The Little Big Things

by Thomas J Peters

  That was five weeks before the party. And now, late in the afternoon on March 31, 2007, following Susan’s “sartorial” guidance and that of a close friend, Lola Van Wagenen, an eminent women’s historian, I was encased in a white wig and long black dress, courtesy of a Boston costume shop, and, though tripping over my hems again and again [“Welcome to our world”—Lola], ready to go—and, courtesy a dozen mesmerizing books hastily ingested on a dozen plane trips, ready to respond to questions and declaim, among other things, on Mrs. Burn, her young son Harry, Carrie Chapman Catt, and, of course, the angry, tenacious firebrand, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

  I was indeed shamefaced—shamed, after almost fifteen years of loudly and doggedly championing change to women’s still diminished role in business and government, that I was almost totally ignorant of the astounding history of the American women’s rights movement. And worse yet, of the gruesome details of women’s status in our society only 100 years ago—that makes the use of the loaded word “slave” frighteningly appropriate. It was no coincidence that the American women’s movement, effectively launched in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 13, 1848, grew in tandem with the abolitionist movement in America.

  But those five weeks were an absolute ball! There is simply nothing but nothing that I enjoy more than sinking my teeth and heart and soul into a new historical topic like this one. (It is still not taught in schools—inquiring in my seminars, I was nothing short of flabbergasted to discover that most women don’t learn of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.) I did indeed devour a dozen books from the original, and always controversial, works of Mrs. Stanton to junior high school books on the life of Susan B. Anthony. In particular I learned from:

  In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by Elisabeth Griffin

  Ladies of Seneca Falls, by Miriam Gurko

  Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States, by Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick

  I learned of the fateful luncheon meeting in Seneca Falls on July 13, 1848, that was hosted by Mrs. Stanton and attended by five “ladies,” including Lucretia Mott, one of the subsequent superstars of the movement; and I learned of the hastily called convention that followed only six days later, the first of its kind—and the brutally negative and demeaning reaction to the conclave.

  I read with astonishment about the Total (as in Cap “T” Total!) absence of rights of American women and, almost as important, the contempt with which their so-called frail and vacuous and largely useless selves were held by males one and virtually all, from the ignorant to the most learned. And I learned—concluded—that, as I said before, women were de facto, and de jure, the equivalent of slaves, denied fundamental and trivial rights alike and even a modicum of respect.

  As an orator myself, I learned of the critical role of powerful women orators in the women’s rights movement, especially the Grimke sisters, the first American women to speak in public to an audience with men—and the contemptible response thereto.

  I learned of the stream of small steps forward (some minor property rights established by New York State—subsequently reversed); and the first grant of the right to vote, in the Territory of Wyoming in 1870 by a “legislative” vote of 6 in favor, 2 against, and 1 abstaining (on July 23, 1890, Wyoming became the first state to grant the franchise to women—bravo).

  I learned of the unabated viciousness and bitterness and “dirty tricks” tactics unleashed by male legislators and media barons and “men on the street” of all classes that attended the 72-year struggle, from that five-person luncheon/cabal at Seneca Falls in July 1848 to Nashville and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America on August 26, 1920.

  I learned of the role of “demented” (my word) optimism and matchless relentlessness that marked the movement … 909 political campaigns (mostly failures) between 1868 and 1920, according to Carrie Chapman Catt (campaigns at state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks—277; campaigns in state legislatures to get suffrage amendments before voters—480; campaigns before 19 successive Congresses of the United States; etc.).

  And I learned that I was hardly alone in my own ignorance of the history of the American women’s rights movement, and hence my de facto diminishment (ignorance is never an excuse) of the role and lot of women in our so-called egalitarian democracy. Typical of our “modern” approach to women-in-American-history was the “towering” Oxford History of the American People, by the “towering” historian Samuel Eliot Morison; he honors the Nineteenth Amendment with two (count ‘em!) sentences in a section of his book with the exalted title “Bootlegging and Other Sports.” There is a monument to Morison on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston that I routinely pass as I power walk; I now purposely snort derisively and turn my head from his bronzed gaze upon passing this contemptible male chauvinist pig (ironically there is a monument to women’s rights pioneers about two blocks farther along the Commonwealth Avenue mall—I indeed accordingly genuflect).

