How (4 page)

Waves are fun; that is their greatest benefit. Standing up, waving your arms, screaming your head off for the home team, and, most important,
being connected to everyone else in the stadium when you do so
, that’s fun. But Krazy George told me that the most significant thing about his first Wave, and every Wave he has made since, is how it changes everything that comes after. For the rest of the game, the crowd cheers more vigorously. They are more excited and engaged in the outcome. They feel more a part of the experience. The Wave is not only powerful in itself; it unleashes long-term, enduring power in its wake. That is an essential property of power; once the circuit is complete, the current continues to flow.

There is a Wave pounding through the people who work in companies like UPS and many others that everyone there enthusiastically perpetuates. It represents a sea change, an approach to how we do what we do that generates lasting, quantifiable value. I believe it is a power that every individual and group of people can understand, master, and learn to apply, and this book will try to help you do that. This book is about the tidal power in HOW.

Part I

HOW WE HAVE BEEN,
HOW WE HAVE CHANGED

INTRODUCTION: THE SPACES BETWEEN US

Consider, for a moment, our brains. Individual working units in the brain are called neurons. Some neurons are highly specialized to perform certain cognitive functions. Others are arranged in groups of varying size to accomplish more complicated tasks. Some are charged with storing things, and others with just passing information along. Neurons have
excitable membranes
, a unique cellular characteristic that allows them to generate and propagate electrical signals. When a neuron wants to act, it sends out a small signal, like an e-mail, to the parts of the brain with which it wants to connect. That signal, in order to get where it wants to go, must jump a series of small gaps, each called a synapse, that separate one neuron from another. A child’s brain contains as many as 1,000 trillion synapses, but by adulthood age and decay pare that number back significantly to between 100 trillion and 500 trillion. What occurs in our synapses—in other words,
in the space in-between
—is a key determiner of successful brain function. So-called
strong synapses
pass messages—called
action potentials
—easily to the neurons around them. Where synapses are strong, they allow for the free-flowing transmission of energy from neuron to neuron that enables the vast range of human capability. Where synapses are weak, however, messages don’t get through. A weak synapse drops the ball, so to speak.
¹

Now, imagine a football stadium, full of people. It functions in a remarkably similar fashion. Each fan is like a neuron. Each has an excitable membrane capable, should the individual desire, of reaching out and connecting with others. The space between them, where one person’s skin leaves off and another’s begins, is like a synapse. It’s the space
in-between
where we connect. There are places in the stadium where people have strong connections—they know each other, hold season tickets, or share a similar enthusiasm for the home team—and places where the connections are weak. When the space between people is capable of connecting them strongly, cheers start with little encouragement, food purchased from strolling vendors gets passed along quickly, and rapport develops easily between strangers sitting nearby; in short, they thrive. When those junctions are weak, however, action potentials die. Fans cheer alone and must push down the row to get their own peanuts.

A single synapse in the brain, just like the space between people in a stadium, connects to many different neurons, like an intersection where many roads converge. This allows it to receive action potentials from many sources simultaneously. Subjected to these multiple simultaneous stimuli, even a weak synapse can be coaxed to pass along messages. In a stadium, we experience something similar. The combined stimulation of a lot of people doing the Wave often sweeps up and involves those less interested or connected to the cheer. In fact, what we colloquially call a “brain wave” is an electroencephalographic impression of a bunch of neurons all firing together, sending their action potentials across synapses weak and strong to get things going—essentially, the brain doing the Wave.

By analogy, in the realm of human behavior, everything that affects the spaces between us affects our ability to get things done. Put 60,000 people in a stadium blindfolded with earplugs, and making a Wave becomes extremely difficult. Ask them to whisper something from person to person while the organist plays at full volume and the message becomes unrecognizable before it leaves the section. Introduce a complicated emotion between two people and everything they say to one another can get misconstrued. To make Waves, then, to begin to generate the sorts of interpersonal interaction that can carry our initiatives throughout an organizational entity (like a brain, a stadium full of people, a team, or a business), we must not only understand the power it takes to start them, but we must also understand the things that affect the spaces between us, that make our interpersonal synapses strong or weak.

