Chapter 3: Crawling and Toddling Along

Chapter 3

Crawling and Toddling Ahead

 Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all;

 the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

— Herodotus

What Next?

The best-laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.

— Robert Burns

Returning to the office after the 400 Year Project launch meeting in September 1995, my instincts as an historian kicked in. After all, a project that was going to have such great success should be well documented for the benefit of future generations. The raw video footage (shot without benefit of tripod) was packed off to a video production company that was charged with creating a videotape version of the launch event.

         Only someone filled with totally unjustified confidence would ever have had that reaction. But there I was. Any normal human being would have spent time in hiding hoping that the burden of the task would take care of itself! I, however, next turned my attention to planning the spring meeting for 1996. Even though I had no idea what we would do at that meeting or how we would develop anything to share during the next six months, we quickly reserved a meeting room and alerted our committee of the date. A few potential volunteers for the steering committee had avoided me after the meeting, so I also began tracking down those people to see if they would be willing to help. Most were wiser than I was and concluded that they were too busy to help: They were probably counting their blessings that they weren’t going to be working on my version of Don Quixote’s quest. To the skeptical listener, this project must have sounded like a boondoggle that could waste a lot of time before running out of steam.

Symbols

Long-range planning does not deal with future decisions.

It deals with the futurity of present decisions.

— Peter F. Drucker

Art is one of my passions. I began collecting original art while still in college and have been fortunate enough to occasionally indulge my tastes for abstract lithographs, aquatints, paintings, and sculptures since then. To get a sense of my interest in art collecting, you should know that I used to describe the main benefit of having a company as providing an opportunity to decorate the offices with art. Prospective clients were often invited to visit a museum show with me where I would explain the ins and outs of seemingly indecipherable abstraction.

         Naturally, then, I liked the idea of creating visuals to help communicate the project. My good friend, the artist Tobi Kahn, kindly agreed to produce two commissions that would serve as important visual expressions of making 400 years of progress in only 20 years.

         The first commission is informally called The Seven Days of Creation and expresses God’s work as described in the opening passages of Genesis (you can see these paintings by registering for free at http://www.fastforward400.com/). The work comprises seven individual acrylic paintings on small boxes. The images sweep from the front onto the four wide sides of the boxes to increase your sense of seeing painted sculptures. In addition, Tobi has an amazing ability to take a painting and make it seem three dimensional by raising the depth of the paint on some sections by nearly a quarter inch. Even if the work hadn’t commemorated the start of the project, Tobi’s great art would have been inspiring in and of itself. With Tobi’s help, we also used a photograph of the seven images to create a note card that we shared with everyone involved in the project. In the spirit of encouraging creativity, we also developed a tradition that these works are hung at different heights to add to viewer interest and inspire creativity. Intrigued by that concept, Tobi later did a major show where he hung dozens of paintings in similarly random-appearing fashion. It was stunning.

         Later, I began to think about what purposes the project should advance. Clearly, making 400 years of progress in improving personal appearance shouldn’t have the same emphasis as eliminating painful, lethal diseases. I wanted to create a focus for our thinking about improvements so that our modest activities would not become too diffuse to be effective.

         Those initial purposes were defined as health, happiness, peace, and prosperity. My thinking was that without health there is no sound foundation for a constructive life. Once health is in place, it’s much easier to grasp for happiness. Enjoy enough happiness and there would be the possibility of feeling peaceful and acting peacefully towards others. With that peace in place, one could expect that cooperation and prosperity could be effectively pursued.

         Unfortunately, many people start with pursuing prosperity as their focus and never get around to health, happiness, and peace. So the order of focus is important.

         Working with Tobi to select among images that he designed by the dozens, the second commission resulted in four medium-size paintings on wooden boxes, one for each of the four purposes. As before, we created greeting cards based on these four images and shared those cards with the steering committee and our clients. Unveiling the second commission was also the centerpiece of one of our semiannual project review meetings.

Learning about Web Sites

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world

in the image of a global village.

— Marshall McLuhan

The youngest people at Mitchell and Company assured me that we had to have a Web site for the project. They explained that a Web site was going to be the universal medium for finding important information. Although none of us had ever been involved in creating a Web site, I was told that there was nothing to it.

