Cascades

by Greg Satell

  The British Viceroy, for his part, was caught in a dilemma. If he allowed Gandhi to continue unhindered, he risked making British rule a farce. However, if he had Gandhi arrested, he risked fanning the flames even further. The Viceroy chose the latter, and on May 4, a month after the Mahatma reached his hand into the sea at Dandi, he was brought into custody. There was an immediate outcry, with mass demonstrations and hartals, and the cascade accelerated. Roughly half of the country’s textile mills shut down. 128 villages in the Bardoli district, where Gandhi had previously led successful Satyagraha campaigns, refused to pay land taxes, and dozens of other villages followed suit. The entire country, it seemed, was in open revolt.32

  The action at Dharasana went forward as well. Abbas Tyabji, a seventy-six-year-old retired judge, announced that he and 300 of the Mahatma’s followers would continue with the march with him and Gandhi’s wife at the lead. They were both arrested. Next Sarojini Naidu, an internationally known poet and former president of the Indian National Congress, stepped into the breach. She told the demonstrators, “You must not use any violence under any circumstances. You will be beaten but you must not resist: you must not even raise a hand to ward off the blows.”33

  As the marchers approached the salt works, they were ordered to stop, but refused to obey. As each column approached, they were clubbed down by police, only to be replaced by another, who were bludgeoned in a similar manner. The confrontations went on day after day, and throughout, the nonviolent discipline of the protestors held even while they were being savagely beaten. It was an appalling sight, and foreign correspondents were there to record it.34

  Public opinion, even in Great Britain, shifted sharply against the Raj. Those charged with defending British rule in India were also demoralized. John Court Curry, a British police officer in Bombay, remarked that he disliked dispersing the nonviolent demonstrators so much that being called to duty made him physically ill.35

  The struggle was punishing for both sides. Thousands of protestors had been imprisoned, and many had been severely beaten. For its part, the British Raj suffered a significant decline in tax revenues and increasing costs associated with enforcing the contested laws. Finally, Gandhi was released from jail and entered negotiations with the Viceroy. A settlement was made on terms generous to the British. All prisoners would be released, those who quit their government jobs would get them back, but the salt laws would stay in place, except for provisions for small-scale manufacture.36

  Yet the terms of the agreement were never the point. Constitutional reforms were always secondary for Gandhi. His primary objective was to create a state of Satyagraha, a force for truth and dignity among his countrymen, and in that, he succeeded brilliantly. The fact that the British were forced to come to the table and negotiate with Indians as equals broke the spell of dominance. British rule had lost much of its legitimacy and therefore its power. For Indians, going to jail was no longer a cause for shame, but a badge of honor. As one of Gandhi’s followers remarked, before the British sat down with Gandhi, they “were all sahibs and we were obeying. No more after that.”37

  From that point on, it was only a matter of time. Once salt had been identified as a keystone change, the movement would only gather steam in the years to come. India became an independent country in 1948.

  SHARED PURPOSE AND SHARED CONSCIOUSNESS

  * * *

  When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Special Forces Task Force in Iraq, he encountered a situation not very different from what Gandhi found upon his return to India. Where Gandhi found his country splintered into factions of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, high caste, peasant, and untouchable, McChrystal’s forces were split into their own tribes, which included Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, Night Stalker helicopter pilots, and others, each with its own ethos, codes, and traditions. Additionally, there were a number of stakeholders outside his command, which included operatives within intelligence and law enforcement agencies as well as diplomatic corps stationed at embassies and other posts that were also essential to his mission.

  In his book Team of Teams, McChrystal likened the situation to that of the famous game theory thought experiment, the Prisoner’s Dilemma.38 In the classic example, two criminals are arrested and taken to separate interrogation rooms, where each is offered the same deal. If one informs on his partner and his partner stays silent, he goes free and his partner gets a five-year sentence. If they both confess, they will each get a three-year sentence, and if neither confesses they will each serve a one-year sentence on a lesser charge. The payoff matrix looks like Figure 4.1.

  FIGURE 4.1 Prisoner Payoff Matrix

  * * *

  The basic gist of the game is that they are collectively better off if they cooperate with each other, but each will cut two years off his sentence individually by defecting no matter what his partner does. So if both follow the same logic, they will collectively serve a total of six years, the very worst possible outcome. What makes the Prisoner’s Dilemma so devilishly hard to overcome is that the worst outcome is also the most stable, because it arises when each player acts according to his own self-interest. The only way to win is to build a bond of trust that supersedes the economics of utility. That’s the function a keystone change fulfills. It brings together competing interests without inciting opposition.

  Under McChrystal’s command, similar forces were at play. Certain resources, such as air support and intelligence resources, were limited. Everybody knew that it was best for those assets to be deployed where they were needed most, but it was natural for each unit to want to maximize its own capability. So if, say, a team of Army Rangers had been assigned air support but found themselves encountering little resistance, they might want to hold on to it just in case, even though a Navy SEAL unit might desperately need the same resources to accomplish its mission.

