Chapter 5: Irresistible Growth Beckons

Chapter 5

Irresistible Growth Beckons

 Dreams come true;

without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

— John Updike

Doubling Up

No one in his right mind would sit down to write a book

if he were a well-adjusted, happy man.

— Jay McInerney

Peter Drucker knew a glutton for punishment when he saw one. Like a mother who doesn’t remember the pain of childbirth, I soon found that I missed not writing every day. Over my career, I’d written more than my share of articles, workbooks, and research papers. The writing always seemed so rewarding to me that I really didn’t care if anyone read the work. Even writing The 2,000 Percent Solution (which had become painful at the end) became a happy memory in the rosy glow of postpublication applause.

Needing no more encouragement than the itch to write again, I immediately began working on a new book proposal. At least I had learned one lesson from The 2,000 Percent Solution: Don’t write the book before you have a publisher unless you plan to self-publish. Having been featured as one of the top two new books in our publisher’s large catalogue, naturally I expected they would be quick to grab a new book from us. Unfortunately, experience had taught our publisher that a sequel sells a lot less than the original book; they would be content to wait to see how well the first book sold before considering a second work. There was no rush.

However, that’s not how I felt. I had all these important ideas I wanted to write about. I began shopping my proposal around to other business book publishers. These clever businesspeople also wanted to see how the first book did before making a commitment. Many of them candidly told me that if my first publisher didn’t want a second book, they didn’t want to take a chance either.

Fortunately, not everyone felt that way. We found a bright young publisher who had specialized in reprinting English books in the United States that had been originally published elsewhere. He wanted to launch a line of original titles and thought it was a great idea to have two of the coauthors of The 2,000 Percent Solution as his first writers. We liked him and he liked us. We were off to a great start!

Peter Drucker, however, scolded me rather severely: It was madness for us to write major books more often than every five years. Peter said he would never do that because all you do is steal sales from the last book. Books like The 2,000 Percent Solution, he warned us, could take as long as two or three decades to be understood and appreciated. After all, Herman Melville sold fewer than a hundred copies of the classic novel, Moby Dick, during his lifetime.

I politely disagreed. I thought that a second book coming out sooner would deepen interest in The 2,000 Percent Solution by demonstrating the practical value of the problem-solving processes it contained. Well, I was 100 percent wrong in that conclusion.

Filling Mental Gaps

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

— James Russell Lowell

From the book tour, I learned that finding more ways to help people realize that they already knew about better solutions was going to be critical to the 400 Year Project. By writing another book that outlined more examples of stalls, stallbusting, and creating 2,000 percent solutions, I hoped to trigger more awareness of previously observed near-perfect human performances that could be emulated in new solutions.

What should the book’s topic be? I had been struck during my first projects at the Boston Consulting Group by the way that clients were so very impressed when a strategic solution would take advantage of positive trends. Subsequently, I noticed how hard most people tried to get in step with whatever the latest trends were, unless poverty or infirmity made such adjustments impossible.

One source of that preference for aligning with trends was the increasing sense that leaders had less and less influence over their results. It’s hard enough to keep balls in the air as you juggle them. Add strong winds, a powerful earthquake, and loud noise while standing on a tightrope, and juggling becomes much harder. The traditional response to stronger external influences had been to expect more of leaders: They needed to become ever more agile so that they could quickly twitch themselves and their organizations into favorable orientations with whatever shifts affected their business. The description of a good leader increasingly sounded like that of Superman: “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” I didn’t know any leaders who bore even the slightest resemblance to Superman. What could a mere mortal leader do instead?

I began reading broadly on the subject of how leaders can orient organizations to trends. My eye was caught by a book written by Arie de Geus, The Living Company (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), that argued persuasively for using biological metaphors for companies rather than inanimate ones. My thinking was further sparked by something he said during a talk about his book at a forum of strategic thinkers: When people have no experience in an area, they draw a blank when they try to think about what to do. Fill in that blank with useful experience, and they will make rapid progress. Arie noted that working on simulated problems based on scenarios describing a challenging situation was very good for providing relevant experience. This observation was based on Arie’s work at Shell. He had been involved with the famous scenario-based planning in which Shell executives had considered what they might do about an Arab oil embargo before the real thing occurred in the 1970s. Reports suggested that this scenario thinking had helped Shell to adjust more rapidly and effectively than many of its competitors.

