by Greg Satell
Otpor saw that even a supremely powerful dictator relied on others to impose his will and that by winning those people over to their cause, the regime’s authority would crumble under its own weight. So the activists designed their tactics to appeal not just to fellow travelers, but also to everyone else. They were funny, engaging, and, above all, clear about what they intended to achieve: the downfall of the Milošević regime. As they built connections throughout Serbian society, their movement cascaded to victory.
General McChrystal saw that commanding the most powerful forces on earth was of little use if he couldn’t make them interoperable. He recognized that having greater resources can actually be a disadvantage because as you expand the nodes in your organization, the links increase at an almost exponential rate.45 So he set out to widen and deepen linkages between individual units in order to create a “team of teams.” In doing so, he fundamentally changed the way his organization functioned, allowing information cascades to help his forces determine where they would strike next, instead of waiting for orders from centralized commanders.
The technology companies in Silicon Valley, taken individually, weren’t all that different from their Route 128 counterparts. Yet by understanding the importance of the links between enterprises as well as those firms’ connections to the communities in the region, they created a cascade that led to a technological movement that has no equal anywhere in the world.
The evidence is clear. In a world pervaded by digital technology, power no longer resides at the top of hierarchies, but at the center of networks. Movements become successful by expanding out, always seeking to widen their appeal. Those that continue to play to a narrow constituency of stakeholders eventually find themselves stuck on the periphery. This principle holds true whether you are seeking change in an organization, an industry, or throughout society as a whole.
In Part One of this book, we will learn how cascades work through understanding the new science of networks. In the late 1990s, researchers began to understand how real-world networks create order from chaos. We will meet some of these pathbreaking scientists and learn how the principles they uncovered can guide us as we seek to create positive change around us.
The second aspect, seemingly antithetical to the first, is planning, organization, and discipline, without which a cascading movement will spin out of control. It was Otpor’s superior planning and discipline that empowered it to inspire fellow citizens and topple a dictator. And it was Occupy’s lack of discipline that turned off many who may have sympathized with its message about economic inequality, but were reluctant to throw in with activists who often seemed extreme, disorganized, and vulgar.
Where Occupy hurled insults at police, Otpor saw every interaction, even arrests, as an opportunity to win converts. Otpor also trained its activists to defend police against violent protestors so that they wouldn’t turn off the people they needed to help them effect change. They had more than passion, but a plan to identify pillars of support, win allies within the mainstream populace, and undermine their foes. It is not the passion and fervor of zealots that creates change, but it is when everyone else joins the cause that a movement gains power. Students and activists can protest, but it is only when everybody else starts taking to the streets that a true revolution can begin to take place.
In a similar vein, Al Qaeda’s brutal tactics were able to make the populace tremble in fear, but its inability to provide even a modicum of governance to meet people’s needs made it possible for McChrystal’s forces to not only defeat it on the battlefield, but also in the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis. It was the “Sunni uprising,” as much as anything else, that led to Al Qaeda’s defeat in Iraq. It was also the Route 128 firms’ inability to see beyond the boundaries of their own organizations that led to their irrelevance. On the other hand, it was the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ efforts to build a regional ecosystem that helped create a global phenomenon. The reality of today’s world is that connection wins and isolation loses.
As we will see, these principles do not just apply to the examples discussed above, but were also utilized by successful movements throughout history, such as those led by Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and those who struggled to win LGBT rights. Their salience is not confined to political revolutions, either, but can be applied to transformational change in any context. Corporate revolutionaries, such as Lou Gerstner at IBM and Paul O’Neill at Alcoa, as well as other leaders, like Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church, applied many of the same precepts, as did the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a movement to decrease preventable deaths in hospitals, and 100Kin10, a movement to recruit and train 100,000 STEM teachers in 10 years.
Part Two of this book will explain how to apply the concepts of planning, organization, and discipline to harness the power of network cascades to create your own brand of transformational change. We will see how creating clear purpose and values, and devising a plan to win over converts in the populace as well as within institutions, can help you make a positive difference in the world.
If you want to create change—real change, not just make noise—you will find these principles invaluable. They will be your playbook for making a true difference in the things you care deeply about. But before we get into the specifics of how transformational change is created, let’s first take a look inside a true revolution. This is my personal story of how I first came to understand the power of network cascades and the movements they spawn.
It starts in the fall of 2004 in Kyiv, Ukraine, when I woke up one morning to find that my world had completely, unalterably changed.
PART ONE
THE ANATOMY OF A CASCADE
CHAPTER 1
What a Revolution Looks Like from the Inside
I ask you, people who care about the soul of Ukraine, those who want to preserve the heart, the spirit and the faith of our country for future generations, to please defend it.
—YULIA TYMOSHENKO, former Prime Minister of Ukraine
For 15 years, a significant portion of my adult life, I lived in post–Soviet Bloc countries in Eastern Europe, where I managed media companies and observed events from the fairly unusual position of being not quite an outsider, but not really a local either.