  “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” (Incidentally, it was not until 1956, a scant half century ago, that the number of women voting equaled the number of men.)

  I dwell on this story because it describes a personal journey (mine) away from ignorance, a journey that was, well, a blast—and, I believe, important. (I now speak noisily for far greater attention to the history of the women’s rights movement—still woefully skimpy, a condition not corrected to this day.) I also dwell on this story because innovation, including social innovation, is the “business” theme nearest and dearest to my professional heart—and the most important business issue of this and, frankly, every era.

  It is my long-standing argument that all innovation is irrational, nonlinear, and anything but the product of plans and focus groups; it is instead about anger to the point of rage that eventually boils over (from suffrage to the personal computer); “a little band of brothers” (whoops, the Five Great Sisters of Seneca Falls and a slew of successors); willingness to suffer vicious smear attacks and unspeakable opprobrium of both a professional and personal nature, passion (!!!!!!!); relentlessness(!!!!!!!—72 years, 1 month, and 7 days—from lunch at Seneca Falls to ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment by Tennessee, the 36th state to do so; and those 909 political campaigns); tolerance for setback upon setback upon setback; and strokes of luck such as the willfulness of Henry Burn’s blessed mother.

  All the above made the sacrifice of wearing a wig and a long dress for five hours, in honor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seem like small beer! (Hmmm, should I have gone as Henry Burn’s mother?)

  My hero, Ms. Stanton, per Elisabeth Griffin, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

  “She was defeated again and again and again, but she continued the struggle with passionate impatience.”

  “She had survived her husband, outlived most of her enemies, and exhausted her allies. Her mind remained alert, her mood optimistic, and her manner combative.” [Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 80th birthday celebration, attended by 6,000 people]

  Thank you, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

  CHAMPIONSHIP RECORD

  Lessons?

  I’ve got just one:

  A record of 1 win and 908 de facto losses(a “batting average” of.001, in 909 political campaigns) is just fine & dandy—and more than good enough for the Hall of Fame—if the cause is worth the effort and pain and personal opprobrium!

  Innovation

  104. The Audacity of … Research!

  The “Sacred R&D Axiom”:

  In good times and bad. There are lots of sexy innovation strategies—I’ve championed many of them. But there’s also good old-fashioned spending on R&D. (And protecting-the-hell-out-of R&D in tough times.) $$$ may have to be reduced when the economy goes south to Antarctica. But don’t “cut all the far-out projects”—retain a decent-size, if trimmed, portfolio of Truly Weird
Stuff. Come hell and high water, retain your best folks—and, if humanly possible, grab some new stars from competitors who are stupid enough to let them go. (Perhaps you can offer them the chance to at least get started on some of their more or less far-out pets.) Also, in tight times, there may well be opportunity to acquire small firms that have run out of dough; this is a potential Very Big Deal.

  In big firms and small. Aggressive R&D is not just the provenance of the big company. In fact, it is arguably more important to the two-person Professional Service Firm than the lumbering giant (!!!); if business is slow in that two-person mini, it might be the perfect time to get on with some study topic that you’ve put off; to invest four or five hours a week on interesting Webinars that might yield real pay dirt, etc.

  Including big projects and small. Make sure the R&D portfolio includes many one-off, short-term projects. (Quite often, these little fellas grow to become the Biggest of the Big.)

  In every department. AGGRESSIVE R&D IS AS IMPORTANT IN FINANCE and PURCHASING and HR and LOGISTICS as in IT or NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT!!! (THERE IS NO WAY TO OVEREMPHASIZE THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS—“leading edge” should characterize HR as much as it does New Product Development.) (!!!!!!)