         I hired one staff member, Jason Breyan, to work full-time on the project, and he led the charge for developing the Web site (you are invited to visit by registering at http://www.fastforward400.com/). Fitting in with my preference for aesthetics, he located a designer who could produce intriguing looking pages.

         We had a hard time figuring out what to put on the Web site. Someone had the good idea of using Tobi’s paintings to spruce up the pages. With Tobi’s kind permission, we did exactly that. This arrangement worked out well for Tobi because he didn’t have a Web site in those days, and many people came to know his work through our project’s Web site.

         However, being attractive wasn’t going to be the most important factor for the Web site: We needed to decide what content to use. An early resource for helping with this thinking was our friend, Robert Metz, who had founded the Marketplace column in the business section of The New York Times and later served as New York bureau chief of Financial News Network, a cable news network that was later merged with CNBC.

         From this collaboration, key concepts began to emerge. Perhaps the most important of these early ideas was that some forms of thinking and behaving delay improvements. After much discussion, we decided to call these factors “stalls” and to begin to identify the individual stalls. We weren’t sure how to identify all of the stalls. Someone suggested we invite those who visited the Web site to share their ideas about stalls that they had observed or experienced. We decided to try that approach.

         The hardest part of creating the Web site was figuring out how to describe why the project’s purpose is a reasonable one. One of the key documents we created was “Time Telescope” that considered what a company might look like in 2395 if 2 to 3 percent a year productivity gains continued. We focused on that aspect of progress because companies have been the most effective sources of improvements for the last few centuries. The bulk of productivity improvements have come in the fields of manufacturing, farming, mining, electronics, computing, and medicine though the directions taken by the companies that wanted to expand their sales by improving products and lowering costs. Governments, by contrast, usually experience negative productivity as do many nonprofit organizations.

         Here are some of the projections we shared in that section:

• A well-run manufacturing company would have sales per employee of $1.5 billion in constant dollars.

         • New products and services would be designed and put into production in less than a day.

• The cost of doing a constant computing task would decline by more than 99 percent within 20 years.

         As I look back on those examples, I’m struck by how conservative they turned out to be. A company could already use a lot of outsourcing and reach revenues of tens of millions of dollars per employee. Many Internet marketers develop products and services now in less than a day and deliver those new offerings in the same day. At the recent rate of progress, the cost of a constant computing task usually declines by 96-98 percent in only 10 years.

         Another key section of the Web site was called the “Buck Rogers Perspective”. The idea was to encourage companies to focus on creating 25th-century performance in the early part of the 21st century. We argued that the advent of faster computing and rapidly expanding access to information would allow progress to be telescoped into a shorter time period. Had we known about Metcalfe’s Law (Robert Metcalfe’s view that the value of a networked connection of computers and other communication devices goes up by the square of the number of connections) at that time, we might have cited that effect as evidence of the potential for faster progress. Clearly, in a copy-cat driven world, it was going to make sense for the Internet to allow ideas and facts that interest people to spread very rapidly and widely.

         With that limited message, our Web site designer plugged away. A major lesson for me was how much time needs to be spent on writing, updating, and proofing material. Because of the many computer quirks among different machines, you also have to be careful or you create a very messy picture for some visitors. In those days of mostly dial-up telephone Internet connections, you also had to limit how much you put on a page or no one would ever stick around long enough to read what you had to say.

         After more months and expense than I care to remember, our Web site was finally up and running in 1997. Then Jason pointed out that if we didn’t do something to build traffic to the site, no one would ever know the site existed. I next met dozens of so-called experts in getting search engines to place our site at the top of the search page. Every one who advised me on this subject described what to me were obviously unethical methods. In addition, these people wanted to be paid around $300 an hour and felt like they needed 10 hours a week to keep our site optimized. Forget it!

         Instead, Jason went to chat rooms and other public sites where he could share his enthusiasm for the project and invite visitors to come and learn more. Visitor traffic built steadily from that point. We were finally getting the word out. In the early days, we often had visitors who spent hours on the site. Clearly, we were fascinating somebody. We didn’t know who they were because I stupidly overruled everyone who suggested that we encourage people to register at the site so we could send them new information from time to time. I thought that requiring registration would discourage visitors. Perhaps that was the right decision then, but I should have captured names and e-mail addresses at some point. Undoubtedly many people who wanted to track our progress forgot about us as the weeks passed without hearing from us or seeing any new material on the site.

