Introduction:
Seeds of an Optimistic Idea —
the 400 Year Project
My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my
life there.
— Charles Franklin
Kettering
Peter Drucker once advised me to be sure that I always tell
people in my books that I want them to stop doing most of what they already do
and take up more important and useful activities instead. All of the prior
books I’ve coauthored have aimed to shift attention toward working on
different, more useful tasks that almost always lead to breakthroughs and then provided
how to advice for performing those new tasks.
Adventures of an Optimist doesn’t take that path. Instead, this
book has a broader purpose: to show you the benefits of shifting your attention
from day-to-day concerns and incremental improvements towards learning how to
make breakthroughs in areas with the most potential benefits for you and
everyone else.
To show the significance of this
attention shift, I describe a vision of a vastly better world that could be
created through your efforts and enjoyed in your lifetime by you, your children,
and your grandchildren in the book’s background briefing. From there, the book
looks at the origins of the 400 year project (to make 400 years worth of normal
improvements between 2015 and 2035) in part one. In part two, I share the
lessons that have been learned so far through the project. In part three,
you’ll see my prescriptions for how the project can be accomplished. In the
epilogue, you’ll find a description of how you can play a role in this grand
activity.
In Adventures of an Optimist, you’ll find lots to inspire you. Whether
you want to experience extraordinary activities on a modest budget, build a
billion-dollar business, show people how to lift themselves out of poverty,
eliminate harmful pollution in profitable ways, or just increase your daily time
with loved ones, this book outlines the pathways to get you there.
Once inspired, you should read
and apply the how-to books on making breakthroughs that I’ve already written (which
are briefly described in the book) and those how-to books that will come in the
future. In those other books, you’ll find the questions and how to information
you need to go from being ordinary to performing at extraordinary levels in
what’s most important.
As you read each chapter of Adventures of an Optimist, you’ll feel
like you are visiting a new country where people think and talk differently. As
you respond to that feeling, be sure to realize that these chapters are all
connected together much like the countries in continental Europe
are part of the same land mass. The connections come from my experience, my
perspective, and the 400 year project’s work and plans. So be sure to connect
the dots among the chapters to see the overall picture.
Let me start by sharing with you
some of how this audacious project came about to help the world to make 400
years worth of improvements from 2015 to 2035. With that perspective, you, too,
can gain insights into how to capture breakthroughs normally destined for the
25th century by installing the right, flawless activities today.
Looking Backward Illuminates the Present
and Future
The
distinction between past, present and future is only
a stubbornly
persistent illusion.
— Albert Einstein
I have always been fascinated with the past. As a youngster,
the older a story, myth, or legend was, the better I liked it. By quite a young
age, David, Icarus, and Ulysses seemed quite real to me. That interest soon led
me into reading histories as well. The battle of Thermopylae (where in 480 BC the
Spartan-led Greeks heroically held a narrow mountain pass to block the passage
of the Persian army under Xerxes until betrayed by a traitor) seemed as
immediate to me as D-Day (the Allied invasion of Normandy in France to
establish a Western front against Germany during World War II) did to people
who were alive in 1944. By the time I had finished the sixth grade, I had read
all of the standard history texts used through the end of high school.
Branching out, I also began to read biographies and autobiographies to meet
other prominent figures from the past and bring them into my present for
consideration.
By the time I finished high
school, I knew that I wanted to study history in college. That was a happy
choice because Harvard
University, where I would
be an undergraduate, was unusually well stocked with great historians. Quickly,
my tutors there taught me to disregard secondary texts and to focus on original
documents written by contemporaries who had participated in or observed the
events. Old newspapers, diaries, pamphlets, and written versions of oral histories
became my stalking grounds.
From this experience with the raw
material of history, I began to form a different impression of how improvements
occur than what had been described to me by books and teachers. I had been told
that with rare exceptions, making progress was continual and ever upward. In
this view, new knowledge was highly sought after by most and quickly
appreciated.