Arie kindly agreed to spend a day with Carol and me at his club in London where we grilled him about the management implications of biological metaphors and developing advance experience through scenarios. He informed us that scenario thinking had an unexpected benefit that everyone should pursue: Think about enough scenarios and you begin to see strategies and tactics that will leave you better off regardless of what comes next.

We had previously been focused on finding opportunities that provide upside potential while having little, if any, downside risk. Our most successful clients instinctively looked at opportunities that way. In addition, we had fine-tuned our financial strategy services by helping clients to find actions that had little downside risk, regardless of what came next in the financial markets.

In The 2,000 Percent Solution, we argued in favor of using simulations to make people more effective in dealing with surprise situations. But scenario planning (although it was an area in which we had been active) was not addressed in that book. Carol and I became intrigued with the opportunity to focus our new book on more ways to create mental bridges that allow people to effectively deal with issues outside of their direct control.

The Joys of Cellular Slime Molds

The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people.

— Steve Biko

Carol and I take great pleasure in finding natural circumstances that seem to defy expectations. In The 2,000 Percent Solution, we pointed out that lizards in the Bahamas were able to physically adapt to their hostile environments more than 2,000 times faster than evolutionary biologists predicted. That discovery was an unexpected finding from an experiment to study extinction. The lizards were placed on islands where they were supposed to rapidly die out because the environments were too hostile for them to survive. But instead, the lizards had thrived in their new homes in various ways on 14 different islands with unique environments by changing physically and learning new behaviors that perfectly fit each island. We loved that example because people should be even more adaptable than lizards by drawing on resources such as ideas from others, helping each other, and using various kinds of work and thinking tools.

Arie urged us to find a biological metaphor for our new book. We searched around and discovered the amazing survival abilities of cellular slime molds. Forgive us for our passion about something you’ve probably never heard of before. I think you’ll be intrigued by what we learned. If you want more details, check out the article by John Tyler Bonner in the December 1984 issue of Science ’84.

Cellular slime molds (a type of amoeba) live individually on the forest floor. The available food supply limits their growth and prosperity, as it does for all amoebas. When the food is gone, stationary amoebas die out. But unlike stationary amoebas, cellular slime molds act in a most unusual way when food is scarce: The cellular slime mold amoebas clump themselves into a community that oozes along as slime until it reaches a spot where more food is present.

They have another trick for finding new homes as well. Clumps of the amoebas will undergo additional physical changes, creating a multicelled stalk holding a sac filled with dormant spores. When animals or people brush against the sacs, the spores attach themselves and are carried to new locations beyond the range that the clump could move on its own.

As a result of these physical adaptations, it doesn’t matter where the amoebas start out because they are designed to move themselves and their descendents to a better place. In essence, cellular slime molds are designed for adjusting to rapidly varying conditions … much as early humans did by roving in hunting bands to where the game was.

Don Quixote, Please Don’t Tilt at the Windmills!

The wind of change is blowing through the continent.

— Harold Macmillan

Being concerned that our readers wouldn’t be as inspired by cellular slime molds as we were, we decided to also use a physical metaphor for the new book that would seem a little more familiar: wind. Wind has often been invoked as a metaphor for change. Having grown up in an area known for its Santa Ana winds, I was well aware of how the wind affects our moods and our daily tasks. Face into a howling desert wind and your eyes are soon filled with grit. At night, the same force drives cold drafts of air through the house and makes being indoors unpleasant. The sound of that force makes sleeping difficult. The trash that piles up in your yard from the wind clearly represents undesirable change. However, when you run a race with the wind at your back, you feel jet propelled. When the wind tapers off, everyone has a sense of new opportunities and optimism. In our book, we would use wind to represent all of the irresistible forces outside of our control that have powerful impacts on us and our organizations.