Thinking about Stickiness

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn;

it can be stabbed to death by a joke

 or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s brow.

— Charles Browder

We were intrigued by finding a way to capture public imagination. With enough interest, progress on the project would occur on many simultaneous fronts without any direct involvement by us.

         We obviously had a problem. Everyone who heard about the project thought that “the 400 Year Project” was a vague and uninspiring way to describe our purpose. How could people who wanted to produce so much progress be so backward in communicating their purpose?

         Our solution at the time was to downplay talking about the project and to focus instead on tangible benefits that people were seeking. One of our semiannual steering committee meetings involved having people tell us what would really excite them about making rapid progress. I cringed when I learned that the consensus was that people wanted to learn better ways to persuade others to follow their every whim. Everyone in the room was confident that he or she was always right and only some weird perversity caused others to disagree. When I gently suggested reasons why others might have a different perspective, some stoutly disagreed that that could be possible while others said that the others would just have to change their perspectives. It was yet more evidence that stalls (bad habits that delay progress) are present in even the best leaders.

         I had forgotten an early lesson from law school: No two people see the same issue in the same way. In fact, you can often make quite powerful arguments in favor of more than two positions on an issue. Sometimes the issues are so closely conflicted among various interests that it’s hard to pick a “right” solution.

         I didn’t think that helping people become more persuasive about their personal opinions was going to be the way to advance the project. But clearly if we strayed very far from self-interest, we would lose our audience and fail to gain interest from others.

         In contrast to our fumbling efforts, we learned about a number of worldwide movements that had succeeded in gaining mass interest. All of these movements had a humanitarian bent and began with a solution in mind (or at least a principle to use in creating the specific solution). No one had, to our knowledge, stirred the popular imagination by leading a broad-based search for answers to thousands of important questions.

         But we drew comfort from observing that the world is also full of people who either are high performers or who aspire to be high performers. Perhaps if we built on the motivation these people already felt for some desired result and gave the aspiring a better way to get to their outsized dreams, we could create a mass movement … one person at a time.

         Here’s how I imagined it might work: We arm an effective person with ways to accomplish more. In normal copy-cat style, dozens will emulate what that person does. Soon, there will be few choices but to follow the new level of effectiveness in that same area. If we can encourage people to see the benefits of making breakthrough progress on a regular basis, there will soon be the kind of collective emphasis on breakthroughs in a given area that has driven the semiconductor industry forward so effectively for the last several decades.

         I decided to explore that approach of arming the aspiring while keeping a watchful eye out for possible ways to create an interesting symbol or concept that would stick in peoples’ minds to help turn them into effective innovators.

Directing Rapid Progress

Put it before them briefly so they will read it,

clearly so they will appreciate it,

picturesquely so they will remember it and

above all accurately so they will be guided by its light.

— Joseph Pulitzer

All of our communication eggs were not in the Web site basket: We also planned to create a series of books and articles that would begin sharing helpful information about our project.

         One such source of material already existed. Since 1992, I had been analyzing the behaviors of CEOs whose companies grew their stock prices the fastest during the prior three years through an annual series of articles for Chief Executive Magazine. This research was the first (to my knowledge) tracking study of CEO best practices, and I had high hopes for what it would reveal. My idea was to locate practices that other company leaders could use to grow 20 times faster than usual. The study did indeed become a potent source of information. Carol Coles and I used the insights we gained to write about the importance of continuing business model innovation in The Ultimate Competitive Advantage (Berrett-Koehler, 2003).

         While the CEO tracking study continued, Carol Coles and I asked Robert Metz to assist us in creating a book that would outline a process that almost anyone could use to accomplish 20 times as much in a given area with the same time, effort, and resources. We correctly saw this book as the first major output of the 400 Year Project. While most people try to write business books to boost their consulting and coaching businesses, our intention was to boost interest in and activity for finding new solutions through the 400 Year Project.

         The good news was that we already had such a process that could be adapted for the purpose: the universal problem-solving process that Peter Drucker had noticed that we always used. He had correctly perceived that we had moved past our clients in creating innovative practices. The key to our effectiveness was a master process that could quickly resolve most problems with superior solutions that no one had ever employed before. In early 1995, Peter began insisting that we take this process and turn it into a universal resource. Otherwise, he was concerned that a tool of immense practical value would be lost, potentially for centuries.