  Throughout the “supply chain!” Having vendors, suppliers, customers, etc., whose R&D spending is top quartile in their industries is of the utmost importance and should be measured.

  In Systems! Innovative systems are as important as innovative products. (Witness Dell’s two-decade systems-driven run that changed the world.) Manage the hell out of this!

  By giving everyone “play” money. Giving everyone in the organization the opportunity to get their hands on a few bucks (and a mentor) in order to play around (right term) with a new idea is essential. (3M pioneered this—Google is today’s poster child.) (Again, this is even more sensible in tiny outfits than in large ones.)

  By thinking “Venture Capital.” Internal VC funds can run to billions of $$$ at an Intel, but the animating idea is to cast a wide, speculative net for potential investments. (This could mean, for a restaurant owner, the likes of a $10,000 scholarship for a star-in-the-making chef to attend a top-flight cooking course in France. The restaurant Chez Panisse practices something like this.)

  By reaching out to universities. Excellent research universities are National Treasures. (The USA has an enormous share thereof.) Associations, major and minor, with such universities are an important part of the innovative enterprise’s R&D strategy.

  YOU & ME & R&D

  Innovation = Everybody’s Game!

  Dictum: Every department shall be equally committed to formal R&D projects and formal comparative evaluation to peers on innovativeness and research effectiveness.

  Best-in-class/Best-in-planet R&D is every unit’s charge. No exceptions.

  So: Ms. Purchasing, please list your ongoing, formal R&D projects.

  If none, or if not “remarkable,” or if not “Oh my God”… then get cracking.

  Formal entry in Values Statement: “Research Is Everybody’s Preoccupation.”

  FYI: This is a “Top 10” idea among the 163 in this book.

  105. Adhocracy—Love It or Leave It.

  In my experience, most truly innovative projects effectively invent themselves, as opposed to being the product of a formal planning process; and their growth, too, is mostly organic, and constantly punctuated by odd twists and turns and plateaus of frightening duration.

  An effective culture of innovation is largely ad hoc—which drives many traditional senior managers crazy. To them, “adhocracy” is little better than “mobocracy.”

  But if they can’t “get it,” they don’t belong.

  Innovation = Adhocracy.

  (Period.)

  Hint: If your organization chart “makes perfect sense,” then you probably don’t have a particularly innovative enterprise. Adhocracy requires letting go of assumptions of linearity—substituting curves and spirals and Jackson Pollock–like tangles for straight lines and 90-degree turns.

  (NB: I am not arguing that plans are dangerous. They are only dangerous if you take them seriously. Preparation is essential—but even more essential is the willingness to let go of a plan in a flash and head off in a revised direction.)

  Action?

  (1) Organize as much work as possible (virtually all!) in project teams. A project team structure, even at places like my old employer, McKinsey, tends to be more fluid, with boundaries more porous, work areas less constrained. Moreover, you have the opportunity to create—and then destroy—project teams of all shapes and sizes. Many more words would be required to usefully describe such a more or less self-inventing, self-destructing (!—“creative destruction”) structure-nonstructure.

  (2) Put “outsiders” by the bucketload on all teams—mixed, diverse, impermanent membership leads to more flexible organization format. (Axiom: Diversity = Innovation.)

  (3) Create rich internal social-networking rituals and routines to encourage anyone to play in any game. Cisco Systems calls this “emergent leadership,” and has bet the future on it—leaders, based on energy and expertise, “emerge” from anywhere, lead for a while when it makes sense, and then the reins change hands more or less automatically.

  (4) Hire and promote for demonstrated flexibility. (It is an observable trait.)

  106. Beyond Excellence: The “Berserk Standard.”

  Amazon has changed the world.

  EBay has changed the world.

  Craigslist has changed the world—put about a zillion nails in the coffins of newspapers, among many other Richter 8.0+ things.

