Spiral Up

. . . and Other Management Secrets Behind Wildly Successful Initiatives

Author: Jane C. Linder
Pub Date: 2007
Your Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0814409172
Format: Hardcover

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Chapter 1
Concrete Slippers or Helium Hightops
The Management Secrets Behind Wildly Successful Initiatives

You won't be reading about Jack Welch in this book. Or about any other rock star CEOs, no matter how stunning their insights or accomplishments might be. This book is about everyday heroes who have stepped outside the practice of conventional management to produce initiatives that are wildly successful. In a phrase, they have worked wonders. We're going to be looking closely at their stories to understand what makes these initiatives so different from so-called best management practice and what it takes to pull them off.

We'll start with the assumption that most managers are neither inept nor venal. The vast majority are well-trained, well-intentioned, hard-working solid citizens. They have internalized the lessons of good management: how to get things done through people. But oddly enough, when these fine people set about managing their organizations' initiatives, the results are, well, mediocre. That's the mystery. For the most part, the people are very good, but the results of their initiatives are no better than ordinary-and sometimes worse.

Wildly successful initiatives play out much differently from abject failures. But that's not really the comparison I want to focus on. Instead, I want to draw the distinction between amazingly effective initiatives and the mass of undistinguished projects that makes up most of our collective organizational experience.

When we actually look at the numbers, we see that the average initiative rates about a 3.5 on an effectiveness scale of 1 to 5.¹ Sure, some projects famously end in failure, but most initiatives fall in the boring middle. They do not achieve quite what their managers promised, but neither do they fail completely. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that organizational incentives make it difficult to admit that things have gone awry and that it's time to apply the brakes.² So managers keep going and get somewhere, ultimately declaring victory almost regardless of the results.

Wildly successful initiatives stand in stark contrast to ordinary projects like this. Let me offer a few examples to whet your appetite. We'll talk about these in more depth as we go on.


David Rose and Ambient Devices

David Rose, the CEO of Ambient Devices, started his professional life as an interface designer for museum exhibits and educational computer games. Among other assignments, he worked with Lego to make its Mindstorms "computerized building blocks" approachable and fun for kids. His unique experiences resulted in an abiding disdain for the way most computerized gear relates to its owner. He recalls,

Rose launched Ambient Devices to make headway on his aspirations. For the company's first product, he developed the Ambient Orb. This simple, elegant product glows colors to reflect the current state of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the wind speed at your favorite sailing spot, progress against your daily fitness goal, or any number of other metrics that people want to track. The Orb has no complex interface; it's what Rose calls "glanceable." 

Rose had gotten this far before. He had convinced brilliant developers to take pay cuts to work with him. He had raised money and convinced leading-edge customers to talk with him about prototypes. With the Orb, however, Rose faced some additional obstacles.

He knew that in order to make devices that were "Zen simple," he needed to take the computers completely out of the picture. He recounts,

So Rose went outside the United States to innovative companies like Docomo in Japan. He also used his personal network to get in through the back door of the U.S. telcos. He won consulting contracts with their research organizations to develop the prototypes he envisioned.

Prototypes notwithstanding, Rose still needed a service partner to broadcast the information that the Orb would pick up and display. Without a partner, the Orb would be nothing more than an inert desk object. The telcos' doors were closed, but the telcos weren't the only game in town. Rose hit on the idea of using pager, rather than cellular, technology in the orb. He explains,

Getting space on retail shelves presented another hurdle. Rose and his fledgling team called Brookstone and Sharper Image buyers and shared product sheets with them. Bang; more doors slammed. But the Hammacher Schlemmer buyer took a different view. He featured the Orb on the front page of the company's catalog. Within a few days, the Brookstone buyer was ringing up Rose. He sighs, "The retailers wanted to feel like they found us, and not the other way around."

Orbs are now stocked in Brookstone stores around the country as well as being available over the Internet and in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Sales have taken off, but for Rose, that's only the beginning. He has an even higher aspiration for a large family of simple devices. He explains,

By any measure, Rose has launched a successful company and a successful product. As the Orb begins to improve the way people work and live, it has reached well beyond even Rose's original aspirations.


How Do Wildly Successful Initiatives Differ from Ordinary Projects?