What are some of those forces? You should make your own list, but the most common irresistible forces described to us by CEOs are new technology, changing customer needs, fashion, government regulation, demographics, economic trends, financial markets, the weather, and currency exchange rates.

The wind was also one of mankind’s earliest sources of power for travel. Where winds were common, simple sails filled with the breeze pushed primitive vessels forward when the wind came from the right direction. Otherwise, oars were used for much slower progress. Later, shipbuilders learned to make adjustable sails and gear that would capture the wind’s power from any direction other than straight ahead. By shifting course to go in a zig-zag style, progress could be made even into a head wind.

On land, windmills were eventually employed for other kinds of work, from pumping water out of low-lying areas (as in Holland) to powering electrical generation in windy deserts. The biggest windmills originally had a serious drawback: Like the earliest sails, they only faced in one direction. If the wind came from another direction, little or no benefit was gained. Like the clever shipbuilders before them, windmill makers learned to adjust: They made propeller blades with vanes behind them that automatically pivot to optimally face the wind and generate power whenever there is wind. Carol and I came to see those adjustable windmills as a metaphor for the kind of strategy and actions that individuals and organizations should take: Use an optimal strategy or action, and the irresistible forces are always creating power for you that allow more to be accomplished.

Our choice of adjustable windmills as a metaphor was inspired in part by one of our favorite clients who collected little statues of Don Quixote. This man was always trying to set the world standard in his industry and realized that such high goals could amount to being overly optimistic. At times during the early days of the 400 Year Project, we had wondered if we, too, were acting like Don Quixote in some of his more comic moments such as when he tilted at windmills.

Use the Force, Luke!

May the Force be with you.

— George Lucas

Creating a human equivalent of a pivoting windmill can seem vastly more difficult and expensive than what is actually required. What’s the basis of that misperception? Most people have never worked on the task and are sensitive to how hard it is to change any aspect of what an organization does. They incorrectly assume that all aspects of the organization need to be incredibly adaptable — a very difficult and expensive challenge. Contrary to that incorrect view, an organization with the equivalent of a weather vane pointing it in the right direction (the proper strategy) will need to adapt very little.

This common misperception taught us there must be stalls that make it especially difficult to take advantage of irresistible forces. As with The 2,000 Percent Solution, Carol and I set out to locate those stalls. Here is what we found: Progress in optimally using irresistible forces is delayed by ignoring or fighting the irresistible forces. Stalls include

• being directionless to begin with so that pushes from irresistible forces are viewed with disinterest;

• employing wishful thinking about being able to accurately predict the future;

• experiencing mental paralysis when irresistible forces turn unexpectedly adverse;

• deciding to fight irresistible forces rather than adjust to gain benefit from them;

• choosing to be too independent in addressing new issues raised by irresistible forces;

• taking an overly optimistic view of the benefits of following the current direction;

• trying to keep secret the bad news of being harmed by irresistible forces; and

• underestimating the ability to handle volatile irresistible forces.

In our new book, we once again provided stallbusters and stall erasers to handle these stalls.

We also developed a parallel new eight-step process for taking advantage of irresistible forces:

1. Recognize how measurements can help your company identify and understand more about irresistible forces.

2. Use your own leading indicators to anticipate shifts in irresistible forces.

3. Identify future best practices for locating, anticipating, and adapting to changes in irresistible forces.

4. Extend your vision to identify best practices beyond anyone else in the future for locating, anticipating, and adapting to changes in irresistible forces.

5. Identify the ideal best practice for benefiting from changes in irresistible forces.

6. Determine how your organization should approach ideal best practices for benefiting from changes in irresistible forces.