When President Clinton invited Poland into NATO, I was there, sitting just a few rows behind former Polish President Lech Walesa and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (both are shorter than you’d think). I was in Moscow on my way to work when the Chechens were blowing up metro trains, and I happened to be traveling in the northern Georgian Republic and observed some of the early troop movements before Russia invaded South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Yet in all my life, I don’t think I’ll ever again experience anything quite like the events that occurred in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2004—in what is now known as the Orange Revolution.1
Revolutions are remarkable things, because they do the opposite of what nature predicts. They upend an existing order, which has power and inertia on its side. And they do it with almost unthinkable speed. You wake up in the morning, and the world has changed overnight. No transition period, no forewarning. It’s as if someone flipped a switch somewhere, and poof! The world begins anew.
That’s what it was like when I awoke one morning in the fall of 2004 to see my fiancée wrapping a bright orange bandana around her neck as she prepared to go out. It seemed particularly early for a Saturday.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going out to a demonstration,” she replied.
“I thought you didn’t care about politics,” I said, now confused.
“I didn’t, but we’ve had enough, and it’s time to do something about it.”
And indeed they did. Just like that, things had changed. Ukraine was about to join the wave of popular uprisings that came to be known as the “color revolutions,” which swept across Eastern Europe in the first decade of the twenty-first century. They included Serbia, the Republic of Georgia, and, of course, Ukraine.
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At the dawn of the new century, the work left unfinished by the 1989 revolutions and the fall of the Berlin Wall would begin again as post-Soviet dictatorships fell one by one. Later, another wave of political unrest erupted, this time in the Middle East, when a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire in front of a governor’s office, touching off a wave of protests that would soon engulf the whole region. It came to be known as the Arab Spring.
Political disruptions are, of course, nothing new, but the Orange Revolution is where I began to understand the power of cascades. I became intensely interested about why some movements succeed and others just seem to flame out. Why do some technologies, like VHS, become standards and others, like Betamax, fail? Why do start-ups like Google and Facebook become billion-dollar enterprises seemingly overnight, while well-established companies like Kodak and Blockbuster disappear almost as fast? Why do markets crash? Why do some Hollywood movies with the biggest budgets, the hottest stars, and the most accomplished directors bomb right out of the gate, while silly Internet memes like “LOLCats” and “Gangnam Style” enter the zeitgeist as runaway hits?
Each of these scenarios seems eerily familiar to what I experienced that morning I first encountered the Orange Revolution in my home. Through years of research, I have found that the similarities are far more than superficial. In fact, all point to basic truths that underlie the mysterious forces that create disruption in our lives and allow us to start anew.
So let’s take a closer look at what happened in the fall of 2004 in Ukraine.
THE ORANGE REVOLUTION
* * *
Even among the sordid histories of Eastern Europe, Ukraine is particularly tragic. Over the centuries, Ukraine was ruled by the Mongols, the Duchy of Lithuania, and the Kingdom of Poland before it was overtaken by the Russian Empire during the eighteenth century. It endured the Holodomor, forced starvation under Stalin, in the thirties, and bore the brunt of Hitler’s armies in World War II.2 Somehow, through it all, it maintained a national culture, language, and identity.
Ukraine became independent when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, then endured eight years of turmoil culminating in the currency crises of 1998. It finally began to gain traction in 1999, when President Leonid Kuchma appointed Viktor Yushchenko, the technocratic former head of the national bank, as prime minister, and Yulia Tymoshenko a former businesswoman known in some circles as “the gas princess,” as his deputy prime minister for energy.3 Despite her oligarchic background, Tymoshenko proved an effective shepherd of industry magnates, and tax collections ballooned under her tenure.
The next few years were unusually prosperous for Ukraine, with GDP growing 6 percent in 2000, 9 percent in 2001, 5 percent in 2002, 9 percent in 2003, and an astounding 12 percent in 2004. Unemployment fell; savings and investment increased.4 While problems remained, it appeared that Ukraine was finally turning the corner.
Still, even amidst the unusual period of prosperity, the public was restless. There was a palpable feeling that the country had fallen far behind its neighbors to the west, most notably the Visegrad countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary but also the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. While those countries had enjoyed the political stability and legitimacy that came with NATO and EU membership, Ukraine was still considered a backwater, ruled by criminal oligarchs.
Then there were the scandals. First came the murder of Heorhiy Gongadze, cofounder of the country’s second-largest news site, Ukrainska Pravda (Ukrainian Truth),5 who disappeared in September 2000. His body was found beheaded and mutilated in a forest several months later. Shortly after that came Kuchmagate.6 The head of the Socialist party, Oleksandr Moroz, announced that he had more than a thousand hours of tapes surreptitiously recorded by President Kuchma’s bodyguard that caught the president ordering the assassination of Gongadze.