By studying day-to-day records of
those who first imagined improvements, I found instead that many of the great
advances in knowledge were widely ignored or long delayed in implementation.
For example, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks contained many practical ideas that
lay fallow for centuries before the ideas became everyday realities. The Romans
knew how to make mortar for their roads that lasted for centuries by mixing in
fine pumice emitted from Mount Etna while modern
roads made with coarser materials crumble after a few seasons. During the
Middle Ages in Europe, much classical learning
was all but eradicated. Centuries passed before the Renaissance revived interest
in and awareness of this earlier knowledge. The Chinese became insular and lost
their command of the seas after having once had the world’s most advanced navy.
The highly energetic Japanese similarly rested in suspended animation when it
came to most improvements until forcibly exposed to the Industrial Revolution
by Admiral Perry’s gunboats. Until recently, modern Egyptians had no more idea
of how their ancestors constructed the pyramids than they did how to clone
camels.
Questioning thinkers have always tested
the opportunity to improve on what was previously known, but those quests were
hobbled because access to what had been known earlier was usually quite limited.
Expand awareness of the best of earlier knowledge, and you could greatly expand
potential to improve — that much seemed obvious. The lack of access is worsened
by so much knowledge existing in secret or near-secret conditions. Paradoxically,
some advances were once so well established that no one bothered to document
them, such as the use of some rare herbs to treat medical problems. In addition,
knowledge (or what seemed to pass for knowledge) was expanding much faster than
any individual could absorb in more than a limited area. To me, it seemed like
there was one hope: Gather up the undeveloped ideas of people like Leonardo da
Vinci and get busy working on them. But don’t wait several hundred years to get
started. Work on the most promising undeveloped ideas right after they are
conceived. That’s the first lesson of how to accelerate improvements.
Looking for Opportunities Discarded by
Those with Limited Perspectives
He who refuses to embrace a unique
opportunity
loses the prize as surely as if he had
failed.
— William James
A second important lesson about accelerating improvements
came right after college: Overcome stalls based on rigid mindsets by searching
through opportunities discarded by others. My senior tutor in college asked me
to join his brother and him in developing a new business: matching rare book
buyers with the stock of most rare book sellers by using an IBM 360 mainframe.
They quickly sketched out how valuable this service would be for scholars and
librarians and explained how computer technology had reached the point where
this process could be done at a reasonable cost.
But my tutor and his brother
became profoundly unhappy when I demonstrated that you could provide the same
service at less than 25 percent of the cost of a computer operation by employing
a hand-based system. They quickly abandoned the service idea even though the
manual system would have been much more profitable than their idea.
Why? To their way of thinking if
such a service didn’t need a computer, then they had no competitive advantage,
and there was no benefit to moving forward. To my knowledge, no one ever built
a manual system either, probably because it would have been hard to manage and
operate. Had someone done so, it could have been a golden opportunity. Why
would anyone have tried to duplicate the first manual system? If a manual
competitor had arisen, both enterprises would have had to scramble after the
same customer base, diluting the size of the opportunity and slashing profits
for both. That risk would hardly look attractive to someone looking to start a
new business.
As a result of my potential
partners’ narrow views, people who wanted to find rare books more easily had to
wait several decades before comprehensive rare-book-matching computer systems
were offered. Today, you can find almost any used or rare book you want within
a few seconds by looking on the
Internet to compare the offerings of vendors from all over the world. You can
even inspect the material at a distance by looking at scanned pages.
After that experience while in
law school, I began to wonder if other valuable business concepts were lying
around undeveloped because of some irrational preference by the person who
originally had the idea to proceed in an impractical way. Later, I found out that
this kind of deferral in developing a new kind of business was a common decision
by entrepreneurs because of being closed to alternative operating methods.
Why Going from Concept to Widespread
Application
Often Takes Four Centuries
Nothing so needs reforming as other
people’s habits.