7. Enhance your peoples’ ability to achieve the benefits of irresistible force management.

8. Repeat steps one through seven for improved effectiveness in using irresistible force management.

Fleshing out these ideas into a book format proved to be a lot of fun. We once again were blessed with original art produced by Tobi Kahn. Following the advice of our staff, we created a Web site that you can visit by registering at http://www.irresistibleforces.com where you will find book excerpts and some of the artwork. I also encourage you to read and apply the book, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise (Stylus, 2000), in order to develop expertise in this important activity.

The Sound of Silence

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

— Peter F. Drucker

With the experience of promoting The 2,000 Percent Solution behind us, I felt confident that The Irresistible Growth Enterprise could be launched with a smaller, more focused effort. I was boldly assuming that the bulk of those who had read and liked The 2,000 Percent Solution would be hungry for more. I must have forgotten Peter Drucker’s point about few people reading business books. If hardly anyone had read The 2,000 Percent Solution, just getting all those people to read the next book wasn’t going to generate a lot of sales. The rest of the sales would, in fact, have to come from people who were fascinated by the new book’s title or concept.

From the time that the book was conceived, we began to speak about irresistible force management just as often as we did 2,000 percent solutions. But a funny thing happened when we did: The audience for 2,000 percent solutions would be ten times larger than for irresistible forces. As you can imagine, that reaction didn’t bode well for book sales from those newly exposed to this work.

The ratings we got from those who heard both messages were similarly high. Unfortunately, we had picked a subject that wasn’t as appealing as creating 2,000 percent solutions. We were up against the irresistible force of executive indifference. What was the lesson for your intrepid irresistible force authors? Use your new irresistible force management process to pick future book topics.

Knowing how fruitless it is to do local publicity for a book that’s not in distribution, we decided to focus on markets where we got strong distribution. Unfortunately, that was nowhere other than our offices and our publisher’s warehouse. Favorable reviews didn’t exactly pour in either.

Speaking with Peter Drucker about the modest interest in the book, he was full of explanations. In addition to not following his advice about waiting until the market further developed for The 2,000 Percent Solution, we had written a very sophisticated book that would not appeal to everyone. In fact, Peter confidently reported that it might take 50 years before The Irresistible Growth Enterprise would be fully appreciated by readers and applied broadly.

His advice: Don’t write any more books for a while and focus on making our best ideas simpler and easier to understand rather than developing more sophisticated methods and ideas. Now I followed his advice.

Focus on Growing the Application

I always avoid prophesying before hand,

because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has taken place.

— Winston Churchill

Peter also assured us we would advance the 400 Year Project faster than by writing more books if we worked with and observed people who were applying our ideas from the two books. He also recommended that we focus our writing on shorter pieces.

Severely chastened, I began to embed more and more of the 2,000 percent solution and irresistible force management processes into our consulting assignments. I did, however, reserve some time during my vacation in 2000 to write brief outlines of new management processes.

If you are interested in taking a look at these other processes, you’ll find them at http://www.mitchellandco.com/mngmnt.html. You can read about subjects such as innovation leadership, future management, capital management, mutual benefit management, error-proof management, and leading one-person organizations. That Web site’s management section has an unusual structure designed to make the materials easier to select from and to use. Each subject opens with a brief summary to help you decide if the material is relevant to your needs. If you find that you are interested, you go to a prediagnostic page that tells you how to determine the potential of the subject to help you. If that exercise is sufficiently positive, you go on to a set of instructions for employing the process that include an example and a description of likely benefits. After you apply those instructions, you can click through to the postdiagnostic page that tells you how to build on your first successes in applying the process.

For awhile I was tempted to crank out dozens of these processes. Then I realized that Peter would have advised me to get the processes I had into circulation before adding any more.

My tracking study of CEO best practices for Chief Executive Magazine provided me with an opportunity to write about the two books and these processes. For example, the June 2000 issue of Chief Executive Magazine carried my thoughts on “Irresistible Force Management.” You can find that article at http://www.mitchellandco.com/leadership.html by clicking on the index for 2000 that you’ll find at that Web address.

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.