Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change
von Greg Satell
What Gerstner understood was that what IBM needed wasn't a strategy. In fact, at his very first press conference, he said, "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision, which immediately became one of the most quotable statements in American corporate history. What IBM needed was alignment behind a strategy. So Gerstner set out to create a movement within his own organization. He changed the focus from forcing IBM's proprietary stack of technologies down customers' throats to a new model aimed at helping customers with their stack of business processes. In doing so, he led one of the most dramatic turnarounds in corporate history. We copied the way viruses infect. We started small. We infected groups, individual groups, but then we brought in people from the other sites, who hadn't yet gotten started. We pulled them forward into the process, if you will. So, we made them part of the mini-transformation so that they could get infected and take the infection back. And so, first of all, we phased the 16 sites. We had early and late adopters, basically, and we used pull-forwards to seed the late sites, so they didn't feel like they were left out. In fact, some of the people from the late sites made real contributions to the process in the early sites."
"The experienced video executives were skeptical," Antioco told me. “In fact, they thought that the revenuesharing agreement would kill the company. But throughout my career, I had learned that whenever you set out to do anything big, some people aren't going to like it. I'd been successful by defying the status quo at important junctures, and that's what I thought had to be done in this case."
Yet today, they have become far more salient because the connectivity that drives networks has become predominant. We can now initiate, build, and maintain relationships with far greater velocity and at far greater distances. That has changed the nature of power, shifting it from being a function of hierarchies to one of networks. Since ancient Rome, institutions have ruled the world.
We no longer need bureaucraçies to carry a message, or even, strictly speaking, to organize work. In fact, traditional institutions are finding that conventional hierarchies are often too slow and cumbersome to function in the world today. To paraphrase General McChrystal, in order to compete with networks, they need to become networks themselves.
In other words, small groups, loosely connected, but united by a common purpose are key to success on Broadway as well, and this can be represented by a measurable quantity. Similar results were found in a wide array of studies, including ones that focused on engineers at Bell Labs," currency traders, and the German automotive industry."
Morningstar, a $700 million dollar food processing business, operates without any management hierarchy at all. Networks, unlike hierarchies, push authority down to the lowest level of an organization. They recognize that people on the ground have the most current information and are most able to act on it quickly and effectively.
"What Gerstner understood was that what IBM needed wasn't a strategy. In fact, at his very first press conference, he said, "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision, which immediately became one of the most quotable statements in American corporate history. What IBM needed was alignment behind a strategy. So Gerstner set out to create a movement within his own organization. He changed the focus from forcing IBM's proprietary stack of technologies down customers' throats to a new model aimed at helping customers with their stack of business processes. In doing so, he led one of the most dramatic turnarounds in corporate history."
"We copied the way viruses infect. We started small. We infected groups, individual groups, but then we brought in people from the other sites, who hadn't yet gotten started. We pulled them forward into the process, if you will. So, we made them part of the mini-transformation so that they could get infected and take the infection back. And so, first of all, we phased the 16 sites. We had early and late adopters, basically, and we used pull-forwards to seed the late sites, so they didn't feel like they were left out. In fact, some of the people from the late sites made real contributions to the process in the early sites.""
""IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition. Lou put a stop to that and even let go some senior executives who were known for infighting. He thought we should be open to ideas from the outside instead of thinking, 'if it was a good idea, we would already have done it.' He pushed these values constantly, through personal conversations, company e-mails, you name it. Eventually it all stuck.""
"Incidentally, Facebook's "Bootcamp" has another added benefit. During the course of the six weeks, new employees build close bonds with each other and often maintain those bonds as they spread throughout the company, which not only provides a support system but also helps to create the “small world effect" that Duncan Watts discovered in his research. That, in turn, not only helps new information and best practices to cascade throughout the company, it also helps reinforce values."
"This kind of distributed authority can be amazingly effective. Consider the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, one of the most accomplished ensembles in the world. It operates without a conductor. By giving everybody a voice in which arrangements will be performed, how they will be interpreted, and what role each instrument will play in a particular piece of music, it has unleashed the creative energy of its members and won multiple Grammy awards in the process."
"The principle of building a genome of values is not at all limited to the political sphere, but is important to any organization. Facebook runs a six-week "Bootcamp," which every engineer, regardless of experience or expertise, must complete. It does so for many of the same reasons that the "freedom riders" set up their intensive training camp-to indoctrinate and maintain values even as the company continues to grow at a rapid pace."
"We tend to see success and failure through the prism of strategy and tactics, and that is, to a certain extent, true. But we also act according to how we see the world. If we see the world as a chessboard, with various powers vying for dominance, we will act one way. However, if we see the world as a series of networks and ecosystems, we are likely to act differently. What we see determines how we will act."
- →First, you need to create strong bonds within individual groups. That's how you build trust and operational effectiveness. Yet at the same time, you must also keep your network open, not only so that you can keep the movement growing, but so that new information and insights can flow through.
- →Loosely connected small groups can drive massive synchronized behavior, as long as some element of randomness is introduced in the system (and in the real world, randomness almost always comes into play).
- →Katz and Lazarsfeld concluded that the real reason mase media was effective in forming opinions wasn't simply because it reached a lot of people, but because of its ability to influence the influencers.
- →If you have two friends who don't know each other, there is a high probability that they will eventually meet through you and form their own relationship. Rapoport called this concept triadic closure.
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