SEVEN
Stories for Tomorrow
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
The Extraordinary Power of Ordinary Creativity
The shape of creativity
It is thrilling to listen to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. How many people are capable of such creativity? But there is another kind of creativity of which we are all capable. It’s quite ordinary, in fact, even if its results can be extraordinary: they have sometimes changed the world. It’s all about one little switch.
Let me explain with a joke I once heard: “I’d like to die like my grandfather died—quietly, in his sleep. Not like those other people in the car who died yelling and screaming.” We picture grandpa in bed, but he was actually behind the wheel. It’s just a little switch really, the basis of many jokes.
Jokes, of course, don’t change the world. Nor did Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, for that matter. But if you are capable of making a joke, you are capable of making a little switch, which means you are capable of changing the world.
How about this little switch? In 1928 the physician Alexander Fleming was researching antibacterial agents in his London laboratory. One day he noticed that mold had killed some bacteria in one of his plates. “That’s funny,” he said. Standard practice was to discard such samples and carry on, which Fleming in fact did. But following a conversation with a colleague, he took that sample out of the trash, asking himself if this mold could be used to kill destructive bacteria in the human body. That was the critical moment—the one little switch. What at first seemed to be trash suddenly became opportunity.
The rest took great effort—14 years, in fact—before what he immediately called “penicillin” was used to treat infections. Looking back on this, Fleming said, “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer.”64 But that is what happened, and it changed the world—thanks to that switch from the trash to the bench, and then the body.
And don’t forget that one little switch at IKEA—about taking the legs off the table, from the car to the customer—that changed the furniture business. And by the way, that too required great effort: I was told that it took 15 years to work it all out.
Maybe you have never written a great violin concerto. But I’d bet you have come up with your share of little jokes. So why not use that talent to do something more serious, like changing the world?
Customer Service or serving customers?
It’s been said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t. Perhaps. But I do know that there are two kinds of companies in the marketplace: those that profess Customer Service and those that serve customers, leaving aside those that do neither. (Government people: please read this as serving citizens, who, as noted earlier, are not customers of the government.)
Serving customers is not a technique, not a program; it’s a way of life, a philosophy of doing business. Treating customers well because that makes you more $ is not serving customers. It’s a question of what comes first in your mind: When you see the $, you don’t see the person. When you see the person, you charge reasonably, gain satisfaction, and do better.
Put the company on the stock market, controlled by people who can’t see past the $$$, and watch everyone else in the place see likewise. For example, you put the sales staff on commission, and guess what they see coming in the door: $$$. Most big companies started by serving customers; that is how they become big. I admire those that have managed to remain so after going public.
How does serving customers feel? That’s easy: authentic. You can’t miss it. There was a wonderful waiter in a delightful restaurant in Quebec City, the jolliest, friendliest waiter we have ever encountered. I can’t tell you his name because he was not programmed by Customer Service to say: “Hello, my name is Mestipho, and I will be your server today!”
Customer Service often feels alienating—like those companies that make us wait interminably on the phone while they tell us how much “We appreciate your business!” (Loose translation: Our time is so much more valuable than yours.) Or those programmed greeters at Walmart stores. One weekday afternoon I wished they had put them inside the store, to clean up the mess of merchandise strewn all over the shelves. And then there was our dear old airline, Air Canada, so devoted to Customer Service that when it had a monopoly on the Montreal–Boston route, which takes less than an hour in the air, it charged $1,066 for a last-minute ticket—one way! (That’s $2,132 return, if you are not good at math.) Air Canada couldn’t see past all the money it was making flying to Boston.
And this brings us to $Customer$ Service—treating lavishly only those customers with tons of $$. These are triaged the moment they enter, to be sure which ones to dismiss. I said to a Honda salesmean (whoops, a typo!): “Can you please give me your best price?” He replied: “Are you here to buy now? Otherwise, why should I tell you that? You will just go to another dealer and tell them our price.”
The nerve of me, trying to comparison-shop for the second-biggest purchase I make (after a house). So I went to another Honda dealer, where the salesman gave me his best price on the spot, and I bought the car on the spot. I was not about to go back to that salesmean even were he to offer a better final price.
And this brings up another side to all this: respecting sellers. Customers, even ones with $$$, who don’t treat decently the people who serve them may get Customer Service, but they don’t deserve being served as customers. If the sellers are not treated well by their customers, let alone by their employer, how can they treat even the decent customers decently?
Enough of MORE: Better Is Better
Enough of MORE—all this excessive production and consumption, with all its destructive waste and warming. MORE is ravaging our enterprises, our societies, our planet, and ourselves. We can do better.
Creating an Enterprise
You have a compelling idea and lots of energy though not much money. So with the help of an understanding banker, alongside your own sweat capital—those 15-hour days—you build an enterprise. And you succeed! Your customers are happy, your employees are committed, you feel great, and the economy benefits. Everybody wins.