On October 13, 1994, Netscape Communications released the first version of its World Wide Web browser, heralding the dawn of the popular Internet and effectively spawning the information age.
²
At that moment, the free flow of information began to radically alter how we fill the spaces between us, bringing changes so significant as to have almost completely reshaped how the world works. Our understanding of these changes, however, has not kept pace with their rapidity. To adapt and succeed in these new conditions, then, we need a new framework, a new understanding of how we have been and how things have changed.

In this first part, we explore the recent (and not-so-recent) past to connect the dots between a series of disparate events that have shaped and informed our present world. We begin with the birth of the information age and the shift it brought from a command-and-control business model to one of collaboration and sharing. Then we look at how technology trespasses into the synapses of our relationships, both helping and hindering us. Finally, we talk about the shifts in our world that have intensified the importance of how we do what we do.

The next three chapters chart the geography of a very different world, a world of HOW, which requires new powers and new skills to traverse. By the end of this part, it is my hope that you have a greater understanding of the radical ways our landscape has changed, our critical need for a new lens with which to see our way through it, and the way HOW can guide us on our journey.

CHAPTER
1

From Land to Information

Where is the wisdom we have
lost in knowledge? Where is the
knowledge we have lost in information?

—T. S. Eliot

S
ometimes, to look ahead we must look back, in this case, way back, to feudal Europe circa 1335 A.D. In the 1330s, England needed wine. It needed wine because in the century before, Norman fashions had become all the rage and your average noble Joe had given up his daily pint of beer for a glass of
vin rouge
. It needed wine because wine provided vitamins, yeast, and calories to get the English through the long winters. And it needed wine because, well, wine is fun. Given that England was too cold to grow a decent grape, the English required a system of foreign exchange to get their spirits from France. They traded English fleece to Flanders for Flemish cloth (the good stuff at the time), then brought that to southern France to trade for the fruit of the vine. Luckily, the English controlled both Flanders and Gascony (on the west coast of France) at the time. Thus they were able to trade freely, transport safely, and drink to their hearts’ content. For these reasons, and a million other feudal details, the French hated the Brits. In 1337, they attacked Flanders to regain control of the mainland, beginning the Hundred Years’ War, which really lasted 116 years until 1453, when the Brits were finally expelled from continental Europe and went back to drinking beer, a habit they largely retain to this day.
¹

What does all that have to do with us, doing business in a high-technology information age? Well, beer is not the only habit that has hung around since the Middle Ages. Back then we were a land-based world, and the people who controlled more high-value land than anyone else ruled. Land is a zero-sum game: The more I have, the less you have; and the more I have, the more powerful I am relative to you. Land meant crops, and land meant rent from serfs—tradesmen, farmers, and craftspeople—who created the goods and consumables that drove the economy. There was a one-to-one correlation between the most powerful people and the ones who had the most land. To this day, Queen Elizabeth remains one of the richest people in the United Kingdom based on her family’s landholdings.
²
In a time of finite resources, feudal nobility learned that to succeed and gain more power, they needed to protect and hoard what they had. They built castles with moats around them to protect their fiefdoms, conquered everything they could, and built their wealth one furlong at a time, habits that served them well for centuries.

Fast-forward a few hundred years to the birth of the industrial revolution. The invention of machines, powered mainly by the steam engine, brought a host of innovative ways to make things. The rate and scale of manufacturing increased exponentially. A savvy entrepreneur could suddenly mass-produce goods efficiently and bring them to market at lower prices than his craft-guild cousin. Machines created a systematic way to get rich relatively quickly. One no longer needed a lifetime to amass wealth or had to risk a dangerous voyage in search of treasure. Anyone with money to invest could identify cutting-edge inventions, build an efficient factory to make them (or make with them), and take market share from his old-world rivals. Initiative and innovation became wealth, and old gave way to new, all powered by a new investor class able to make money with money. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote
The Wealth of Nations
, and capitalism was born.
³
The word
capital
, by the way, comes from the Latin word
capitalis
, meaning head. Under capitalism, you could use your head to get ahead.

