Company

  “How do I know what I think until I see what I say.”

  —E. M. Forster

  “Blame no one.

  “Expect nothing.

  “Do something.”

  —Locker room sign posted by football coach Bill Parcells

  “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”

  —Wayne Gretzky

  Amen!

  (I hope one or two of these will inspire you as they have me.)

  Change

  79. Zen and the Art of Achieving Change Where It Already Exists.

  “Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix them. I look for things that went right and try to build on them.”

  —Bob Stone, aka Mr. ReGo

  Bob Stone was Al Gore’s point man for “reinventing” government when Gore was VP—hence the Mr. ReGo moniker. He is also credited with, in an earlier incarnation, starting a quality revolution at the Pentagon. In the process, he effectively rewrote the book on “corporate” change in huge bureaucracies. (And he kindly wrote a superb book to explain what he’d done: Polite Revolutionary: Lessons from an Uncivil Servant.)

  Bob, as I see it, was a Zen master, a Sumo wrestler—a Master of Indirection. He full well knew that he could not force change on the federal bureaucracy; even the President rarely succeeds by frontal assault. And as a Pentagon refugee, he knew the silliness of producing ever-to-be-unread, always-to-be-ignored encyclopedic “White Papers” and fat manuals.

  So he turned to and mastered the potent Art of Storytelling—and resurrected the always faithful “accentuate the positive” strategy. Hence the GoGo ReGo Gospel According to Stone:

  “I look for things that went right and try to build on them.”

  Stone knew from extensive experience that there were astonishingly effective, renegade Civil Servants (Uncivil Servants?) at work in the underbelly of the system—plying their effective-but-scorned trade as far from the light as possible. The trick was to discover their existence and then induce them to “come out” so that he could (1) certify (via the Public Blessing of VP Gore) their heretofore shunned approaches, (2) cast their results in Monuments of Documentary Film, (3) bring them together informally as model Cadres of Tomorrow’s Enlightened Practices, and (4) shame scores of others into following the lead of their obstreperous (and now honored) peers. (There’s obviously much more to the tale—see Bob’s book, or my précis of it in Chapter 17 of Re-imagine!)

  Jill Ker Conway played the much same game with matchless skill upon becoming the first woman appointed president of Smith College. She found herself not only surrounded by skeptical tenured profs (mostly male!), but also without the budgetary resources to implement the very programs she needed to make her reign different from that of the feckless old boys who had preceded her.

  Enter Zen.

  She nosed around the campus (like Stone had done in the federal bureaucracy) and discovered a robust Change Underground, mostly consisting of impatient members of the junior ranks. She met with them (word of a 27-year-old assistant prof lunching with the Big Boss gets
around in a flash), encouraged them to keep pushing—and urged them to begin the process of proclaiming their views publicly, with her implicit blessing.

  As to the dollar shortage, she concocted the Sister of All End Runs. The hell with standard budgetary sources of bucks—she met instead with members of Smith’s Change “Overground”—alumnae who were beside themselves with glee at the belated appointment of this first female prexy. She met and met and met some more—and cajoled and cajoled and cajoled some more. And after a zillion lunches, teas, and dinners, she had enough “external,” “off-balance-sheet” funding to pilot several programs that eventually became the hallmarks of her wildly successful term of office.

  All hail the Aussie sheep-station-born Mistress of Indirection from Northampton, Massachusetts!

  Message: Powerlessness is (mostly) a state of mind! With a dab of Zen here and a Guide to the Corporate Underworld there … Gold can be discovered and thence Mountains Can Be Moved!

  Message: Become a Master of Indirection.

  Message: The “guaranteed” best way to deal with the entrenched resistors?

  Absolute and determined(though abidingly civil) avoidance.

  Summary:

  (1) Comb the underground for effective “troublemakers” who are creating and living tomorrow today.

  (2) Anoint them as Public Paragons of the New Deal-to-Be.

  (3) Encourage others to visit them and observe palpable models of new ways of doing business.

  (4) Applaud the Nouveau Copycats of the First Round Pioneers—and grow the Renegade Battalions as rapidly as possible.

  SECRET (CHANGE) AGENT

  “Somewhere in your organization, groups of people are already doing things differently and better. To create lasting change, find these areas of positive deviance and fan their flames.”

  — Richard Tanner Pascale and Jerry Sternin, “Your Company’s Secret Change Agents,” Harvard Business Review (The late Jerry Sternin had a sparkling record at delivering programs and progress in some of the most downtrodden parts of the globe.)

  80. The Way of the Demo.

  If you keep repeating something enough times, you realize what a deeply held belief it is! I got in a discussion with several tech execs (software) about some new technologies that their major corporate users were slow to adopt. I heard myself chiding them in a familiar (to me) way:

  “For heaven’s sake, quit trying to sell Unilever or Fiat or P&G! Enormous companies are invariably ‘late adopters.’ (I.e., more or less useless, sluggish twits.) The far, far better idea is to scour the world in pursuit of 2 or 3 or 4 mid-sized, noteworthy, pioneering customers who will ‘join up’ with you to Make Miracles Happen. Use your work with these hotshots as … Demos. Once you have a passel of mid-sized ‘Super-cool’ Demos … then, and only then, go to one of the Big Guys and say, ‘Don’t miss the Party, Dull Davey Dimwit.’”