Okay, maybe you did this to make a lot of money, or to become celebrated, or to avoid having a boss. But if you are a serious entrepreneur, your incentive went further: to building something special—an engaging enterprise with its own sense of communityship beyond your leadership.
As the enterprise grows, however, you become concerned: What if I get hit by a truck? Or you want to grow faster than your existing resources will allow. Your financial friends tell you to do an initial public offering (IPO): cash out or get the cash in. Let shareholders fund faster growth. It sounds good, so you agree. This is the turning point.
Grabbing MORE
The first sign of trouble is the realization that, while you simply wanted more, the stock market is intent on grabbing MORE. It doesn’t care about your ideas, your ideals, your customers, or your workers except as a means to relentless, one-dimensional growth—of Shareholder Value. You discover that this has nothing to do with decent values, your own included. You are running a publicly traded company now, so you must keep feeding the beast.
To take a particularly appalling example, in March 2015 a deranged pilot flew a Germanwings airplane into the face of a mountain, killing all 150 people on board. Barely a month later, a New York Times article reported from a shareholders’ meeting that “at a time when Lufthansa faces urgent commercial challenges … many share holders expressed concern … that the Germanwings tragedy risked detracting management from its turnaround efforts.” One portfolio manager claimed that Lufthansa management “will have to come back to reality.”65 The murder of 150 people was apparently a distraction; reality is getting back to managing value for the shareholders.
Let’s get back to the reality of our entrepreneur: As a consequence of your IPO, a different feeling is enveloping your enterprise, replacing that sense of community. The market analysts are analyzing, the day traders are trading, the financial sharks are circling, and the wolves of Wall Street are demanding a performance report every three months. Every three months? How can anybody manage a company this way?!
Was that IPO really worth it?
But it’s too late. Anyway, you are getting greater growth, albeit accompanied by greater pressure. Eventually, however, you find yourself running out of established customers, and it’s tough to get new ones with the old ideas, or new ideas with this new Value. And so comes the key question: How can I get MORE when there is no more to be had, at least not as I have built this company in the first place?
Ravaging the Enterprise The answers are all around you in the experiences of other publicly traded companies:
• Exploit the existing customers. Bamboozle pricing is a good idea: price so that the customers can’t figure it out. Or charge excessively for servicing the products that your customers are stuck with.
• Trash the brand. This is particularly popular: sell to new customers who were not willing to pay for the quality of which you used to be so proud. By cashing in your legacy, you can get MORE by giving less.
• If you can’t increase the revenues, you can certainly reduce the costs: cut maintenance, cut research, cut everything out of sight—except the executive perks.
• And don’t forget to squeeze the workers by putting them on short-term contracts at lower pay, without benefits. Better still, fire the whole lot of them and produce offshore.
And when all else fails, diversify. Get into all kinds of new businesses you don’t understand. So what? You’re big now, with lots of money to throw at them.
Ravaging Society Your enterprise has now become a global corporation, with obligation to no country, least of all your own, where it no longer pays much tax anyway. So why not go whole-hog, so to speak? Do well by doing bad:
• Collude with your competitors to create a cartel or, better still, buy them out altogether—in the name of competition.
• And in the name of free enterprise, lobby governments around the globe to grant subsidies to your industry and rid it of those annoying regulations.
• If you do go bankrupt, which happens eventually to companies that exploit, fear not: you have become “too big to fail.” Thanks to your bribes (called political donations), the government you betrayed will bail you out, shifting the costs of your failure to society at large. Economists right in step with such shenanigans call this an “externality.”
Ravaging Yourself Then one day you wake up to the realization that you have become the victim, too: Could I have been responsible for all this by doing that IPO? I used to love my business. We had a great time serving the customers I worked so hard to get. I had pride in our place, our products, our people. Now the customers write me nasty emails, and the workers glare at me when I see them (which is rarely). Why did I build an engaging enterprise, only to jettison its engagement? We used to be delightful explorers; now we are nasty exploiters. I have cashed in my legacy for a fortune that I can’t even begin to spend.
Imagine a country full of such corporations, let alone a whole planet of them. We’re getting there. By hogging resources that could be recycled to build vibrant new enterprises, they are distorting our economies, debilitating our societies, and diminishing our communities. By playing countries against one another, they are also undermining our democracies. And by their relentless fostering of production and consumption, they are damaging our planet too. Not all corporations do this—just too many of them. How much MORE can we take? 66
One-dimensional companies, like one-dimensional people, are pathological. They are an invasive species that has no business in a healthy society. Edward Abbey said it best in 1978: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”67
Getting Better
Take yourself back to that fateful decision about the IPO. You had been a leader in building your enterprise. Why did you become a follower with yet another IPO? Did you really have to become beholden to the mercenary stock market?