As we shifted from land to capital as the engine of wealth, however, the zero-sum mentality of feudal times remained. Capital, too, is finite, and the more capital I had the less you had. With more, I could innovate, expand, and do things that you could not. Capitalists developed habits of power, certain rules of thumb about how to succeed in the new economy. When we had stuff, we hoarded it; we did not share. We did not give it away; we meted it out and only for high returns. We extracted interest. For hundreds of years, assets meant power, and to succeed we controlled them zealously. Generally, we built a fortress around our holdings and defended them against all invaders. We dominated markets, protected trade secrets, and made sure everything we did received a patent or copyright. We could also control information flow to the market, and so developed a host of one-way communication habits to control how it viewed us. We invented the press release, perfected the arts of
messaging
and
spin
, and learned to divide and conquer, telling one thing to Customer A in one market and something different to Customer B in another. Company structures mirrored these impulses with command-and-control structures and top-down hierarchies. The habits of fortress capitalism soon permeated every facet of enterprise.

LINES OF COMMUNICATION

Let’s pause in our brief rush through history to note a couple of specific industrial age events whose significance to our discussion will become quickly apparent. With the coming of the telegraph to the United States in the mid-1850s, some savvy entrepreneurs tried to strike it rich by stringing up thousands of miles of copper cable connecting both the established mercantile centers of the East and the rapidly developing Midwest. In their helter-skelter pursuit of wealth, the enterprise produced a glut of transmission capacity without the market to sustain the infrastructural costs of its installation. Prices collapsed, as did the fortunes of those who invested. Call it the dot-dash explosion. Suddenly, the cost of transmitting a word of text dropped to a then-unheard-of penny per word. This leap in connectivity and economy had some unintended consequences, as journalist Daniel Gross reported in
Wired
magazine: “Reporters could file long stories from the Civil War battle-fields, fueling the great newspaper empires of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Likewise, the spread of the ability to send cheap telegraphs spurred a national market in stocks and commodities and made it much easier to manage international business.”
⁴
These were world-altering developments. Half a century later, American Telephone and Telegraph extended that network dramatically when it introduced the telephone, although they were savvy enough to protect themselves by soliciting monopoly protection from the U.S. government in 1913, thus assuring profitability. The telephone was the telegraph on steroids, and its impact on business was similarly huge.

Fast-forward to 1994, and reflect on the birth of the information age. Technology again allowed multifold leaps in the way we did things. Opportunity was everywhere, and though few had a clear vision of where it would lead, inventions, products, and processes made things possible that were previously only a dream. Once again, entrepreneurs jumped in all over the place. A host of entrepreneurs (seemingly ignoring the lessons of the dot-dash era) invested heavily, laying fiber-optic cable around the world. Fiber-optic cable provided a quantum leap in transmission capacity from the copper cable originally installed by Ma Bell and her telegraph brethren. A single pair of optical fibers can carry more than 30,000 telephone conversations for distances of hundreds of kilometers, whereas a pair of copper wires twice as thick carries 24 conversations about 5 kilometers. When you apply new technologies like wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), fiber capacity increases by up to 64 times. With the new technologies on the horizon, scientists believe fiber-optic cable’s theoretical transmission capacity to be infinite. Laying fiber-optic cable was like replacing every bathroom faucet with something the size of a missile silo. Suddenly, total global electronic communications consumed just 5 percent of transmission capacity. Transmission prices again collapsed (along with a lot of the companies hatched with the idea of getting rich quick on the back of this new technology), and we found ourselves in a world in which information flowed around the world instantly and cheaply like light through a darkened room.