  The situation was even worse when it came to interagency cooperation. Commandos were responsible for killing and capturing terrorists, for which they depended on the work of intelligence analysts. The intelligence analysts, for their part, depended on the commandos capturing enemy assets. Clearly, their functions were interdependent, but their responsibilities were distinct. The Special Forces operators were responsible for killing and capturing bad guys, and the intelligence analysts were responsible for interpreting the information given to them. Each had their own specific mission, but neither was responsible for seeing the whole system.

  McChrystal’s key insight was that he needed to forge a sense of shared mission and shared consciousness among his troops and partner agencies, much like Gandhi created a shared mission and a shared consciousness with his targeting of the Salt Act, which united the elite nationalists, the downtrodden peasants, and also Muslims, Sikhs, and others. And, much like Gandhi, McChrystal framed the challenge not as a simple matter of defeating an enemy, but as an internal struggle to change the military culture. Rather than task his forces with killing more terrorists or taking more ground, he called upon them to embrace a simple equation:

  Credibility = Proven Competence + Integrity + Relationships39

  Competence and integrity were nothing new among the troops under McChrystal’s command, but relationships added a dimension. It put the objectives of other teams on par with one’s own. A commando team’s responsibilities no longer ended with capturing intelligence assets, but also building relationships with the teams those assets would go to. He also, as we will see in Chapter 6, put specific procedures in place to foster networks that would help reinforce this directive.

  For McChrystal, building key linkages between diverse and disparate units both under and outside his command was the keystone change.

  USING A KEYSTONE CHANGE TO DRIVE TRANSFORMATION FORWARD

  * * *

  When Lou Gerstner was chosen to lead IBM in 1993, what most people saw was an old dinosaur that had lost its way. Overtaken by nimbler upstarts like Microsoft in software, Compaq in hardware, and Intel in microprocessors, many
observers believed that IBM needed to be broken up into smaller, more focused units to compete on a more even playing field in the new economy. A huge, sprawling enterprise like IBM, competing in so many technologies at the same time, seemed like it was from another time, and like the dinosaurs, it was dying.

  Gerstner saw the situation differently. As a longtime IBM customer, he saw the value of what IBM could potentially deliver: integrated solutions. From his point of view, enterprise customers were struggling to adapt to new technologies and needed a partner that had the breadth of expertise to solve their problems. IBM was uniquely qualified to play that role, but was failing to capitalize on the opportunity because it lacked shared purpose and shared consciousness.

  “Units competed with each other, hid things from each other, and wanted to control access to their territory from other IBMers. . . . Instead of facilitating coordination, they manned the barricades and protected the borders.” Gerstner would later write in his memoir, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance. “Huge staffs spent countless hours debating and managing transfer pricing terms between IBM units instead of facilitating a seamless transfer of products to customers. Staff units were duplicated at every level of the organization, because no managers trusted cross-unit colleagues to carry out the work. Meetings to decide issues that cut across units were attended by throngs of people because everyone needed to be present to protect his or her turf.”40

  “A lot of people thought IBM should be broken up,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerstner’s key lieutenants during that time, told me. “Others thought we should embrace new computing architectures for mainframes. Still others thought that the new operating system we were developing, OS/2, could return IBM to its former glory days. There were many people with different ideas, but no consensus of how to move forward.”

  “Lou refocused us all on customers and listening to what they wanted, and he did it by example,” he continued. “We started listening to customers more because he listened to customers. Once we did that, we realized that customers didn’t want IBM to fail or to be broken up. They needed our mainframes, software, and services to run their mission critical business processes, as well as to help manage their growing IT infrastructures, so the prospect of losing IBM as a supplier terrified them. Once we understood that, it led us to design our mainframes to be more competitively priced, to build a services business, and to embrace the Internet, all the things that led us to be in greater harmony with the market and brought about our rebirth.”41

  What Gerstner understood was that what IBM needed wasn’t a strategy. In fact, at his very first press conference, he said, “The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision,”42 which immediately became one of the most quotable statements in American corporate history. What IBM needed was alignment behind a strategy. So Gerstner set out to create a movement within his own organization. He changed the focus from forcing IBM’s proprietary stack of technologies down customers’ throats to a new model aimed at helping customers with their “stack of business processes.”43 In doing so, he led one of the most dramatic turnarounds in corporate history.

  For Lou Gerstner and IBM, switching the company’s focus from its own proprietary stack of technology products to its customers’ “stack of business processes” was the keystone change.

  In a similar fashion, when Paul O’Neill took the helm of Alcoa in 1987, the once-great company was struggling. In his first public comments, he didn’t talk about strategy or profits or increasing shareholder value or anything that an incoming CEO would typically say to quell investors’ fears. Instead, he talked about safety. It wasn’t that Alcoa had a bad safety record. In fact, it was better than average. Nevertheless, O’Neill proudly declared, “I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries.”