Wildly successful initiatives do not look anything like "best practice" projects. To make sure we're talking about the same thing, we need a definition. I use two tests. First, a wildly successful initiative is one that produces breathtaking results. Second, from a process perspective, such an initiative seems virtually impossible at the start, and even after it has succeeded, people say, "How did you do that?"

In conducting the research for this book, I identified and developed case studies of 46 highly successful initiatives across a wide range of venues. I looked at product and service innovations, entrepreneurial start-ups and corporate transformations, public-sector programs and nonprofit ventures. I conducted more than 145 in-depth interviews. Three of the examples were researched in collaboration with Professor Donna Stoddard and Research Associate Steve Powers at Babson College under a National Science Foundation grant to explore successful initiatives in government.

Despite their diverse settings and circumstances, wildly successful initiatives have common characteristics. In particular, they sport a unique management approach that I call working wonders that sets them apart from conventional best practice. Many good managers would consider this contrarian approach wrong-headed or even destructive. In fact, it opens the door to the upside.

Working wonders means orchestrating five interrelated dynamics (see Figure 1-1). They make a difference, make space, get it right, energize people, and spiral up. Please do not mistake these for components or modules of a wildly successful initiative. That's entirely the wrong way to think about them. These are open systems, much like the systems in the human body. We can look at each one individually, but we must remember that they are inseparable.

As we explore these critical dynamics, we are going to meet the people involved in working wonders. They are all managers, but that term does not do them justice. Throughout the book, I'm going to call them champions. Some have founded start-ups; others work in the government or for nonprofit organizations; still others have traditional jobs in big corporations. Every single wildly successful initiative has multiple champions. When I use the term champion, I am speaking about all of them.

Make a Difference

Wildly successful initiatives reach beyond their grasp. They produce stunningly good results that make an impact. When you tell people what you accomplished, they say, "Wow!" even if they are your teenage children. Wildly successful results are substantial, surprising, and important. Whether no one ever dreamed of these outcomes before or most thought them impossible, working wonders profoundly affects people.

Ultimately, every wildly successful initiative finds at its core a deep sense of purpose. It succeeds by igniting wildfires of meaningful work. The conventional wisdom says that successful projects should have crisp, clear goals that are, most importantly, achievable. This will persuade the organizational stakeholders who must support the initiative to buy into it. But most successful initiatives involve a leap of faith of some sort-a clear vision of the way things should work without the faintest idea of how one is going to make this happen.

In the early 1990s, Zachary Duff, then a project manager at a small company known for high-tech breakthroughs, expressed this sentiment as he accepted a client's challenge to develop a virtual reality simulator for underwater mining equipment. Previous groups had tried and failed, and some key people in the client organization believed that the task was technically impossible. Duff recalls,

Because the client could not afford a supercomputer, Duff and his team linked up many small computers to create one of the first commercial "massively parallel" systems ever built. Ultimately they saved the client millions of dollars in testing costs and, more importantly, enabled it to lock in the market before competitors could get there.


Make Space

Wildly successful initiatives grow and develop in unpredictable ways. In fact, one of the reasons they seem to be so successful is that they are managed outside of control. Their leaders believe in a nonlinear path and work to enable it.

There are a thousand ways in which projects can fail. When executives tighten their managerial grip on people, tasks, resources, and status, they may reduce the likelihood that their initiatives will run off the rails. But this approach strangles their chances of working wonders. To venture into the upside, executives must loosen their direct hold and engage a much more powerful set of forces.

If you were a senior foreign trade ministry official in the South American country of Colombia-resented around the world for its illicit drug trade-how would you tackle the problem of stimulating economic development through legitimate exports? Stop and think for a moment. You're accountable. Where would you start? Would you offer incentives to entrepreneurs? Would you invite in foreign companies to set up local subsidiaries?

Olga Patricia Roncancio Mendoza began in 1999 by creating spaces. She and her colleagues at the Ministry of Foreign Trade (MFT) believed that to succeed in global markets, Colombian entrepreneurs had to improve the distinctiveness and value that their products provided. Roncancio Mendoza and her team had some ideas about how that might happen, but they realized that governmental controls would not spark anything. They had to take a different approach.

