by Greg Satell
Praise for
CASCADES
In Cascades, Greg Satell delivers an essential guide to navigating and driving change in today’s disruptive environment. I wish he had written it years ago. It would have reinforced our need not only to have the right strategy but to manage the entrenched forces working against it.
—John Antioco, former CEO of Blockbuster Video and Chairman of Red Mango
Greg Satell’s Cascades is among the most useful, engaging, and well-crafted books ever written on how to start and sustain large-scale change. Satell does a masterful job of weaving cases, stories, and evidence to illustrate the nuances of his simple formula—small groups, loosely connected, and united by a common purpose—and to show when and how leaders can use these elements to spread ideas and change organizations for the better.
—Robert Sutton, Stanford Professor and bestselling author of Good Boss, Bad Boss and Scaling Up Excellence
One of the great puzzles of history is how enduring business, political, and social orders can crumble without warning, seemingly overnight. In Cascades, bestselling author Greg Satell lucidly combines insights from network science, historical case studies, and his own experience living through Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 to deliver a thought-provoking account of this profound phenomenon. Cascades is essential reading for policy makers, business leaders, and social activists alike.
—Duncan J. Watts, author of Six Degrees
Greg Satell really understands movements—how they arise and what makes them succeed or fail. What makes him unique is his ability to show how the principles apply beyond the political sphere to organizations, industries, and society as a whole.
—Srdja Popović, Executive Director of the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), Cofounder of Otpor!, and author of Blueprint for Revolution
The complex nature of modern-day counterterrorism taught us that defeating threat networks requires a hybrid structure of network and hierarchy. In Cascades, Satell walks us through the impacts that networks are having in other spaces, and shows us that it is often small groups with the ability to interoperate with other small groups that are the key to driving change. For those hoping to deepen their understanding of the current state of play, Cascades is a must-read!
—Chris Fussell, President of McChrystal Group and bestselling author of One Mission and Team of Teams (with General Stanley McChrystal)
In Cascades, you will learn how to create a successful movement, while avoiding pitfalls along the way. Throughout the book, Greg makes the case that the principles of great movements throughout history can empower you to create change in your own life, community, and company.
—Dan Schawbel, bestselling author of Back to Human, Promote Yourself, and Me 2.0
Creating change today requires more than a strategy, but a deep understanding of how information flows through networks and ecosystems to affect behavior. Greg Satell has a real talent for explaining the science behind networks and how it affects events in the real world in a way that is fun, engaging, and powerful.
—AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean and Professor at UC Berkeley School of Information and author of Regional Advantage and The New Argonauts
I wish I had this book when we started our movement to improve STEM education in America! Cascades promises to be an essential guide for anyone who wants to create meaningful change in the world.
—Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Executive Director and Cofounder of 100Kin10
Cascades provides a powerful blueprint for corporate change that leverages lessons learned from social movements around the world and throughout history. This book will forever change your perception of change and how to make it happen.
—Stephen Shapiro, author of Best Practices Are Stupid
Ready to reboot your company culture? Create something new? Leaders in organizations large and small will find an important blueprint for how to fail at starting a movement and how to inspire the kind of change that makes history in Greg Satell’s Cascades. A must-read for all innovators and daring organizers.
—Lu Ann Cahn, eight-time Emmy award winner and author of I Dare Me
The test of an excellent book on a leadership topic is its ability to give profound insights on daily situations that help leaders to do their jobs better. I had many “aha!” moments reading this book, but my favorite idea is the notion of “keystone changes” (in Chapter 4). What a genius concept! I have tried this idea out with several work teams, and all of them have moved forward in their thinking and practice as a result. We are joining the ranks of Gandhi and the salt march, votes for women, and the same-sex marriage movement in finding a common cause that a diverse group of people can unite behind. The difference between tactics that work for social movements and tactics for contemporary organizations is actually not that great.
