Chapter 8
MOVING BEYOND THE BUSINESS WORLD
Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
The moonshot • Holding the wolf by the ear • Hillbilly armor • The 535-member board of directors • Universities vs. workforce accelerators • What do you want to be when you grow up? • Growth is not just about scale; value is not just about dollars
Think about the original moonshot: landing a man on the moon in less than a decade was a powerful, visionary challenge that galvanized the whole nation. As President John F. Kennedy declared in his May 25, 1961, speech, “We will do it not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our skills and talents.” Having taken formal ownership of the initiative, President Kennedy (and Presidents Johnson and Nixon after him) ensured that it would have all the resources it needed. It was planned from its desired end-point backwards, with an escalating series of milestones. And Kennedy’s challenge was backed up by an implementable strategy.
The already-existing Mercury program, created to send first animals and then men into suborbital and orbital flight, was followed by the Gemini program, whose maneuverable capsules carried two-man crews, stayed aloft for a week and more, and provided the astronauts with opportunities to walk in space and link up with other spacecraft. Finally, the Apollo program put all the pieces together, sending a three-man crew and a detachable lander all the way to the moon, at first to simply orbit it and return but ultimately to land two astronauts on its surface. As carefully planned and orchestrated as the original moonshot was, there were costly setbacks and lessons learned along the way, like the launch pad fire in 1967 that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, and the oxygen explosion that nearly doomed Apollo 13.
Most beyond-business organizations have deep and inspiring missions, but, as with businesses, institutional structures and processes and their leaders’ present-forward thinking can sometimes stand in the way of their goals. The government is prone to partisan gridlock; the military gets bogged down in its sometimes Byzantine procurement practices; while too many religious institutions and charities fall out of touch with the communities they intend to serve.
In this chapter, we will step outside of our usual purview as business strategists and suggest some of the benefits future-back thinking can bestow on noncommercial organizations—and the insights it can give into your own personal values. It would be presumptuous of us to advise government, charity, educational, and religious leaders to comport themselves more like business leaders. Different kinds of organizations have different needs, and as such, require different kinds of leaders. But we do believe the principles and methods we prescribe to business leaders can also help the leaders of other kinds of organizations address some of their most vexing challenges.
The US Government
For most of its history, the US government has worked as the Constitution intended it to. Because of the divisions between federal, state, and local authorities, and the many checks and balances between its legislative, executive, and judicial branches, the ship of state is cumbersome and hard to steer. Nonetheless, the national government has held together for most of the nearly 250 years it has existed. Along the way, it has undertaken projects of staggering scale and ambition, such as the transcontinental railroad, the Panama Canal, the interstate highway system, and the moonshot. Each was as visionary as the idea of America itself, conceived out of a bold vision of what could be, instead of what is.
But when it comes to wicked problems—quandaries so systemic, complex, and multifaceted they demand a national effort to solve them, but so politically and ideologically fraught people can’t agree on how to define and frame them (never mind reach a consensus on a concerted program or strategy to overcome them)—our decentralized government can become paralyzed. The question of slavery, for example, was already dividing the country as the Constitution was being drafted. Both Washington and Jefferson feared the controversy would eventually spell the ruin of the Republic. “We have the wolf by the ear,” Jefferson despaired, “and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”1 It ultimately took four years of bloody warfare to settle the issue, and the nation is still struggling with its repercussions today.
Similarly, look at the impasse the United States is stuck in with healthcare. No one would have deliberately designed a healthcare system like ours, which spends more per capita than any of the other developed nations while delivering some of the worst outcomes (for just one example, the United States’ disease burden, as measured by years lost to disease and disability, is 30 percent higher than in other wealthy countries).2 The Affordable Care Act succeeded in its main goal of expanding access to care by applying patches to the system, but it was so fiercely attacked that many of its features were rolled back or excluded as it was implemented state by state. A host of thoughtful improvements have been proposed, but the heat of the debate is such that it is hopelessly distorted by dogma and bad faith. Partisans are either trapped in the present or the future, unable to envision an ideal system that could be and then work back from it to an actionable plan that can begin to move us toward it today.