  Craigslist has more traffic than Amazon or eBay.

  (Though a private company, craigslist has a projected market capitalization numbering in the billions of dollars.)

  Amazon has 20,000 employees.

  EBay has 16,000 employees.

  Craigslist has … 30 employees.

  Message: There is more than one way to skin a cat—even a thoroughly modern cat.

  “Pragmatic” action?

  Among other things, every (every!) time you start a project, no matter how small, reach out to several S.W.P.—seriously weird people—for their views about what you are undertaking. Keep reaching until you find a couple of people who are so far out that they more or less speak gibberish.

  It may indeed be gibberish, and indeed probably is gibberish—but perhaps once or twice in a lifetime, it’ll be someone and some approach that amounts to a blueprint for doing the work of 10,000 with 10, à la craigslist vs. Amazon and eBay.

  Never get seriously under way until you’ve surfaced a couple of ideas that score perfect 10s, or at least 8s, on the … Berserk Scale.

  At the least, you will have had your mind stretched, the best exercise regimen of all; at most, you may have taken a baby step toward inclusion in the history books.

  WEATHER, WHETHER OR NOT WE WANT TO KNOW

  I’ve got two books beside me as I write this:

  The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon (Frank Batten with Jeffery Cruikshank)

  ESPN: The Uncensored History (Michael Freeman)

  The idea of an all-weather channel and the idea of an all-sports channel were considered the fantasies of raving lunatics.

  It took both sets of “lunatics” forever to prove their points. Yet both properties achieved matchless popularity (user-addicts by the millions and more millions) and market values of several billion dollars each.

  I love books like these. It’s not so much that they “inspire” me—rather, they “remind” me of the complete sensibility of paying serious attention to so-called nonsensical things!

  107. Out of the Shadows: Skunkworks, Revisited.

  Lockheed invented the term “Skunk Works” as an alias for Advanced Development Programs; while there are conflicting stories about the exact origins of the term, the official story places the birth of the first Skunk Works in the 1940s. It was a small unit, based in Burbank, California, tha
t used a totally unconventional approach to developing essential military aircraft—e.g., the famous SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, a pillar of our Cold War tactical package—in record time at minimum cost with maximum innovation executed by an astonishingly small group of astonishingly motivated people. (Too good to be true? I agree except for one thing: It was true.)

  I came across the Lockheed Skunk Works in the early 1980s—and immediately fell madly in love. I had long been convinced that “normal pathways” would rarely yield innovation at Big Companies. And I was on the lookout for byways—places that stunk to the reigning bureaucrats. And Skunk Works, or skunkworks as I prefer, filled the bill perfectly.

  In the Introduction, I reported that this book was to a large degree a “return to basics.” Well, the skunkworks idea is as basic as it gets for me when it comes to innovation. I had adored the skunkworks idea so much in the 1980s that I named my Palo Alto consultancy “Skunkworks Inc.” My colleagues and I held, six or seven times a year, “Skunk Camps,” five-day intensive innovation-strategy seminars, on the edge of the Pacific (fittingly), aimed at regenerating the “Spirit of the Skunk” in the bellies of tiring corporations. (Naturally, in retrospect, tired corporations rarely showed—our “Skunks” were largely from midsized companies, like W. L. Gore or Perdue Farms, determined not to calcify.) I even wore an elaborate “Skunk Suit” to conduct “graduation”—given to me by the American Electronics Association for my help in keeping them “non-stuffy.”

  All this (too much info?) is a long-winded way of saying that somehow, by hook or by crook, you have to figure out how to fool yourself. How to run a trick play—that catches you off guard. How to run end runs on yourself. I won’t guarantee much in this world, or in this book. But I will pretty much guarantee—no, I will guarantee—that standard structures won’t do the trick when it comes to innovation and renewal, even in moderate-sized companies, let alone in the Bumbling Beasts.