Roncancio Mendoza recalls,

The team got an earful of problems and suggestions from the private sector directed toward the Columbian government and how it could help them be more successful. After this initial session, the MFT team created a matrix to organize the problems and identify possible activities to solve these problems. One of these activities was to connect the entrepreneurs in Colombia's cosmetic sector with the entrepreneurs in the medical plant industry in order to produce natural cosmetic products for world markets.

At the time, the medicinal plant growers were concentrating on breaking into the supply chains of large pharmaceutical companies, with little success, and the cosmetics sector was limited largely to domestic sales. Furthermore, the businesspeople treated each other as adversaries. Some entrepreneurs had never even met their counterparts in companies that had been their suppliers for years.

Roncancio Mendoza and her team continued to push open the space. "We put the two sectors together to create a dialogue between them. We worked like a bridge between two similar interests. The principle was to create more value-added in the products."

To begin to build relationships among competitors and overcome skepticism during the early meetings, Roncancio Mendoza worked with Hartwell Associates to seed the discussion with a case study of a successful collaboration in Peru's asparagus industry. Independent asparagus growers had been cut off from world markets because they lacked a refrigerated warehouse to keep their produce fresh until it could be shipped. No single grower could afford the expensive facility. Through an initiative facilitated by the government of Peru, the growers were able to form a consortium to build and operate the warehouse. Their share of the world asparagus market grew dramatically as a result.

The Colombian entrepreneurs began to talk to one another. "At the beginning it was a fierce time," Roncancio Mendoza explains. "They talked at length about all their small problems. Sometimes they didn't think at all about the future or the innovation or research needed to develop new products." But the discussions did highlight specific obstacles that the MTF team could work to resolve. For example, the cosmetics entrepreneurs used alcohol as an ingredient in some of their products. Alcohol was controlled by Colombia's regional governments and taxed heavily as a beverage, making it completely unaffordable as a raw material. Over two relentless years, the MTF team harangued its colleagues in the regional government, eventually convincing it to give up its alcohol tax revenue to enable a more competitive cosmetics industry.

In time the meetings expanded so that all the people related to the opportunity were sitting at the same table. They ultimately included, in addition to the MTF and the entrepreneurs, academics from research centers related to cosmetics, the health minister, the customs services, and the central planning department. More importantly, as the collaboration continued, its character changed. It evolved from a mare's nest of fierce adversaries to a productive, problem-solving team.

Ever watchful for good business, the team headed for the cosmetics industry's sweet spot: high-quality, healthy products made with natural ingredients. The marketplace's resounding welcome drew the team members forward and even increased their willingness to collaborate.

As a result, eleven small enterprises named the Colombian Beauty Group are now marketing a new line of natural cosmetics for men in Mexico.

Roncancio Mendoza and her team opted for a circuitous, bursty, serendipitous, and uncontrolled approach to this promising result. She reports enthusiastically, "It was a beautiful experience-to show that you can do your job, but in a different way. We are more creative now. It was a practice to find the resolve and the road ahead."

Champions of wildly successful initiatives carve out the space to experiment and relentlessly learn by trying to accomplish what they have in mind. In a complex and unpredictable open system, this is the manager's version of the scientific method; it is anything but deterministic. One executive calls the approach "ready, aim, steer."


Get It Right

The people who participate in wildly successful initiatives search for answers and learn incessantly until they break the code. Remember when your primary school teacher gave you credit in arithmetic for following the right steps, even if you arrived at the wrong answer? That practice still exists in organizations today. If we follow all the written and unwritten rules, check all the boxes, and tag all the bases, we get credit for a good effort, even when the results are not what we had hoped for.

I'm not making this up. Just look at ISO-9000. This very important certification does not demand that an organization operate effectively or produce good results. It requires only that the organization have a specified process and actually follow that process-regardless of how well it works. Wildly successful initiatives don't make this mistake.

Champions of wildly successful initiatives insist on finding the right answers to the hard questions. They place priorities where they belong, recognizing that implementing the right solution is ten times more valuable than a solution that is only "good enough."

