danger and then issues warnings throughout the body’s systems. Here’s a chart of the amygdalar activity that those Super Bowl researchers measured among the viewers of that FedEx commercial, up to and just past the moment when the caveman gets crushed by the dinosaur (as indicated by the arrow):
Fear is almost always with us, even when we’re unaware of it. It might be easy to nod in wise agreement with the management shibboleth, “People don’t dislike change; they just dislike being changed,” but there’s only a small amount of truth in that. Acknowledging the sharp, constant, often-hidden reality of fear is a crucial first step toward hushing the ancient brain centers that can turn even our best intentions into disappointments that only look like slapstick comedies to those who are not living them.
One Leader’s Fear
Former publishing executive James Autry has written ten books about the human side of leadership. He begins his book Life & Work with a story that includes the following exchange between him and a friend:19
“Do you ever get the feeling that one day they are going to come into your office and say, ‘Okay, Autry, we found out about you’?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, almost shouting. “I frequently get that feeling. You, too?”
He nodded, and we both began to laugh. “You know what this tells us,” he continued.
I knew, but I could not find the exact words. He did it for me: “There are no big boys, only us little boys.”
The Balance Pole
Hanging on to your tools in the wrong circumstances can have tragic results.
Karl Wallenda was the patriarch of a family of the world’s greatest high-wire performers. He, along with a host of family members, invented and performed many stunning acts, such as the seven-person pyramid: four on the wire, two balanced on their shoulders, and the seventh seated in a chair above them. After premiering in Milan in 1925, the troupe was soon signed by John Ringling’s “Greatest Show On Earth,” where their first performance was met with a 15-minute standing ovation.20 They never used a safety net.
“Life is being on the wire,” Karl would say. “Everything else is just waiting.” On March 22, 1978, at the age of 73, he was walking a high wire between two towers of a seaside hotel in Puerto Rico when a gust of wind threw off his balance. He crouched, then lost his balance again. He began to fall, grabbing for the wire with one hand while he held his 23-foot-long, 36-pound balance pole with the other. Unable to maintain his grip on the wire, he fell 120 feet to his death. His grandson said:
People felt he could have saved himself if he had just dropped the pole. But he would never do that. He taught us never to drop the pole.21
Even the most useful tools have their limits, and knowing when to let go of them can make all the difference.22
Knockout strategies often let go of what others have considered indispensable elements. Southwest Airlines bypassed the hub-and-spoke system that its main competitors used; companies like Amazon and Netflix did away with the brick-and-mortar-based thinking that kept existing companies stuck in the past.
To choose just one example from today, the “free stuff revolution” means that large numbers of customers can pay nothing for items that include air travel, rental cars, international telephone calls, and daily newspapers—often, advertisers pick up the tab.23 Europe’s Ryanair, for example, which flies 190 airplanes among more than 150 destinations, gave away a million and a half free seats in 2009.24
Letting go of the age-old question, “How much will customers pay for this?” is the first step. Replacing it with “Who will pay for this?” comes next.
What tools are you, or your organization, hanging on to when they need to be let go? Elsewhere in this book (see “The Mile Run”) we note that Clayton Christensen has recommended that companies need to drop, or at least reconfigure, some very precious tools of financial analysis if they want to truly stimulate powerful innovation. Adrian Slywotzky demonstrated in his book The Upside that Toyota might never have developed the Prius had it clung slavishly to its risk-assessment tools that told it that there was about a one in twenty chance of success for that venture.
More hair-raising for executives might be the outcomes of a 2008 conference that gathered many of the brightest business minds, academic and applied, of our day to consider two related questions:
What is it about the way large organizations are currently managed that will most imperil their ability to thrive in the decades ahead; and given this, what fundamental changes will be needed in management principles, processes and practices?
Twenty-five “moonshots for management” emerged, each of which requires that some precious, hard-won tools be dropped by someone.25
At a more operational level, consider how industry leaders have dropped old tools and developed new, more effective ones. In hiring, for example, determining skill qualifications such as education and experience has long been an essential tool for employee selection. Yet Southwest Airlines spokesman Terry Millard says the rule at Southwest is “Hire for attitude, train for skill.”26 Southwest applies the rule even to pilots, according to Millard.
Regarding customer satisfaction, so much has been spent for so long on exhaustive, detailed surveys—yet Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company argues that just one survey question—Would you recommend this company to a friend?—is all that’s required to predict top-line growth in most circumstances.27 General Electric, American Express, Intuit, and Procter & Gamble are among the companies that have dropped or modified older tools and picked up this one.28
What could be a more mundane, unquestioned tool than the invoice form? James Collins has hailed the California company Graniterock for adding the following words at the bottom of every invoice: “If you are not satisfied for any reason, don’t pay us for it. Simply scratch out the line item, write a brief note about the problem, and return a copy of this invoice along with your check for the balance.” In its new manifestation, the old invoice is not just a tool for collecting what’s owed; it’s a mechanism to drive customer satisfaction throughout the organization.
Graniterock refers to the policy as “short pay.” Collins writes:
To put the radical nature of short pay in perspective, imagine paying for airline tickets after the flight and having the power to short pay depending on your travel experience—not just in the air, but during ticketing and deplaning as well. . . . Or suppose your cell phone bill came with a statement that said, “If you are not satisfied with the quality of connection of any calls, simply identify and deduct those from the total and send a check for the balance.”29
For individuals, there is probably no tool more deeply ingrained in us than the complex of behaviors that we