         We were flattered by Peter’s high opinion of our work’s potential. The bad news was that Carol and I had no experience with turning processes we used into books. We again turned to Robert Metz to help us. Robert had written a number of investment-related books and had authored one best seller, CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye (Signet, 1976). Robert had helped new authors before and felt confident he could shepherd us through the process.

         Having heard a lot about interfering agents and intractable publishers, we asked Robert to advise us on how to get an agent and a publisher. His advice was to simply write the book and then look for a publisher. In this way, we were likely to be able to write a book that contained the content we intended rather than the direction that a publisher wanted us to take.

         Beginning around 1997, we started the conceptual development of that book, tentatively named The Future Before Its Time. We needed to lay out a format that people would enjoy using for learning. Early on, we decided to fill the book with as many examples as possible and to make the information accessible to those with many different learning styles. That approach was quite a challenge because most people have read or experienced relatively little in the way of advanced practices. We had to take the most solid information available and reduce it to tasty bites that contained the essence of the lesson without cloying our readers’ appetites for more.

         In one-on-one conversations about the project, it was obvious that people loved specifics and were confused or bored by general principles. But we needed to express general principles, or people wouldn’t know what to do next. What model could we use to get around this problem?

         The story of Scheherazade came to mind. She married a king who had executed a string of brides after each wedding night. To stay alive, every night she told her husband a new story that ended in a cliffhanger. She continued to tell the stories for 1001 nights, gave the king three sons, and so avoided execution.

         Could we similarly string together a large number of fascinating stories, stories so rewarding that readers would race forward to find the next one? Well, it was worth a try. Robert, Carol, and I were all accomplished storytellers and had large repertoires of stories we had accumulated from our reading and contacts. We could draw on those resources and see what we could do.

Progress Reports

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

— Niels Bohr

The semiannual steering committee meetings provided a helpful discipline for the project in the early days. I was always thinking about how to produce something new and improved that could be shared in six months or less.

         We developed a habit of making the fall meeting a little more formal than the spring one and holding it at a special location. Steering committee members were encouraged to bring spouses and children to the fall events, and there was a festive atmosphere as we pondered ways to make more progress and to share our messages.

         Following the kick-off meeting, I learned my lesson about how difficult it is to create a useful meeting video. Instead of the handheld video camera we used in 1995, the video producer would set the stage, put up lights, add microphones, do endless lighting and sound checks, and direct the action. As a result, we have an excellent video report lasting nine minutes from the 1996 fall meeting. Why only nine minutes? People have short attention spans. The cover of the VHS box displays the four Tobi Kahn paintings from the second commission, the BYRKA series representing health, happiness, peace, and prosperity that were unveiled at the one year anniversary of the project. People could take the recordings home and play them. We could also send copies to steering committee members and clients who could not attend the session.

         After two years, I found that the video production was driving the meeting rather than the other way around. Also, our producer took a job where he could no longer be available to create the videos for us, and we were never able to find an acceptable replacement. In fact, we didn’t turn our last shoot into a finished video.

         As had been my habit for all of our learning organizations, I also wrote reports for those who simply wanted to read about the key elements of what we had covered. What impact those reports had I’m not sure, but it made me feel more virtuous to write them.

         Despite the excitement Carol and I felt for the project, it was soon clear that the steering committee’s interest was waning. Attendance kept dropping from progress meeting to progress meeting. An unexpected benefit came from this fall-off in interest: Our steering committee became more candid with us about what they perceived to be the limitations of the project.

         Through these years, our most devoted steering committee members were Robert L. Guyett, Robert P. Kanee, Richard E. Koch, and Michael A. Sharp. We cannot thank them enough for the support, encouragement, and suggestions they provided. We also appreciate all of the help everyone who ever joined the steering committee gave us.

         Peter Drucker was a tougher critic of our efforts. While our steering committee would be pleased that we were still plugging away on what they felt were the most important areas, Peter expected us to be making breakthrough progress. To him, the process for advancement was pretty clear: We needed a major company to begin using the project’s insights as a laboratory to develop the model for future performance. With each visit, we reported no progress on that front. Peter was encouraging, however, by reminding us that every major company in the United States turned him down originally when he wanted to study management before General Motors finally agreed to let him in the door.