Consider the example of a successful executive in one of the world's most renowned consumer goods companies. Let's call it Unigamble. This executive believed that his company could gain a great deal of benefit from improving manufacturing reliability-the percentage of time that the equipment was operating as it should. At the time, despite successful initiatives to measure reliability consistently and improve performance, many plants were stalled at 65 to 75 percent. He asked his organization to achieve at least 85 percent, and he required all new operations to reach that level in the second month. He set this extremely aggressive goal, then he gave his people the latitude to go meet it.

A pair of engineers in the diaper business took the challenge personally. They were well aware of the existing research on reliability, but the accepted theories did not jibe with their everyday experience on the manufacturing lines. Something was wrong. Operations had hit a plateau of improvement. No matter how hard the engineers tried, they could only get the manufacturing lines to be up three-quarters of the time at most.

Working from the middle of a very large company, the engineers had two problems. First, the predictive simulations that reliability experts provided just weren't working for them, but continuing to operate intuitively wasn't going to get them to the next plateau. Second, in the absence of a good model, the company was awash in competing ideas about the right approach. Since there were no hard numbers on which to base these proposals, politics took over. In the engineers' view, a negotiated compromise was an unacceptable substitute for a valid, mathematical proof.

The engineers knew that their theories were incomplete, but one thing they did have was a wealth of data on machine reliability. Every stoppage was recorded, with detailed coding to indicate why it had taken place. They had thousands of recorded incidents, but no effective framework for analyzing them.

The engineers set out to try to make sense of the extensive data they had gathered in the plant. Their explorations ultimately led them to Los Alamos National Laboratories, where scientists were working on the predictability of nuclear weapons systems for the U.S. military. Lacking a real-world operations environment in which to test their mathematical model, however, they had never demonstrated its efficacy.

Through what one engineer calls a "courageous process," the two organizations joined forces and pooled their intellectual property-the data from one side and the mathematical simulation from the other. Over the following year, the team developed a categorically new reliability simulation-one that actually predicted failure in a manufacturing environment. This model found that machine stoppages interact. Even the smallest hiccup could start a chain reaction that would breed more stoppages. The model predicted that eliminating every small stoppage, instead of concentrating on eliminating the catastrophic failures, could substantially improve performance.

Why was getting it right so important? For the first time, the engineers were able to make accurate predictions of the value of particular improvements so that operating executives could make good investment decisions. This opened the door to reliability improvements that dropped more than a billion dollars to the company's bottom line.

One engineer remarked, "The first thing we did was to clarify the business impact of running the manufacturing process well. It sounds easy, but sometimes the truth gets lost in the accounting data." It seems that the practice of management has ramped up its emphasis on process over the past three decades, and this tidal wave of focus has almost swamped the other fundamental foundation-getting the right answer.

Getting it right doesn't stop at the intellectual solution. If the right answer can't be communicated to the people who must implement it, it has little value. As a result, the word simple finds its way into every story of working wonders. Unigamble's engineers used a homey little analogy to make their new approach easy for everyone, from their management colleagues to the machine operators in the factory, to understand. They talked about the family vacation. They gave operators a new view of manufacturing downtime by likening it to all those little stops that families make on a road trip.

One engineer explained, "The reliability of repairable production systems is like taking a cross-country trip with your family and predicting when you will get to Grandma's. People want to know the reliability of your car, the probability of an engine failure or a flat tire, and the chance you will run into construction. When you think about it, the number one failure mode with a car full of kids is the bathroom and gas stops. Conventional reliability science treats all those bathroom stops as independent events. They aren't. When we stop to get gas, if we all go to the bathroom, we don't have to stop again in 20 minutes. That way, you take advantage of the stop to be resetting as good as new. It turns out that's radically different from resetting a piece of equipment as good as old."

In another example, Intel's future-of-technology research organization-which is staffed with anthropologists and social scientists, not engineers-recently had an epiphany. A team that was nominally studying trends in home music usage found itself pondering a very different concern: how families were going to take care of aging parents. The team concluded that technologies that were already in the home, such as televisions and telephones, would form the foundation of a personal care network. If Mr. Johnson needs to be reminded to take his medicine, that message should come to him through the telephone, not through a personal computer or PDA. Why? Because Mr. Johnson already knows how to use the telephone. With this simple interface, he will actually get the message and take his medicine. As a result, the more complex technology underneath will become useful.

Leaders of wildly successful initiatives recognize that simple is the doorway to usable. And if a "solution" is not usable, it just isn't right.