  Much like the Indian elites when Gandhi announced he would march for salt, the reporters and analysts were puzzled. They began asking the typical questions about performance. O’Neill would have none of it. “I’m not certain you heard me,” he said. “If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures. . . . Safety will be an important indicator that we’re making progress in changing habits across the entire institution. That’s how we should be judged.44

  For Paul O’Neill and Alcoa, safety was the keystone change, and like Gerstner, he led his company to a historic turnaround.

  What O’Neill understood, much like Gandhi and Gerstner, was that to create a movement for transformational change, you need to create shared purpose and shared consciousness on a fundamental level. Concepts like “independence,” “freedom,” and “shareholder value” might check the boxes of elite opinion, but they mean little to the masses that are needed to actually make change happen. That’s why shared purpose means little if it’s not combined with shared consciousness and vice versa. In the 2016 US presidential election, Hillary Clinton proposed policies that shared purpose with the working class, but her opponent Donald Trump displayed shared consciousness and won many over to his side.

  To create a powerful movement for change, you need to show both shared purpose and shared consciousness among a wide swath of constituents. All too often, this is cast as a mere issue of messaging. Leaders try to devise a strategy that gives a little of something to everyone, attempting to piece together a coalition that will add up to 51 percent majority support. Politicians vow to help the poor, support businesses, and give a little something to the middle class. CEOs promise to champion the interests of workers and profits. In the end, it all comes off looking like exactly what it is, pandering to constituencies to get them to back your program.

  To create real change, change that sticks and won’t be soon reversed, you need to identify a fundamental issue that encapsulates the value of the mission—a keystone change that is concrete and tangible, unites the efforts of multiple stakeholders, and paves the way for greater change. Revolutions don’t begin with a slogan—they begin with a cause.

  MAKING CHANGE FOUNDATIONAL

  * * *

  At the height of the Occupy protests in 2011, Srdja Popović of CANVAS was called in to talk to its leaders. He asked them what change they wanted to see, and they spoke about their grievances. They told him, in excruciating detail, about the greed of the banks and the travesty of oppressive student loans. They had no shortage of complaints that they demanded to be addressed. But when Popović asked them about what change they actually wanted to see happen, they couldn’t say. “Imagine you are like Harry Potter with a magic wand and you can change anything,” he told the activists. “What would that change look like?” They didn’t have the first idea.45

  It is never enough to merely state grievances to challenge the status quo. To create meaningful change, you must put forward an affirmative vision for what you want the future to look like. Again, this is not about messaging. It’s not enough to merely express your grievances more artfully. You have to define an alternative that is actually better, not just for those who agree with you, but for the vast majority of those who will be affected by the change you seek.

  That may seem like a very simple thing, but it isn’t. Remember, Gandhi struggled for weeks to identify a cause that would encapsulate the change he wanted to see. In his book on the history of the LGBT movement, Awakening, Nathaniel Frank explains how the activists struggled for decades before they came to understand that same-sex marriage was the issue that would give them their strongest case for equality. After all, while it can be hard to internalize another’s sexual preference, everybody can recognize the importance of being in a committed relationship and raising a family. Denying it to fellow citizens just seems fundamentally unjust.

  In much the same way, during the nineteenth century there were many issues facing women. In most cases, they couldn’t own property, receive a real education, or take legal action against abusive husbands. They were, in many respects, treated like property. So it wasn’t at all obvious that voting rights would be
come their keystone change, but today we know their struggle as the women’s suffrage movement.46 However, voting rights were not the ultimate vision, equality was, and while the struggle for full gender equality continues, the right to vote paved the way for significant advancement over the last century.

  In some cases, keystone changes have a technical dimension. Don Berwick, Founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), was a doctor who was introduced to W. Edwards Deming’s quality methods for manufacturing. He soon became convinced that similar methods could be the keystone change that would transform the healthcare system and cut down on medical errors, which result in tens of thousands of needless deaths each year. Yet it would take years of research to identify exactly which practices could have the greatest impact before the effort could be scaled up enough to launch the “Campaign to Save 100,000 Lives.” We will discuss that campaign further in Chapters 6 and 8.47

  In other cases, keystone changes are nested, as in the case of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals’ quest to cut costs by 25 percent. Lean manufacturing methods were identified as the keystone change that could transform the company and achieve its objectives, but to implement those methods meant transforming the behaviors of 20,000 employees across 16 large facilities, most of whom were skeptical of the change. So they started with one process, factory changeovers, and reduced the time it took to switch from producing one product to another in half. “That changed assumptions of what was possible,” an advisor that worked on the project told me. “It allowed us to implement metrics, improve collaboration, and train the supervisor to reimagine her perceived role from being a taskmaster that pushed people to work harder to a coach that enables improved performance.”48