— Mark Twain
After I joined Heublein as the corporate planner, our CEO
once told me I should spend 5 percent of my time adding new knowledge that
would be useful to the company. This knowledge searching seemed like a perfect
opportunity to study how the past might provide clues for creating future
improvements. I found a seminar that addressed how innovative ideas are turned
into practical products and services. The seminar also provided a bibliography
that helped me track the advent of various kinds of improvements. That seminar
and later reading firmed up my understanding of how the concepts behind major
new approaches that succeeded were often identified centuries before the
approaches went into widespread use. In fact, the lags were quite predictable.
The delay between conceiving of the solution and demonstrating a practical way
to accomplish that solution often stretched for centuries as well. From the
time of a practical demonstration to widespread application could also comprise
the better part of a century. Mulling over my history studies, I became
convinced that we can selectively mine the best thinking of the past to capture
benefits that wouldn’t otherwise be gained for centuries. In essence, we have an
enormously valuable knowledge bank filled with partially developed resources that
we aren’t using very well.
I also observed that common
attitudes frequently got in the way of making much faster use of such valuable
knowledge. Delays in developing antibiotics related in part to the dislike most
scientists felt for studying natural phenomena like the curious effect of bread
mold in killing bacteria and working with other sources of naturally occurring
antibiotics. Overconfidence in the reigning so-called knowledge of the day encouraged
those who supposedly knew the right answer to try to eliminate the superior
knowledge that would replace conventional wisdom, such as when scientists insisted
that stomach ulcers were usually caused by stress and worry rather than by
infections that could be cured with antibiotics. Few people can stand outside
of their current way of thinking to appreciate the potential advantages of the
new approach. Why would anyone ever use a telephone to call a neighbor when you
could just lean over the fence and have a conversation? In other cases, people
were satisfied with the results they were getting. Why would anyone want more? Driving
along in a horse and carriage was good enough for mom and dad, why go faster? From
thinking about these observations, I concluded that attitudes were a bigger
barrier to progress than physical, technical, or financial limits.
Although I had never studied
psychology in a classroom, I had read widely in the subject. The behavioral
experiments that demonstrated ways that people act against their self-interest
and the interests of others particularly fascinated me. But psychology didn’t
provide enough answers because so much of its focus was on treating those with
abnormal psychology. I became intrigued by the faults inherent in normal
psychology and began to take mental note of such faults whenever I observed
one.
I began to wonder how such mental
hurdles could be overcome. Whenever I saw someone make rapid progress, I would
take note of the circumstances. Soon I began to realize that although
foot-dragging and denial were common reactions, taking rapid, appropriate
action was also a common reaction. I found myself appreciating two new
questions: What could account for the differences between harmful and helpful
responses? And how could those differences be exploited to accelerate
improvements?
A Stitch in
Time Saves Eighty-One
You see
things; and you say why?
But I dream
things that never were; and
I say “why
not?”
— George Bernard Shaw
Let me tell you about some perspectives I developed about how
mindsets can encourage rapid improvements. Here’s the starting point: Extreme optimists,
like me, are naturally drawn to the subject of perfection, the extreme
optimist’s ultimate objective.
I had help in learning about
extreme optimism. Any disinclination to perfection I had was overcome by having
a mother who often found achieving mere aspects of perfection to be
unsatisfactory. Here’s an example: I routinely earned straight A’s in junior
high and high school for my subject grades. We also received grades in effort
and citizenship, which we quickly learned were never seen by anyone but school
employees, our parents, and ourselves. Those grades obviously were like writing
in the sand in the beach and would eventually disappear. Most students simply
ignored these extra marks.
Like many 13-year-old boys, I
decided to try a little misbehavior that was sometimes aimed at teachers who
annoyed me (such as the man who insisted we memorize over 300 dates and events
from World War II). That teacher decided to send home a message. I earned my
usual A as a subject matter grade, but I also got a D in effort and a D in
citizenship. My mother’s feet didn’t seem to hit the ground for days as she went
crazy with anger over her “perfect” son not working hard and misbehaving. I got
the message, and the A’s spread across the whole report card after that.