False Steps

From error to error, one discovers the truth.

— Sigmund Freud

While it would take a much longer book to describe all of the things we tried that didn’t work, it’s worth noting some of the many mistakes we made that others might see as opportunities to make faster progress. Hopefully, others will avoid these pitfalls in similar projects. Here’s an example: Many public speakers will tell you that you can simply dictate 10 hours worth of material onto a tape and then hire a writer for very little money who will turn that material into a finished book. Perhaps that’s the case if your message is about your humble beginnings and how positive thinking made you a success.

         We tried that approach for several book ideas. In each case, we found an intelligent, hard-working person who wrote much better than Carol and I do. We armed our writers with an outline for a book and invited the writers to interview us until he or she had enough material. We recorded those interviews and had them transcribed. The writers even got a floppy disk of the transcribed material so they could simply edit the interviews if that was enough for them.

         Our talented collaborators did their best. They worked hard. They wrote lots of material. They asked lots of good questions. But they could not produce manuscripts that captured the essence of what we wanted to describe. Carol and I devoted long and painful hours to the process, and these collaborations just didn’t work. It became obvious that we could write the material faster than we could explain it to someone else who would then do the writing.

         When people first learn about the 400 Year Project, they often have a reaction like Peter Drucker’s: Some smart CEO will want to take this perspective and gain enormous advantages by permeating his or her company with these practices. We spent many years writing to CEOs who had such reputations, visiting CEOs we knew who had that orientation, and making presentations to senior officer groups. I remember one such visit when I felt very confident that we would get the go ahead. To ease matters, I offered to do the work for no fee. That offer only gained me the reaction that each person in the room would rather go home five minutes earlier every night than spend even five minutes on learning and employing the problem-solving practices we had created.

         Why? I’m sure the answer varied from organization to organization that turned us down. Our general impression was that people were overworked and fearful of losing their jobs. The continual downsizing of American organizations had been going on for some time, and there weren’t many people left who did anything other than run from fighting one fire to putting out another one. A little known fact was that many of the executives who had great reputations for installing new ideas were mostly doing so after these ideas had been around for 20 or 30 years. In addition, executive pay had reached the moon. Due to a combination of more emphasis on stock options and larger performance bonus opportunities, a senior management group could earn more in five years than a similar group would have earned in a lifetime two decades earlier. Most executives didn’t plan to stick around any longer than it took to cash out with their big payday. Something like the 400 Year Project required people who wanted to enjoy improvements for many years to come.

         Marketing-oriented people will tell you that you can sell any idea to the media. Just write press releases; follow up with writers, editors, and producers; and you will be overwhelmed with demand for your idea. That wasn’t our experience. Fearing that we had gone about it in the wrong way, we sought help in pursuing this path.

         Marketers of ideas seemed underwhelmed by our project. One organization is considered to be unbeatable in this area. We spent months making daily telephone calls trying to get someone to speak with us. Finally, a sales representative from that organization called us back to say that they were very busy but that the CEO of the organization had agreed to discuss our project for 15 minutes by telephone three months in the future. Okay. On the appointed day, there was a snowstorm in the CEO’s town. The CEO didn’t make it to the office in time for our scheduled call. We tried for the next six months to reschedule. We never got another slot. And that was one of the more promising leads we had.

Confidence Counts

We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.

— Helen Keller

While some might have seen the normal process of starting up the project as discouraging, Carol and I felt like youngsters learning to crawl and toddle. You unexpectedly flop down and fall over a lot, but it’s still exciting to be able to move around on your own. We tended to measure our progress by the distance from where we had started to where we were at the moment, rather than from where we were to where others thought we could or should be. You’ve all seen a madly grinning toddler shrieking with glee while racing off with two parents trailing behind. We felt that joy. We listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a lot to help keep us in that mood.

         More importantly, we could tell that the obstacles were falling back before our efforts. Feeling an obstacle start to give way isn’t the same as removing the obstacle, but once you know you can move it a little, it’s only a matter of time before the obstacle will be irrelevant. As we flexed our obstacle-removing muscles, our confidence grew. Although we didn’t yet see the path to the end of the project, we could always see the next step or two. Believing that the path to the objective existed, even if we couldn’t see it, was all the confidence we needed to keep plowing ahead wherever we could make progress.

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.