Energize People

Wildly successful initiatives boast a strong emotional field. Have you ever walked into an office area, a call center, or a plant that seems on fire with excitement? It looks different; it sounds different; it even smells different from ordinary places of business. The emotional intensity is palpable.

Of course, emotional intensity is only part of the tapestry; it does not, by itself, guarantee success. But an initiative will never be wildly successful without it. Champions in highly successful initiatives create an emotional environment that engages and energizes people. This fuels the work they must do to take on challenging issues and, like a powerful magnet, draws others into the field.

Engagement really matters. Research tags it as one of the few identifiable workforce characteristics that is statistically associated with company profitability.³ A study by ISR Research, based on information about 360,000 employees in 41 companies, indicates that engaged employees are two to three times more productive than average and ten times as productive as those who are not emotionally involved in their work.⁴

Two features of the strong emotional field stand out. First, it's not brought to you by Pollyanna. We'll talk about this in more depth in Chapter 9, but a strong emotional field takes advantage of the full range of human feelings-from fear and anger to hope and joy. Champions help people harness these feelings to produce directed action by shaping the way they interpret what's going on. For example, our Unigamble reliability engineers were given a target that some would have considered unattainable. They had exhausted the sources of ready answers. Ever-present politics undermined their ability to get things done. They weren't personally on the hook to solve the problem. Unigamble at the time was incredibly insular, so working with an outside organization-even one as reputable as Los Alamos National Labs-was considered heretical. Yet these engineers interpreted the situation as inviting, in a challenging sort of way. They interpreted the obstacles as signals to try harder, in spite of having to take personal risks to do so.

Second, the kinds of experiences that energize people change as an initiative progresses. In the early, discovery-oriented phase, people get juiced from possibilities and new ideas-the "aha" factor. As the initiative progresses through pilots and implementation phases, the source of energy shifts toward getting things done and demonstrating results. At this point, discussions about new concepts or alternative approaches actually deenergize the initiative.⁵

Our linear, almost mechanistic mindsets for managing ordinary projects don't address the emotional components or the way they change over time. And by the way, have you ever been part of an initiative that was linear? The norm is bumps and turns, sticking points and setbacks that evoke strong feelings in the people involved. An executive from Nike, for example, described a strategic initiative driven by the company's most senior management to streamline the firm's idea-to-profit cycle. At the end of a year's intensive investigation, the handpicked, up-and-comer team presented its findings to the board and was greeted with skepticism and resistance. A few of those high-potential people quietly went back to their day jobs, but most of them decided to leave-opting for companies that valued their contributions.

In contrast, champions of wildly successful initiatives use community recognition and public visibility to fan small sparks of interest into hair-on-fire motivation. The heroes in working wonders are made, not born. Leaders spend their time giving others credit for accomplishments. They run internal contests to make winners and help team members earn external awards as well. They fuel their engines, and those of their teammates, not with financial incentives, but with public acclaim. As a result, team members feel that they belong to something important. These feelings increase commitment and build momentum.

How did the EPA's Chet Wayland get local and regional air quality engineers to volunteer their time to the AIRNow project? He asked them to apply for it, and he gave them a vision of what success could mean to their agency. They did not just receive new monitoring equipment; they "won" a grant. Wayland highlighted these accomplishments in his annual air quality conference, an occasion to give participants credit for "their" initiative. When Wayland himself takes center stage, it is to acknowledge people's efforts, to applaud their progress, and to celebrate their results.

When Rose describes what he finds satisfying about developing products like the Ambient Orb, he does not talk about revenue or profit. He says instead, "It is very satisfying to build a company where each team member is a huge contributor-all stretching and growing."

Conventionally managed projects are frequently staffed with seasoned veterans-individuals who have implemented the same type of software or brought the same kind of product to market before. Wildly successful initiatives are littered with first-timers. Make no mistake, these initiatives include some extremely competent people. But two counter-conventional characteristics stand out. First, team members are often self-selected, rather than drafted. Second, they are plowing new ground, not familiar furrows. Choosing to take on a challenge one has never faced before adds creativity and energy to the process. And this shows up in the results.