From then, my
focus shifted: I began to look for ways to gain perfection by making less
effort without anyone noticing. Here’s an example: I had to take a driver’s education
class to graduate from high school. My mother insisted that I take typing as
well during the same summer school session. (How did she know that I would be
typing my own books all these years later?) We had a lot of homework for driver’s
education, and most of my friends didn’t want to be bothered doing it. I
offered to type up the homework assignments for a fee. In this way, I would get
extra typing practice while earning some money. To keep from being found out by
the teacher, I wrote my own answers in long hand after typing out the answers
for someone else, and I was careful not to repeat any of the material. After
typing out long answers (I was paid by the page), it was easy to shorten up the
answers for my own homework. I also breezed through typing class because of the
extra practice I got at home every night. My budding approach to perfectionism with
minimum effort was taking root and provided a firm foundation for my work as a
business consultant.
Later, my
consulting clients often asked me to check out all of the new trends I could
find that might affect their businesses. One day I might be in England
talking to a plastic bag manufacturer. The next day might take me to Germany
to look at new designs for packages. On such visits, you felt like you were
looking clearly into the future. The solutions were often so terrific that
there was no way that the current approach would survive. It was exciting and
fun.
After having
done these kinds of assignments for a time, I found that I began to accumulate
perspectives from prior meetings that the person I was interviewing didn’t seem
to have. Curious, I began asking my interviewees if they knew about
such-and-such that related to their field. Seldom had they heard of the related
development. In most cases, they didn’t even bother to note down what I
mentioned. I naturally didn’t tie the ideas together for the interviewees in a
neat package because my loyalty was to my client. I came to appreciate that
while John Donne was convinced that no man was an island spiritually, there
were plenty of people deliberately living on isolated islands of knowledge.
Consultants are
often described as being like bees. Here’s the description you often hear: Bees
(consultants who work with lots of organizations) gather pollen (new
information and insights) from one flower (person or organization) and carry the
pollen to another flower (person or organization). In the process, bees
(consultants) help create new hybrids (combinations of factors that previously
didn’t exist). The flowers (people or organizations) would usually not have
propagated with each other at that time.
The reality can
be a little more complicated than that. Consultants often see ways that a large
number of flowers could propagate with one another to create a superior
offspring that shares many combined traits. That’s not just a hybrid (which has
two parents) but, rather, a whole new species. To create that new plant
(superior offering) is more like genetic engineering than it is like pollination.
At least that’s the case when consultants are good at thinking about what they’ve
learned.
Here’s an
example of the thought process consultants might go through to create a new
species of business: During the heyday of minicomputers, Digital Equipment
Corporation led the market. The company grew over 40 percent a year for many
years. That success was built around a simple business model: Use the latest
advances in electronics to deliver more speed and functionality at the same
price through installing new components in compatible computer hardware that
runs on operating software you’ve already developed. Rely on partners to
develop useful application software to make good use of the improved hardware.
Count on smart customers who are engineers and scientists to make any
adjustments that are needed to gain a good result. Offer proprietary hardware
and software operating systems so that competitors can’t provide compatible substitutes
of your offerings in existing accounts.
If you looked toward
the future at that time, it was clear that minicomputer functionality would
eventually reside in something like today’s personal computer due to improved,
less expensive electronics. That solution wasn’t of interest to Digital
Equipment. The company looked upstream instead to the mainframe computer makers
and created cheaper versions of mainframes built around its minicomputer base
technology. This product offering meant having lots of terminals with limited
intelligence tied together by an expensive minicomputer. The trouble with that
concept was that the high priced minicomputer could eventually be replaced by a
server that cost about the same as a personal computer. Digital Equipment either
didn’t seem to see or to be concerned about that likelihood.