  This I Believe!

  Change in “big” places is mostly a result of showing off “demos” from modest-sized “cool” places! The on-the-make general manager of the small Irish division of BigCo thinks your new Purchasing Software is off-the-charts good; she’s keen to be an early adopter. Once she’s done her bit, you can say to the slugabed big-division general managers, “Why don’t you go and look at what Mary O’Donnell and the Irish have done with this—it changed their world.”

  To succeed with “new stuff,” you must find … Kindred Spirits … those who will … Play with You (and your “cool stuff”) … which in turn provides you with … “Demos”… that you can Tout Far & Wide.

  I call “it”: The way of the demo.

  And I will boldly state: Selling-by-demo is the single-best way to accelerate acceptance of a novel (= scary) idea.

  No demo.

  No deal.

  Period.

  First Steps: Do you have a program/product/process, the acceptance of which is diffusing at a snail’s pace? Seek nominations for a “prospect list” of … Potential Pioneers who might be amenable to offering you a Playpen and becoming your Playmate.

  This is another case of winning through indirection. You will be “slowed down” (relative to the “big breakthrough” sale) by your decision to work on some “little” (= not huge) demos. But in the long haul, this apparent detour is the Ultimate Accelerant for overall program/product/process success.

  PRIMARY CLUELESS

  The Way of the Demo even applies to big-time politics. What is a primary, after all, but a candidate’s chance to put out a demo?

  Consider the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign for the Republican nomination for president. Rudy Giuliani, the early favorite, didn’t bother to collect “demos” in lowa or New Hampshire. He skipped directly to Big Florida as his first stop. Sans a “demo,” Florida, a likely “good state” for Giuliani where he’d worked like hell, turned its collective back on him—and the low-odds John McCain, replete with his New Hampshire demo, took the Florida Trophy and then the Republican nomination.

  81. Big Change—All at Once!

  I am an avowed incrementalist—even if the eventual aim is stratospherically high. That is, get going ASAP—and quickly experiment your way toward/to success.

  But, when my wife and I had a Grand Idea in 2008 for a landscaping project that would change the look and feel of our farm in Tinmouth, Vermont, we decided, more or less, to … do it all at once. There has been pain from biting off more than we could readily chew, but the story to this point has the mark of a real success far beyond our initial imaginings.

  The power of “getting going on everything at once” with but a sliver of a master plan (a couple of “napkin” sketches) was that we could envision from the outset the vague outline of what was going to (more or less) end up happening—thence we could adjust like crazy, improvise constantly, destroy and create using the entire palette, and dramatically reshape the overall work, and even the overall concept, as we went along. Which, of course, means we didn’t really reject my beloved Rapid Experimentation Method—we just did it on and amid a Grand Platform called “everything is in motion and up for grabs.”

  To be more specific, we essentially started by blowing everything up—sticking in a roughed-out new road that changed the entire dynamics (look, feel, flow) of the farm. From there a dozen supporting projects began, or were also roughed out “on the ground,” at once. (In the space of a couple of weeks.) As a result, the place was a disheveled inchoate mess (“that only a mother could love”) from stem to stern, north to south, and east to west.

  And then the real “serious play” (Michael Schrage’s book by this title was an inspiration—more later) began. To stick to the Basic Texts of Life, we were following Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek’s “spontaneous discovery” economic-growth process.

  I’m not sure I’d do things, big things, this way in every instance, but I do think there are times when such an “all at once” approach is merited—when you have a Big Idea but need to be living “in the middle of it,” with all ends loose ends, to figure out what it means.

  Further confirmation of this idea—and how gutsy-nutsy it is!— came from, at about the time we attacked the project, reading Wendy Kopp’s One Day, All Children …: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way.

  I think Ms. Kopp’s story is among the most extraordinary I’ve happened across. From a Princeton dorm room, in 1988, she hatched a program that has arguably become the most profound educational and public service experiment-success in America in many a year or decade.

  Kopp rejected from the start the advice from the Captains of Industry and other Great Ones who intended to support her—namely, she decided that even though she really didn’t know what she was up to tactically, she would mount an enormous program launch to demonstrate to the world the power of her idea. “Great, Wendy, but you need ‘proof of concept.’ Test it with a handful of young untutored teachers in an out-of-the-way-place off-off-off-off-Broadway”—that, in effect, was the advice she got again and
again and again and without exception. (And the advice I would have given her if asked.) But she was adamant that if she was going to attract excellent recent top-university graduates to give up two years of their lives teaching in depressed areas, she had to create a Wave of World-rattling Momentum on Day One.

  Of course we now know she pulled it off … Big Time. But close calls and pratfalls occupy most of the 193-page book. Everything that could go wrong—and then some—did go wrong. Not just tiny miscues, but enormous boo-boos—again and again and again. Her tiny staff fumbled and bumbled their way to survival, then eventually success, holding on only to the Dream and Ms. Kopp’s staggering intensity and energy.

  As I read the book I came to the conclusion that she had been right—that the only way for her to go had been the Big Way from Day One. Of course, her youthful energy, spirit, and naiveté certainly helped her bite off such an enormous, often contentious (“20-year-old ‘girl’ tackles teachers unions in Manhattan, etc., etc.”) notion.