How (10 page)

Look at the kinds of business behaviors we have seen in the past few years. Who could conceive that the founder of the job-search web site Monster would embellish his own resume? That the former executives at Tyco would turn a publicly traded corporation into their personal piggybank to pay for, among other things, an ice-sculpture cherub spouting vodka from his private parts?
¹⁶
On the other side of the coin, look at Angel Zamora, the UPS driver I met who went the extra yard to deliver not only an important package, but also a great experience. Or the pilots of Southwest Airlines. I recently flew to Phoenix to visit a client and I noticed that when it was time to board the plane, the pilot appeared at the gate to help the ground personnel take tickets. Later, as I was exiting the aircraft after we landed, the co-pilot appeared on the ramp carrying a stroller for a mother and her child deplaning ahead of me. How extraordinary, I thought. It certainly isn’t in the job description of the pilot to help board the plane. And I can’t imagine the Southwest Pilots Association union rep negotiating a clause requiring the co-pilot to carry strollers. There is no rule that says, “To stay employed here you must help board the plane and hand out baby strollers.” It seemed as though there was something bigger than a job description or a rule guiding those Southwest employees.

Of course, you still need great products and great business models. You still cannot succeed, thrive, or become number one without having good WHATs. But those WHATs used to be enough to excel; now you need them just to stay in the game. To thrive, you need something more. “Anything times zero is zero,” said Steve Kerr. “If you do something useless in a really elegant way, it is no more profitable than if you do something important in an inefficient way. The reason to emphasize the HOWs
now
is that they are the underattended part of the equation. They can take you to a different place.” It is not that HOW is necessarily more important than WHAT, Steve was telling me; it is that we live in an A-times-B world, and HOW is the X-factor. The greater your command of HOW, the greater are the results of your efforts.
¹⁷

The world today, powered by vast networks of information, connects us and reveals us in ways we have only just begun to comprehend. Through it all, one thing has become crystal clear: It is no longer WHAT you do that makes a difference; it is HOW you do it. Not every team gets to win. Not every employee becomes an executive. Many do not even get to survive. Some last, some end, some outperform others. The emerging trend among leading-edge businesses today involves delivering not so much a better product, but a better experience to their customers. The opportunity to differentiate by outbehaving the competition is the central raison d’etre for both this book and my life’s work. This concept, applied broadly to company/customer/supplier relationships and worker/boss/team relationships, is what I mean what I talk about innovating and winning through HOW.

HOW WE GO FORWARD

Human behavior always mattered in the way we conducted our affairs and pursued personal fulfillment but, unquestionably, it now matters in a new way. In 2005, Merriam-Webster reported that the number-one most looked-up word on its world-renowned dictionary web site was
integrity
.
¹⁸
Our new networks of connection allow enormous innovation, but only for those who understand how to send current through these networks and how to make Waves with other people. Frameworks change; paradigms shift. Business, like life, often seems to exist in a bowl full of splinters; movement in one place has a profound effect on dozens of others. Sometimes, tectonic forces bring about new alignments in the world. Sometimes, it is just our ability to see familiar things in a different way that reveals a new world order lurking not far beneath the surface of the one we thought we knew so well. If the world has changed, how we conduct ourselves within it must change, too.

In this part of the book, we have explored the conspiracy of forces that define the parameters of a new framework, a new reality for twenty-first-century business. We’ve looked at the shift from land to capital to information and the old habits like hoarding, dividing and conquering, and command-and-control that have clung to us despite profound change; the trend in business toward horizontal connections that puts us into increasing contact with those of relatively equal stature working in teams around the globe, the ways in which we have been jammed together across time and cultures faster than we have developed frameworks to understand and operate productively with one another, and how information and communications technology trespasses upon and alters how we fill the spaces between us. We’ve talked about the many ramifications of transparency, how it inflates the value of reputation and how it combines with the free flow of information to make reputation more vulnerable to inaccurate or unfair charges. We’ve charted the end of the Just Do It era, with its focus on bottom line results and transactional behaviors, and the limitations of rules to govern human conduct. And we’ve considered the profound way that these changes have shifted our focus from WHAT to HOW.

The picture of the world these forces and dynamics paint reveals a sea change, not a pendulum swing, in how we do what we do, and places unprecedented focus on human conduct as a process full of value. There is no going back. It bears repeating that we will never be
less
transparent, will never have
less
information, and will never be
less
connected than we are today. No matter what our vertical specialty—sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, administration, management, service, and on and on—achievement in the twenty-first century dramatically depends on our ability to thrive in a system of connections more vast, more varied, and more exposed than any before in the history of man. We do not live in glass houses (houses have walls); we live on glass microscope slides, flat as flat can be, visible and exposed to all.

Success now requires new skills and habits, a new lens for seeing, and a new consciousness for relating. In our see-through world, there’s an overabundance of information and it flows too easily for anyone to control it and outfox everyone. You can no longer game the system and expect that no one will find out. You need to stop dancing around people and start leading a dance that everyone can follow. Long-term, sustained success is directly proportional to your ability—as a company or an individual—to make Waves throughout evanescing networks of association, to reach out to others and enlist them in endeavors larger than yourself, and to do so while everyone watches you. In the chapters that follow, we’ll explore HOW.