Back in the late
1970s, our firm (Mitchell and Company) was asked by another computer maker to
study Digital Equipment and design a competitive strategy that the minicomputer
maker could not resist. Putting together the trends and the best practices in
the computer industry, it was clear that software used by businesses on
personal computers operated by inexpensive hub machines (servers) was going to
be the big winner. Technology would improve and new uses would swell the number
of computers into a vast array. Each personal computer would need operating
systems and application programs. The value of using the computer would be tied
up in those programs, while the value of the hardware content would eventually
approach zero as more and more functionality was inscribed onto a single
computer chip. The simpler the hardware platform was to use, the more valuable
the software would be. If the same software could work on the machines made by
different companies, software makers would earn substantially more. In fact,
they could expect to exclude many competitors that way.
As a
result, we recommended a business model for the future that was the exact
opposite of what Digital Equipment was pursuing. Why? We had been able to
verify a future vision of perfection by talking to those who were driving the
major trends such as chip manufacturers, software vendors, and computer users. In
fact, the business model we described then is very close to the one that
Microsoft soon adopted by becoming the outsourced supplier of software for the
original IBM PC.
What happened to
Digital Equipment? It made several reluctant, unprofitable forays into providing
personal computers. As competition from the low-priced IBM personal computer clones
began to reduce the market for many minicomputer applications, profits began to
disappear at Digital Equipment. The company’s founder was ousted. New
management hunkered down to focus on slashing costs and eventually sold the
firm to a personal computer maker, Compaq, for the value of maintaining
essential services for Digital’s existing customer base. Compaq in turn was
acquired by Hewlett-Packard as part of Carly Fiorina’s controversial strategy
to diversify away from the profitable personal computer printer market. Carly
Fiorina is no longer CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but the company eventually
improved its position under new CEO, Mark Hurd. The consequences of Digital’s
obsolete business model continue to rebound throughout the computer industry by
having opened important doors of opportunities for newer companies.
What happened to
our client? They never entered the software business very seriously. After all,
they were hardware people. Today Microsoft is worth four times what our client
is. Perhaps it would have been worth our client’s while to add some software
people back then. But they didn’t do so.
As you can see
from this example, a consultant can show the vision of future perfection by combining
several trends and best practices, but the clients may not act. Why not? It has
to do with those pesky attitudes and behaviors that delay all kinds of
innovation. Unlike bees carrying pollen to female flowers, what consultants
have to share may be rejected even when the approach is sound.
Boldly Go
Where No One Has Gone Before
The future
belongs to those who
believe in
the beauty of their dreams.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Another of the big hurdles to
making progress is found in the bee analogy: Many people limit themselves to
that concept of having a bee bring some pollen from another flower to improve a
person or organization with some added attribute. The purpose of such pollen
spreading is seen as incorporating that which already exists elsewhere as a way
to become the equal of the other person or organization. Think of this as the
copycat strategy, a preferred method of competing that most people and organizations
favor.
Here’s
how the copycat strategy works: You watch what others are doing, and if it seems
to work, you rush out with your own version of what’s working. But usually the
results from this strategy are mixed. Why? Almost everyone else is doing the
same thing, and cutthroat competition ensues in a market that’s now glutted with
capacity and attention. In addition, those who come in later are often seen by
customers and suppliers as less
authentic and desirable than the provider who pioneered the offering or
approach.
Wouldn’t
it be better to leap well beyond what anyone is doing now? Sure it would, but
organizations rarely work on that direction. Why? Leaders often lack a sense of
what the leap ahead will be that everyone will want, and the organizations almost
always lack the business processes and experience to create such leaps.
Copycats, in other words, don’t easily turn into genetic engineers creating new
varieties that deliver vast improvements.
Back
in the 1970s, it was popular for companies doing their planning to find a
single company that could serve as a model for everything they felt they needed
to copy. These companies were called “success models,” and thousands of
executives identified such success models and began copying them with even more
attention and rigor than before.