—Helen Bevan, Chief Transformation Officer at NHS Horizons (National Health Service of England)
Copyright © 2019 by Greg Satell. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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To all the friends I have met on my travels. And to my wife, Liliana, and daughter, Ashley, Who brought me home
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION: A Shift from, Hierarchies to Networks
PART ONE THE ANATOMY OF A CASCADE
* * *
CHAPTER 1: What a Revolution Looks Like from the Inside
CHAPTER 2: Fireflies, Snowy Tree Crickets, and the New Science of Networks
CHAPTER 3: How Cascades Create Transformational Change
PART TWO HOW CHANGE MOVEMENTS SUCCEED—AND FAIL
* * *
CHAPTER 4: Identifying a Keystone Change
CHAPTER 5: Making a Plan
CHAPTER 6: Networking the Movement
CHAPTER 7: Indoctrinating a Genome of Values
CHAPTER 8: Building Platforms for Participation, Mobilization, and Connection
CHAPTER 9: Surviving Victory
AFTERWORD: Leading Toward Common Ground
NOTES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote “I am a part of all that I have met,” and that is doubly true for this book. A number of people contributed, in ways large and small, to developing and writing Cascades, and whatever it achieves is largely due to them. Any errors are, of course, my own.
Srdja Popović spent countless hours schooling me on the principles that led to the great successes of the Otpor movement and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS). He was also generous to be frank and open with me about the failures along the way, how he and his colleagues learned from them and were able to adapt to changing contexts. Most of all, he became a dear friend, and for that I am truly grateful.
My friend and former colleague Vitaliy Sych, as well as Mustafa Nayyem and Vitaliy Shabunin, provided me with essential insights into what has transpired in Ukraine since I left in 2011. Each continues to play an important part in shaping the country for the better to this day.
Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, both through their work and through my personal interactions with them, helped me understand the dynamics of networks and the role they play in change movements. Over the years they have been incredibly generous with their time and insights. The conversations I have had with AnnaLee Saxenian shaped my thinking about how networks played a role in the rise of Silicon Valley and the reversals of fortune along Boston’s “technology highway.”
In a similar way, Bob Sutton has helped me understand how change happens within organizations and pointed me to others who could provide further assistance. Chris Fussell took the time to explain the work he has done with General Stanley McChrystal both in Iraq and at the McChrystal Group. John Antioco was also kind enough to speak to me candidly about his time at Blockbuster Video and helped correct some earlier misconceptions I had about the Blockbuster story.
Talia Milgrom-Elcott has shared her experiences at 100Kin10 with me, as have Maureen Bisognano and Joe McCannon regarding their efforts at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Irving Wladawsky-Berger has spent hours with me over the years helping me to understand IBM’s historic turnaround in the 1990s.
Many people read through early drafts and provided helpful advice, including my mother, Penny Satell Berman, Anne Bockol, Todd Pruzan, Giles Anderson, Mark Bonchek, and Lu Ann Cahn. My publicists, Sarah Salbu and Eric Schmeltzer, were invaluable in helping to get the word out.
I would especially like to thank my friend Stephen Shapiro, who has provided constant help and encouragement over the past year. At critical junctures, he seemed to find exactly what needed fixing and was able to point the way forward. I am immensely grateful for it.
I would also like to thank my former colleagues at KP Media, with whom I experienced many of the events that inspired this book: Anya Dovgal, Olga Sych, Alexander Tismenetsky, Oksana Sohor, Vitaliy Gorduz, Herakliusz Lubomisrky, Magda Mazur, Svetlana Udod, Pavel Zhdanov, Elena Viter, Olga Shchur, Katya Vorapayeva, Alona Tokar, Maxim Tkachuk, Maxim Kulakov, Yuriy Ivashenko, Daria Ivashenko, and, of course, KP’s founder, Jed Sunden, who made it all possible.
Finally, I’d like to thank my agent, Jill Marr at the Sandra Dijkstra Agency, as well as my editor, Cheryl Ringer, and the entire team at McGraw-Hill whose advice and guidance helped round off early flaws.
Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Liliana, for being the partner of a lifetime. To my daughter Ashley, I apologize once again that this is not a children’s book, but hope that one day, you will pick it up, read it, and understand what was keeping Daddy so busy.