Consider the example of Toyota's production crisis in 1997. Its manufacturing organism in Japan was humming along, producing 15,000 cars a day. Relying on its famously well-tuned supply chain, it held only three days of inventory ahead of the line. Then there was a devastating fire; a supplier's factory that was the sole source for a critical brake valve burned to the ground overnight. Toyota had no backup supply and no secondary supplier in the wings, and building a new plant with a full complement of specialized tools and equipment would take at least six months.⁶

How could the company avoid a financial and marketplace disaster?

Toyota turned to its network of suppliers to find a solution. At Toyota's behest, the engineers, managers, and manufacturing experts from more than 200 companies went to work simultaneously to find a way to restore the flow of brake valves. With little chance of simply replicating the process that had been destroyed, these problem solvers worked through their interpersonal connections to coalesce naturally around ideas that might have a chance of working. The groups that emerged-some of which brought together firms that were head-on competitors-pulled in guidance from the original brake factory and from Toyota itself. Using the tools and expertise they had at hand and patching together solutions on the fly, they designed at least six totally different production processes.

Within three days, the new production lines were picking up speed, and within a week, the cobbled-together scheme was turning out enough brake valves to support Toyota's prefire schedule. Toyota's vaunted manufacturing expertise notwithstanding, its management knew that a structured approach could never avert the crisis in time. Instead, the company counted on the wealth of everyday talent and resourcefulness that lay quiet in its supply network and invoked it by requests rather than directives. This approach opened the space for Toyota's manufacturing partners, linked by a rich web of affinity, to volunteer their own energy and will to design workable solutions.

Champions of wildly successful initiatives actively manage the emotional field throughout the initiative to keep passions lit-inclusively taking as much oomph from adversity as from victory.


Spiral Up

Wildly successful initiatives take a long time to play out. Or as Mont Phelps, the CEO of NWN Corporation, quips, "It took me years to become an overnight success." Ordinary initiatives always have an explicit end. They need to fit within an organization's attention span. Declaring victory allows the team members to move on to their next assignment with honor. For some companies, the ability to focus withers in less than a year; others can sustain a project for as long as five years. We all know how this works. If the project takes longer than the organization's ability to concentrate, people on the project move on to other assignments, budgets get pulled, capital allocations dwindle, and folks just lose interest.

Wildly successful initiatives do not seem to wear this straitjacket. Leaders and team members don't gather up their winnings and move on. Instead, they extend their work into new areas. So the project scope evolves, and the acolytes either stay involved or hand the project off willingly to another team that can take it forward. This unusual approach maintains focus on the predictable and critical but often overlooked effort that follows implementation. It also takes advantage of the initiative's momentum to scale the next peak.

Of the 46 examples I studied, the median initiative duration is almost seven years. Even more telling, two-thirds of these initiatives have no end in sight. In order to extend the value of its manufacturing reliability solution, Unigamble has packaged its know-how for distribution and sale. If we count from the beginning, that initiative will be turning seventeen this year. The AIRNow initiative to make air quality information public is still going on after ten years. Motivated by its success with one pollutant, the nationwide team has turned its attention to others. The Stansylvanian revenue agency, which we'll meet in Chapter 4, after more than ten years of effort, continues to plan new releases that add to its capability. The digital simulator that Zack Duff and his team built has been extended to many more types of "smart" construction machinery, serving their customer well for fifteen years.

I sometimes use the word patient to characterize these initiatives. For example, our Unigamble engineers spent about ten years altogether achieving the reliability target they were shooting for. In many cases, the same individuals who began the initiative are still pushing it forward years later. That in itself is unusual in an organization environment, where the norm is constant human shuffle.

Chet Wayland, one of the architects of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's AIRNow initiative, which we'll explore in Chapter 8, explains the duality this way:

Spiraling up implies more than just duration. Wildly successful initiatives progress through plateaus. To paraphrase David Brower's "think globally; act locally," we would say that for working wonders it is necessary to "think possibilities and act practicalities." And in some cases, those practicalities are extremely prosaic. We'll meet Dr. Hsinchun Chen in Chapter 10. In order to begin to work on a problem that was worth his time and attention, he asked his artificial intelligence laboratory to spend two years building a very ordinary data warehouse for the Tucson police department. As he had known, this first plateau was an essential foundation for what came later. Without it, he and his team would not have been able to see all the possibilities in front of them. It gave them a view of a much broader horizon.