Realizing
that this approach would lead to disaster for most companies, I encouraged
those executives I worked with to create success models that borrowed excellent
elements from many companies in a variety of industries and circumstances. In
this way, it was easy for those who liked to use copycat tactics to put
together programs that would exceed what competitors would be doing in the
immediate future. If you can’t change the cat, at least change what the cat
looks at. Clients found this approach worked well for them.
When
Mitchell and Company was first founded in 1977, I spent a lot of time looking
around to see where people would have the easiest time improving their
performance. From that thinking and research, it became clear that
opportunities that provided both the most near- and long-term benefits would be
best to focus on. It also became clear that most people emphasized what helped
the near term, even if it hurt the long term, and that many long-term focused
individuals were willing to virtually destroy the present situation in order to
grasp at straws that they hoped would turn into something in the future. From
that investigation, I learned that the most attractive opportunities could be
found where organizations and offerings were already growing rapidly, their
profit margins were expanding, and little added money was needed to pay for the
future growth. Unfortunately, that delightful conjunction was almost always
mismanaged to the detriment of future performance, regardless of how much
potential existed. Why? The organizations usually chose to maximize what they
had today, rather than build on their potential in new ways. In essence, they
were acting like copycats of their own outdated ways to succeed.
Having
been well trained by my mother to keep seeking higher levels of perfection, I
realized that people could accomplish a lot more. One basis for that opinion came
from comparing how poorly most organizations did new things compared to how
effectively they did the tried-and-true.
Was
it possible to take the tried-and-true for a person and build on that
foundation to create incredible effectiveness in what was new and of enormous
potential? What results might follow? Consider this: If people can successfully
turn their copycat skills towards new targets and break through to higher levels
of performance, what other habits might be harnessed for more productive
results?
Trying
to harness more habits to achieve breakthroughs seemed worth a try. Here’s why:
Even people with few habits often had virtues hidden within their lack of habits.
For example, they might be willing to leave others alone. Couple that inertia
with partners who would be harmed by receiving interference, and you could
accomplish more than more active people would with these same partners. One
example of this combination was our work in helping clients find and make successful
acquisitions. Our studies showed that purchasing other businesses succeeds best
when the acquirer can add lots of immediate and valuable improvements to the
newly purchased business or when the acquired operation is left alone to pursue
an appropriate improvement path that would be harmed by interference. That
latter circumstance most often occurs when the purchased organization is a
capable innovator with a great backlog of projects to work on. Such
organizations can often be found in the hidden byways of larger operations that
are focused in a different direction.
Eventually
we realized that creating perfection would entail doing things that no one
seemed to have done before. In the field of acquisitions, perfection might mean
both adding great, immediate improvements from the acquirer while stimulating
the innovative capability of the purchased organization to a large multiple of
the former level.
How
might you do that? Here’s an example: In the early 1980s I had a chance to work
on that problem. A market-leading business was languishing in a company where
its activities didn’t fit with anything else. The parent company’s top
management saw limited potential. As a result, the parent company kept the
business starved for the funds required to develop new products and services.
But prototype development of new products and services went on anyway in secret
within the business. A client of mine had a smaller, somewhat related, business
that looked at the success and potential of market-leading business with great
envy. I was asked to think about how my client might put the two operations
together for the best results.
I
began by looking at what both organizations would do naturally if left alone.
My client would run with technology opportunities early and often. My client
also knew many other types of markets that the firm would continually explore
and develop. But most of the leaders of my client’s business were within three
years of retirement, and little had been done to groom successors.
The
market-leading business was very cautious in its marketing and made few
mistakes. Its quality was high. Its leaders, about 15 to 20 years younger than
the client’s leaders, understood the potential for adding new technology for
their business and were capable of doing so.
I
brought the two management teams together to see how their personalities mixed.