Part II

HOW WE THINK

He who has a hundred miles to walk
should reckon ninety as half the journey.

—Japanese proverb

INTRODUCTION: THE PARADOX OF JOURNEY

As a law student, I was a teaching fellow in a class taught by Alan Dershowitz, Stephen J. Gould, and Robert Nozick called “Thinking about Thinking” to undergrads at Harvard College. It was a highly conceptual, cross-disciplinary class that combined science, philosophy, and law to confront the big issues of the time: drugs, abortion, euthanasia, gun rights, and others. At the end of the semester, I began to notice an interesting trend in my grading patterns, something surprising about who earned Bs and B+s, who earned the As, and, most interestingly, who earned the Cs. I discussed it with my fellow teaching associates, and in the process confronted an interesting paradox about how we learn and the journey to deep knowledge.

The B/B+ students in my class demonstrated good command of the material. They started their intellectual journeys at the beginning of the semester and climbed a hill of understanding. They did all the reading, they were industrious, and they were able to lay it out very clearly on the final exam. They climbed diligently, as one does on all journeys, ever upward toward knowledge. At the end of the semester they displayed a basic understanding and basic knowledge, made no major mistakes, showed little confusion, and repeated it all back clearly. Basic knowledge deserved a grade of B.

Those who received A grades had mastered, synthesized, and integrated the material into their being. They thought deeply, developed counterarguments that weren’t part of the readings, internalized the material, and put it to work. They took charge of what they had learned, took it further, challenged it, and created new, innovative thoughts: thinking outside the classroom, if you will. In short, they had developed a power—a power informed by what they had read and heard, and amplified by the way they saw it at work in the world. They were not just
taking
the class; they were in some respects
teaching
it, and I found them inspirational. They deserved a grade of A.

Those who got Cs, however, really caught my attention. As you would naturally assume, some were lazy and did the bare minimum to get by. But I was surprised to realize that a good number of them were every bit as industrious as those who got As. They, too, did all the reading and understood the material well. And like those who got As, they exuded flashes of brilliance, often trying to take their understanding to the next level. But when it came to coalescing it into an understanding and expressing their thoughts, they were stuck in a deep valley of confusion, struggling to get out. They had taken the extra step and had gone for the deep knowledge, but missed it by a degree or two or kept slipping back, and couldn’t express their thoughts in clear or cogent ways.

When I plotted it out on a graph it looked like
Figure II.1
.

The paradox was that the C students were actually further along than the B students. They had traveled more ground and gone past the first peak of basic understanding achieved by the Bs. They were unable to command the power of the As, sure, but they were closer to the As than the Bs, further on the intellectual journey than the Bs. The good news/bad news story for those C students was, at semester’s end, I had to give them a C for
confusion
. But they revealed a com-pelling analogy for the path of knowledge. It is easy to stop on the Hill of B; you feel like you made a climb, can see the lay of the land below you, and think that perhaps you deserve a little rest. It feels safe there, too; on that first hill, things seem clear. You have demonstrated a reasonable amount of effort and achievement, and exposed yourself to relatively little risk.

FIGURE II.1
The Paradox of the Hills of Knowledge

B, however, is not a winning grade. If you stay at B while others accept the challenge of continuing on to A, you get left behind. B is stasis, and, as we all know, success lies in consistent progress. To gain true understanding requires struggle in the deep Valley of C. If you don’t struggle there, you’ll never get to that second, much higher, peak. You can skip around in this book, for example (as many people do with business books) and come to a superficial understanding that Innovating in HOW is good business, that HOW we do what we do holds the key to long-term, sustained success, and that the winners in the twenty-first century will outbehave the competition, but all you will achieve is a
basic
knowledge. Those are thin concepts. Despite the old cliché, knowledge doesn’t have wings; we can’t fly from peak to peak. To gain a true understanding of the world of HOW, you must be prepared to struggle and wrestle with complexity and uncertainty and new ways of seeing.

It takes courage to keep going, and more courage still to descend into the Valley of Confusion and wrestle with what lies there. Most of us have experienced this before, unintentionally, when we set out to truly master something. We found ourselves in the Valley of C but didn’t understand why we were confused. Some of us struggled on, and some got demoralized and gave up. You might experience this again as you read this book. To get from the Hill of B to the Hill of A, you need more than directions and you need more than rules; you need bravery, tenacity, and emotional intelligence. You need to struggle and be confused so when clarity comes, the knowledge is deep. The only thing wrong with the Valley of Confusion would be to get stuck there. Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki said, “If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an ‘artless art’ growing out of the Unconscious.”
¹

Power in a world of HOW is not power
over
something, but power
through
something, like a network, or a synapse, or a circuit; a power that connects, not a power that commands. I want to lead you to the Hill of A, and, as the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
²
Change, progress, and personal growth require a journey, and I use that word consciously throughout the book. To be on a journey means to focus on process not product, on HOW not WHAT, and on the road not the destination. Journeys are by their nature curvilinear; they have highs and lows and require more effort for the climb than the descent. From this point on, then, I will use this two-hill model to illustrate the journey from old to new, from getting it to mastering it, and from knowledge to understanding. Since that wavy line picture I first drew seems a little less than inspirational, I’ve created
Figure II.2
to illustrate these ideas. The point, of course, is exactly the same.