My friend and colleague Jed Sunden, founder and publisher of the English-language weekly Kyiv Post, was the subject of one tape. Sunden, returning from a business trip one day, learned he had been declared persona non grata and was denied entry to the country. Luckily, events conspired in his favor. Madeleine Albright was scheduled to visit Ukraine to encourage reforms two days later.7 Sunden made a call to an acquaintance on her staff, and Albright intervened. Kuchma could be heard on the tapes dressing down his subordinates about the incident, chiding them for making a public spectacle when they could have just raised Sunden’s rent.
Stories like these were plentiful. The tapes revealed a regime that was not only brutal and Machiavellian, but also almost comically inept. They reinforced the feeling that the country was ruled not by enlightened leaders, but by thuggish mafiosi. For the first time, widespread opposition broke out, led by Moroz and Tymoshenko, who had established herself as a charismatic opposition leader. Yushchenko rode the fence.
In a power grab, Kuchma fired Yushchenko and Tymoshenko from his administration (and subsequently had Tymoshenko arrested, at the behest of the powerful business interests that now despised her). The once-reticent Yushchenko became the de facto leader of the opposition, and his party, Nasha Ukraina (Our Ukraine), made significant gains in the parliamentary elections of 2002, as did Moroz’s Socialists and Tymoshenko’s eponymous party. The alliance of the three parties was quickly becoming a formidable political power in its own right.
Three other forces were converging at the time that would lead to what would be called the Orange Revolution. First, the “color revolutions” had begun, with the overthrow of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević in 2000 and of Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia in 2003. So along with the recent EU ascensions of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and the Baltic States to the immediate west of Ukraine, a feeling of change was already in the air.
The second was a youth movement called Pora! (It’s Time!). Trained, like the Kmara in Georgia, by Srdja Popović and his friends from Otpor, it was determined to see democracy thrive in Ukraine. This younger generation of Ukrainians was the first with little or no memory of Soviet rule, and its denizens yearned for a more stable, just, and prosperous country. Faced with the Kuchma regime’s domination of the media, they would, in a foreshadowing of Barack Obama’s campaign four years later, organize their supporters on the Internet and through mobile phones.
The third was a greatly weakened President Kuchma. Now thoroughly unpopular, Kuchma formed an alliance with the powerful Party of Regions and appointed Viktor Yanukovych, its leader and the governor of the Donetsk region, as his prime minister and handpicked successor. Yanukovych, a thuggish brute and twice-convicted felon, almost uniquely personified the grievances that had riled up the public in the first place. In that sense, he would prove a perfect adversary for the opposition.
The stage was now set for the presidential election of 2004. The Russian-leaning eastern third of the country would support Yanukovych. The Ukrainian-speaking western third would support Yushchenko. The mixed-language middle region—where the capital city of Kyiv is situated—would determine the fate of the country.
And it was about to explode.
A Ground’s-Eye View of the Revolution
In truth, I was really more of an observer than a participant in the Orange Revolution. Although I had been in the region since 1997, I was still a newcomer to Ukraine. I had been in Kyiv for six months in 2002, but only came to live there permanently at the beginning of 2004, after a stint working in Moscow.
Over the summer, Jed Sunden and I became partners in a billboard business, and in the fall, he asked me to help him with his company, KP Media, where I would eventually become Co-CEO. Jed was a serial entrepreneur who had come to Ukraine in 1995 and founded the Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper. In 2000, he launched Bigmir.net, which would become Ukraine’s largest Internet portal. In 2002, he started Korrespondent, a Russian-language newsmagazine, which would play a major part in the Orange Revolution. So, although I was a relative newcomer, I worked closely with many of the country’s top journalists
and had a bird’s-eye view of the events.
Nevertheless, I was genuinely surprised on that fall morning when my wife-to-be donned her orange bandana and set out for a political rally. My experience with Ukrainian political life up to that point could be summed up in one word: docile. While other countries in the region, such as Poland (where I had previously lived for six years) were extremely active politically, Ukrainians seemed mostly resigned to their fate. Fabulously wealthy oligarchs could take what they wanted, state-owned assets could be sold at a fraction of their worth, opposition politicians could be thrown in jail with no just cause, and everybody tried not to notice. They didn’t exactly like it, but there was little they could do. So why worry or complain? It was better to focus on your own life—your family, your friends, your job, and maybe saving enough money each year to go on a nice vacation.
Even the journalists were different. Others in the region were typified by Adam Michnik, the legendary, famously combative, and chain-smoking editor of Poland’s national daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza (who we will meet again in Chapter 8). His Ukrainian counterpart, Korrespondent’s editor in chief Vitaliy Sych, on the other hand, was one of the calmest, most well-adjusted people I’ve ever met. Although we formed a close friendship over the years and spent countless hours drinking whiskey and talking about everything under the sun, I can’t recall a single incident when he raised his voice. Other prominent journalists that I knew and worked with were similarly agreeable.