PREFACE
One night in 2002, I had dinner with a man named Jed Sunden in Kyiv, Ukraine. I’d only recently arrived in town, but had been in the region for a number of years. Sunden, on the other hand, was already a legend in Ukrainian media circles. He had come in 1995 to work on a project to catalogue Jewish cemeteries and, sensing opportunity, launched the Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper, with $8,000 he financed on his credit cards.
I had several reasons for setting up the meeting. First, I had been sent to Kyiv by a Swiss magazine publisher whose Ukrainian business unit was having some trouble, and it was clear that Sunden would be a valuable source of market information. Second, it was already well known that he was preparing to launch a Russian language newsweekly, Korrespondent, and the company I was representing had some interest, albeit not very serious interest, in investing in the venture. Third, I wanted to take the measure of the man and see what he was about.
I found Jed to be immediately likeable and wickedly smart. He seemed to know everyone and everything that went on in the post-Soviet media world. For his part, he seemed to be intrigued by my knowledge and contacts in the Western media world. It was an interesting discussion that lasted for hours and ended only when we started getting dirty looks from the waiters wanting to close up.
Eventually, the conversation turned to the launch of his upcoming magazine. I knew that Jed had been declared “persona non grata” by the Ukrainian government for running a hard-hitting journalistic operation in English at the Kyiv Post. Introducing a more comprehensive version in Russian seemed like a gutsy move, and I told him so. He looked at me lucidly and said, “Maybe . . . but I just think that the Ukrainian people deserve a reliable news source in their own language.”
That’s what hooked me on Jed Sunden.
Over the next few years, we established a friendship and eventually became partners in a billboard venture. A few months after we had started working together, he asked me if I could help him with Korrespondent, the magazine we had discussed during that first dinner. It was doing well editorially but struggled financially. He also wanted my assistance with a women’s fashion magazine that was in a similar position. Before I knew it, I was spending more time with Jed’s business, KP Media, than on our joint venture. Eventually, we sold the billboard business and I went to work full-time managing KP Media.
The most formative experience I had in Ukraine was the Orange Revolution, and Korrespondent was at the center of it all. It was incredibly exciting, but also terribly confusing. Events seemed to happen with no rhyme or reason. Thousands of people who would ordinarily be doing different things would all of a sudden stop, then start doing something else entirely, in unison, guided by some mysterious force that neither I nor anybody else could seem to identify.
A few years later, in 2006, I was in California, taking a summer publishing course at Stanford University, and everybody in Silicon Valley was talking about a new online phenomenon called social networks. Between the online version of Korrespondent and the web portal Bigmir, essentially Ukraine’s version of Yahoo!, KP Media had a commanding position in digital media and it seemed like it was important for me to understa
nd what social networks were and how they functioned.
So I began to research network theory and, to my great surprise, what I found was a mathematical description of exactly what I saw unfold in the Orange Revolution. As the years went by and my interest continued, I learned that others found essentially the same thing in vastly different contexts. AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at Cal Berkeley, saw similar effects in the formation of Silicon Valley. General Stanley McChrystal found the understanding of networks essential to defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq. After he left the military, he established a successful consultancy teaching businesses to harness many of the same network forces. I would later find that the same principles applied to turnarounds at companies like IBM and Alcoa, as well as movements to promote evidence-based quality practices in medicine, to recruit and train STEM teachers for schools, and even to shift the global giant Experian from a traditional to a cloud infrastructure. Finally, I got to know Srdja Popović, who leads CANVAS, the organization that trained the activists in Ukraine as well as in many other countries around the world. It seemed that everywhere I looked, whenever transformative change took place, networks were central to making it happen.
Today, as I write this, it’s been more than 15 years since I began my journey at that dinner in Kyiv with Jed Sunden. What follows is what I’ve learned along the way.
INTRODUCTION
A Shift from Hierarchies to Networks
Power is easier to get and harder to use or keep.
—MOISÉS NAÍM
Nobody really knows exactly how or why everything erupted so suddenly. Most probably, it was a confluence of factors, events, and contexts. Clearly, though, when protestors began flooding into Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, it was the start of something big. The activists obviously touched a nerve that ran deeply throughout the populace and, almost immediately, “Occupy Wall Street” became a household name.