There are better ways to finance a growing enterprise, for example:
• Find some patient, decent capital that will allow you to grow responsibly and sustainably.
• Do an IPO, but keep the analysts at bay by issuing two kinds of stock, as did the Tata group in India and many of the major corporations in Denmark, with foundations controlling a majority of the voting shares.
• How about converting to B (or Benefit) Corporation status, with a commitment to respect social and environmental needs alongside financial ones?
As for a new enterprise:
• If you don’t need heavy investment, consider relying on funding from loans and retained earnings. Sweat capital is the real investment in truly entrepreneurial enterprises anyway.
• How about establishing the business as a cooperative, with one share owned by each of the customers, or the suppliers (as in a farmers’ cooperative), or the workers (as in the Mondragon Federation in Spain since 1955, now with 72,000 people).
• Or give your existing company away to its employees—you know, those people who actually care about the place, unlike the day traders who supposedly own it. Much better than destroying the legacy you built up so carefully. The John Lewis Partnership of the U.K. actually did this in 1950 and remained successful, with its 84,000 “partners” in the tough businesses of department stores and supermarkets.
• Imagine creating a social enterprise—a business that is owned by no one. Look around; there are many. My better half is a rental agent in a building with 250 apartments for people over 50. It’s a not-for-profit, and is the mood ever different! Even many established NGOs are in the act: after all, the Red Cross sells swimming lessons.
Better Is Better Economists insist that MORE is the way forward. No, it is the way backward, economically as well as socially. We don’t have to destroy our progeny and our planet for the sake of a senseless dogma. Sure we need development and employment—but responsible development with robust employment. A healthy society is sustained by a decent and diverse economy, not one driven by the mercenary force of one-dimensional growth. Stock markets have done enough damage.
There are impoverished people all over the world who need more: more food, more housing, more employment, more security. What they don’t need is the MORE that is dragging down the so-called developed world.
So let’s shift our economies from MORE to better—quality over quantity—to lift us up rather than drag us down. We can invest our efforts in durable products, healthy foods, personalized services, and robust education. Rather than reduce employment, a shift to better can enhance it, with higher-paying jobs in healthier organizations. When we work better, we feel better, so we live better. Imagine a world of getting better instead of grabbing MORE.
Be Good: The Best Is Too Low a Standard
In 1997 Stuart Crainer met me at Heathrow Airport as I arrived on a red-eye from Montreal. He was interviewing me for a book he was writing with Des Dearlove about management gurus.
This guru business must be very competitive, Stuart suggested. “Not at all,” I replied. “I never felt any competition.” And then I blurted this out in my jet-lagged stupor (words that I remember distinctly): “I never set out to be the best. It’s too low a standard. I set out to be good.”
This was not meant to sound arrogant: I was not claiming to be better than the best, just outside the quest to be the best. I meant that the best work is done by people who compete with themselves, more than with anyone else. They do their best.
How can anyone tell “the best” anyway? Was Tchaikovsky better than Beethoven? Was Edith Piaf the best? Who knows, but was she ever good! Indeed, she was incomparable and therefore in no danger of being labeled the best. Michael Porter has written extensively about how to be competitive in business. With whom was he competing when he wrote his landmark book Competitive Strategy?
My favorite story about this comes from Sylvie Bernier, who won the gold medal for diving at the 1984 Olympic Games. I got to know Sylvie when she did our International Masters for Health Leadership program. One day I asked her what really distinguishes athletes who win such high honors.
Nikki, doing her best
Photo by Susan Mintzberg
Sylvie told me a striking story, not about other Olympic medalists, just about her own experience—at 20 years of age. When she got into the finals, she blocked out everyone and everything—her coach, her parents, journalists, newspapers, radio, and TV—any source that could tell her how she was doing.
As she came up from her last dive, Sylvie could not have known whether she had won gold or nothing. Maybe that is why she won gold. Sylvie certainly wanted to be the best—there’s only one gold medal for each Olympic event—but her means to get there was by doing her best, competing with herself.
So let’s drop, not our standards, but our obsession with being the best, so that we can get on with being as good as we can possibly be.
Rise and Shine!
Eat those eggs—off the podium, on the ground, in the air.
Organize like a cow so that ordinary people can come up with extraordinary ideas.
Sometimes be sure to see and do before you think—to allow your strategies to grow like weeds in a garden.
You can’t measure it? Good: manage it! You lack the evidence? Good: get the experience!
Beware of boards that buzz, IPOs that impoverish, CSI that shames, and analysts who overanalyze. Analyze thyself, for effectiveness, not efficiency.
Downsize your vocabulary: Drop the “Top.” Sack “Shareholder Value.” Purge “Strategic Planning,” “Human Resources,” “Customer Service,” “Transformation,” and “CEO” labels in hospitals, governments, and other endangered species.
Above all, do your best—for the sake of great natural happiness.