Patience and plateaus imply a long-term perspective and the willingness to push ahead no matter what. That's an accurate picture of these initiatives. But these descriptors do not quite capture the sense of urgency-occasionally even crisis-that infuses the initiatives. Paradoxically, they are both relentlessly driven and confidently enduring.

When the city of Sydney, Australia, began work on its stunning opera house in the late 1950s, the building was intended both to stimulate the arts and to give the city its signature icon. More than 230 architects participated in an anonymous design competition that stipulated no cost limit for the construction. At least one knowledgeable member of the panel that selected Jørn Utzon's progressive design suspected that it would be unpalatably costly to build, but he held his tongue so that the vote would pass. The Labour government at the time agreed to pursue the project only with the proviso that no existing public funds could be used, so the organizers implemented a lottery to provide AUD $100 million over fourteen years of construction. The comments of celebrated architect Frank Gehry qualify the accomplishment as a highly successful initiative: "Utzon made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinary malicious publicity and negative criticism to build a building that changed the image of an entire country. It is the first time in our lifetime that an epic piece of architecture has gained such universal presence."⁷


Creating Wildfires of Meaningful Work

As you can see, wildly successful initiatives can come in small packages or large ones. With apologies to 7-Up, this book highlights the "un-management" practices that champions use to work these wonders. Rose's Orb does not solve world hunger, but it's a working wonder all the same. The point is, champions can choose an arena-or a playground, if you prefer-that fits their own passions and abilities.

Champions orchestrate the five dynamics described earlier to fuel the hard work that goes into accomplishing their unthinkably challenging initiatives. With the right touch, champions use the working wonders approach to lift initiatives off, produce meaningful results, and ultimately develop a self-sustaining momentum that makes the initiatives virtually unstoppable.

Should managers use this approach for everything they do? In a word, no. Some initiatives are never intended to break new ground. Their leaders deploy them to achieve a specific, well-understood objective. For example, when Intel needs to expand its manufacturing capacity, executives use a formula that they call "copy exactly." They replicate an existing, working plant down to the detailed layout and processes. No innovations, no improvements, no deviations. While they might call the entire copy exactly approach a wildly successful initiative, the project to build each new plant doesn't deserve that name. It does exactly what it set out to do.

To consider working wonders, managers must first ask themselves whether they are seeking routine results or have set their sights on what could or, perhaps, should be. Depending on how they answer, they should manage everything differently. Managers must understand that they have this choice. When they indiscriminately use accepted, legitimate, conventional rules of project management-demanding a clear project scope, asking for detailed and disciplined task plans, and drafting "been there; done that" experts for the staff (among other rules)-they put their projects on the "avoiding failure" path. Many of them don't even know that there's another way. And the approach that makes so much sense for routine projects guarantees that they will never see the upside on other types of projects.

Anyone can work wonders. Nothing in the approach requires a particular type of experience or set of resources. What is required, however, is a willingness to rethink the practice of management from the ground up. Although this is considered illegitimate by the conventional wisdom, many superb executives already do work this way. That's why, when I ask executives to tell me about their wildly successful initiatives, I get one of two answers: "I never had one like that" or "Which one do you want to hear about?"

Beware, though; working wonders is addictive. Executives who learn how to manage this way will be ruined; they will never again be satisfied with standard management practices or the results that these produce. To start on this path, you will want to:

* Decide at the outset whether you would rather reach for a big impact or simply avoid failure. This is not a gratuitous comment. It's a legitimate and valid decision. Most organizations will want to avoid failure in implementing Sarbanes-Oxley, for example. But executives who hope for the upside while managing for the downside will never get what they want.

* For initiatives on the high road, legitimize the contrarian approach. Do not hobble yourself with the best practice strictures that make so much sense for no-fail projects. Loosen the laced-up processes that strangle exploration and drain energy, and welcome your team to an un-management experience.

* Build your organization's strength for working wonders repeatedly. Start with people. Since managing these initiatives requires a distinctive way of working, look for executives who have several "unthinkable" successes in their experience. Move executives who have embraced this approach to arenas where you have high hopes.

© 2008 Progress Board, LLC.
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