By observing that they naturally employed mutual respect and courtesy, I
suggested that the market-leading business take the top jobs in each function
except for the CEO position. The client’s leader in that business would be
retiring in two years. I proposed that both leaders share the CEO position
until the client’s leader retired, at which time the acquired company’s leader
would take sole charge. This joint leadership would help the two organizations
get to know one another and coordinate activities between the two groups, which
would continue to be in different locations. I recommended that the remaining
few young Turks who wanted to build a big new business in the client
organization spin out of the combined organization by becoming an independent unit
focused on one high-potential opportunity.
That
way of combining the businesses was decidedly unusual. Typically, the
executives and managers in the company that paid the price gets all the good
jobs somewhat like conquerors in wars grab the spoils from the conquered. In
this case, the newly combined operations benefited by greatly accelerating
their growth, profitability, and innovation. Later this new unit became the
core of the acquiring company. This success showed that you could have your
cake and eat it, too, when it comes to spreading strengths and innovation to
create a more effective organization for creating breakthroughs! And the
results further bolstered the unconscious development within me of an idea that
would become the 400 Year Project.
Soar Like a
Nonprofit Eagle
An idealist
is a man who helps other people to be prosperous.
— Henry Ford
Through my continuing studies into
the nature of rapid improvements, I looked at all kinds of organizations. Having
been a fan of Peter Drucker’s writing since the early 1970s, I was familiar
with his point that nonprofit organizations are often better at innovating
breakthroughs than for-profit companies are. Why? Resources are usually so
scarce in nonprofits that anyone who feels compelled to provide more benefits
has to do a great deal with very little. In addition, nonprofits attract people
who are inherently motivated by the organization’s purpose to look for how to
do the most. Imagine, for instance, the differences in perspective and
motivation you would experience between working for a for-profit waste disposal
company and a nonprofit organization aimed at eliminating breast cancer.
I
continually contacted leaders of nonprofit organizations to see what they were
doing. Mostly, I found bureaucracies more concerned with their own perpetuation
than with making any improvements. For instance, in the early 1970s I worked on
a project while with The Boston Consulting Group to find ways to contain health-care
costs. One idea that interested the United States Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare (HEW) was to simplify billing in hospitals so that the
same revenue was generated, but at less expense. In those days, a bill for a
three-day hospital stay could run to 67 pages. HEW gave a grant to our
consulting firm and our accounting firm partner to put demonstration projects
in place to generate shorter bills that would be less expensive to produce.
There would be no cost to the organizations that participated in the
demonstrations. The grant also provided payments to state hospital associations
for their efforts in describing the project as one method for enlisting
participants. My colleagues and I trekked across the United States many times to
describe the opportunity. The result? No nonprofit hospital in the United States
wanted to work on this project. How did we eventually find participants? We
began to work with for-profit hospitals. Their leaders cared about cutting
costs because they were financially rewarded for earning higher profits.
From
that experience, I learned that breakthrough innovations from nonprofits were
easier to spot than breakthrough-innovating nonprofits. Scanning for news
stories, I began to find those nonprofits that had soared like eagles to go to
a higher level of performance in some particular activity. Then I studied what
those organizations had done to succeed and extracted the key lessons from
these champions. In every case, I found high levels of personal identification among
staff and volunteers with organizational goals to improve the world for others.
This identification was just as strong among staff and volunteers as it was
among the organization’s founders. Who were such organizations? Many were
connected to religious activities such as the emerging Protestant mega-churches
that Peter Drucker often advised. The Salvation Army was another group that effectively
drew on Christian roots. Secular concerns drove other groups, such as the Girl
Scouts under Peter Drucker’s tutee, Frances Hesselbein, to breakthrough
excellence. Concerns about eradicating poverty provided the motivation to
succeed for the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh,
which provides low-cost, small loans to farmers and fledgling entrepreneurs in
remarkably effective ways. In addition, employees, volunteers, and
beneficiaries found their lives were transformed in positive ways beyond what
they could have expected. The enthusiasm became contagious, and rapid growth
ensued that did not dilute the motivation. For-profit skills and innovations
rapidly invaded the nonprofit organizations through the attention of volunteers
and donors. From these observations, I realized that rate of improvement was often
related to how strongly people felt about gaining the benefits from making
improvements.
Design
Future Breakthroughs in Good Company
The way a
team plays as a whole determines its success.
You may have
the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world,
but if they
don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.
— Babe Ruth
Recovering alcoholics have support
groups. So do those who abuse drugs. Could being in good company that’s devoted
to helping one another improve be an effective way to launch breakthrough
thinking and results? That was the question that interested me in 1989 when I
cofounded Share Price Growth 100 with Carol Coles. We invited our many
stock-price improvements clients to join and many did. Other companies, which
hadn’t been clients, were intrigued as well and joined us. Everyone shared a
common desire to learn more about stock-price improvement and hoped to
accomplish that result by pooling perspectives to advance mutual knowledge
through cooperative efforts.
Over
the next ten years, the group achieved astonishing results in revealing what
worked, what didn’t work, and how the lessons could be customized to an
individual company. To those who were involved, the search for stock-price
improvement methods felt as exciting as the project to decode the human genome:
Their efforts created an accurate picture of how supply and demand for shares
are influenced by what companies do. That picture could be enlarged to describe
the individual value genome for any member company: Swift, sustained
stock-price growth quickly ensued for those who employed the lessons.
Impressed
with these results, we extended the cooperative experiment to groups of chief
executive officers, chief financial officers, and those who headed up
individual business units in larger organizations. Motivated by sincere
interest in performing better, these groups made breakthrough headway in many
of the most intractable problems of the time: reducing the cost of capital
below zero; identifying how leaders could spur much more effective innovation
at all organizational levels; making productivity improvements measured in
thousands of percentage points; and managing the ascent from zero to a billion
dollars in annual sales in less time.
Clearly,
there was no limit in sight to this collaborative way of designing and
implementing improvements. We could just go on working with executives through
such collaborations to create new helpful solution after new helpful solution.
That was our plan.
Peter
Drucker Asks a Question and Makes an Observation
We always
carry out by committee anything in which
any one of us
alone would be too reasonable to persist.
— Frank Moore Colby
It was now early 1995. Carol Coles
and I had been meeting with Peter Drucker two or three times annually to review
what the learning organizations were doing and to get his advice on how to
improve. It was exciting to hop on the plane to California
from Boston
knowing all the great things we had to share with Peter.
On
this occasion, he shifted our focus. He asked a new question: “How many of
these new developments are you learning from your members and how many are you
developing from your own thoughts?” Considering the last year’s results, we
realized that although the members were doing a great job of defining what they
wanted to know, we had drained the insights members could provide from their
experiences. The new processes, solutions, and breakthroughs were coming from
work that Carol and I were doing. We admitted that to Peter.
He
noted that if that were true, these organizations were holding back the
innovations that Carol and I could develop and deliver. We agreed to think
about his observation. His question was like the emotional impact of being hit
by a surprise earthquake. We were reeling with the implications for weeks.
Nagged
by that suggestion, I realized that a totally new approach was needed. Other
seeds started to germinate that I had gathered from my observations about the
nature of making rapid improvements. Here was the conclusion: The fastest
current rate of progress could be replaced by much more rapid improvements when
better sharing of knowledge was tied to focusing existing attitudes and habits
in more helpful directions.
Gradually,
I began to realize that it is possible to accelerate worldwide improvements by
20 times within the span of only 20 years. That realization was a key
ingredient in launching the 400 Year Project. Before the end of 1995, the
project to achieve that acceleration goal between 2015 and 2035 was born.
The
rest of this book tells the complete story of how the project was born and
flourished, as well as what solutions will enable making 20-times-faster
worldwide improvements from 2015 through 2035.
Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald
Mitchell.
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