When a government is “of the people,” it is particularly vulnerable to the biases we described in chapter 1. Perhaps the starkest example of its inability to overcome the normalcy bias (our tendency to underrate the potential for catastrophe) is its failure to come to grips with the dilemma of global climate change. If its consequences will be half as catastrophic as an overwhelming consensus of scientists predict, climate change threatens not just America’s coastal cities and farms but the very survival of the human species. Yet a large percentage of American voters and politicians have made their peace with it, much as they have lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation for the past half century and more. There are a host of reasons for this, some economic, some psychological, and some political. But the problem is clearly exacerbated by its present-forward framing.
While growing numbers are sounding the alarm, too many of America’s leaders and citizens insist on framing the crisis and proposed efforts to forestall it from the perspective of the present. They begin by weighing the negative externalities that will be certain to occur in the near-term (higher gasoline taxes; setting your thermostat low in the winter and high in the summer; having your freedom of choice restricted in the marketplace; reversing the growth of carbon-dependent industries and possibly the nation’s GDP) against the hypothetical future consequences of doing nothing. Those hypothetical consequences are: (1) distant in time; (2) not a 100 percent probability; (3) based on analyses of data that are not easy to understand and that don’t always agree with each other; and (4) so devastating that the mind simply rebels.
Paying more to fill our SUVs’ gas tanks is hard on our wallets, while the prospect of our grandchildren struggling to survive in a hellish dystopia sounds like something we’d see at the movies. Forcing fossil fuel producers to scale back their growth expectations and utilities to invest more than they want to in renewables is inviting pushback. It’s easy to find excuses not to act—especially if you have a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance and are able to convince yourself that climate scientists, who have nothing to gain from their doomsaying, are in it for the money, while the carbon-dependent interests are disinterested.
On the other hand, we could ground our thinking in the future. If we begin by envisioning both the worst- and the best-case scenarios, objectively weighing the costs that would be incurred in each against the savings that would come from doing nothing, the opportunity costs our descendants will have to pay become much clearer, making it that much harder to keep kicking the can down the road. If the needed response is framed in a reverse chronology—to forestall the worst we have to accomplish d in twenty years, which is attainable if we do c by year ten, which we could easily accomplish if we managed to do just b in five years, which requires us to do a today—it would be much easier to get a handle on what is required. In fact, we’ve already made much progress that can be accelerated and leveraged (a shift to renewable energy and more sustainable systems for transportation and agriculture; the development of hybrid and fully electric vehicles; the potential for carbon dioxide removal technologies). It may be too late to avert all of the negative impacts of the crisis, but if we’re ever going to summon up the will to act, we must start by believing what we do today will have real consequences for real people tomorrow. As the saying goes, if we can send a man to the moon, then why can’t we fill in the blank? With a strong enough commitment to collaborative learning and problem solving, a sufficiently inspiring and actionable vision, and a leadership that is committed to change, we’d like to think we can.
The US Military
In 2003, the US Army launched an ambitious program called Future Combat Systems which, using Silicon Valley’s spiral model for rapid technology development, was meant to create and deploy a visionary system-of-systems for ground combat revolving around robot tanks and drones. The target date for its rollout was 2025. In 2009, after some $20 billion had been expended to little effect, the program was unceremoniously shelved.
Some Common Threads in Visionary, Future-back Projects
Governments are organizations too, and like businesses, they can be either future-facing or bound to the present. When you look at the largest-scale projects the United States has taken on in its history (putting a man on the moon; building the interstate highway system and the transcontinental railroad; developing the atom bomb; digging the Panama Canal), they all had certain features in common. First and foremost was a powerful vision. Each of them proposed to do what was seemingly impossible, drawing a stark line between what existed before and after. Beyond that, they leveraged:
- A sense of urgency. Putting a man on the moon had a clear deadline. The Manhattan Project was driven by the need to create a deployable weapon before the Germans did. The deadline scientists have set for averting the worst effects global warming is terrifyingly close.
- Necessity. The Panama Canal cut the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean by 13,000 miles. Within the United States, frustrated travelers, businesses that needed to ship and receive raw materials and finished goods, and the military saw a national highway system as a vital ingredient of the country’s infrastructure. In the summer of 1919, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a 28-year-old lieutenant colonel, participated in a coast-to-coast journey with a 72-vehicle convoy organized by the Army’s Motor Transport Corps that took 62 grueling days. As bad as the road conditions on the Lincoln Highway (the nation’s nominal cross-country route) were on the early legs of their journey, when they reached Nebraska there were hardly any roads at all. Vehicles were mired in quicksand in the desert, and they struggled to traverse the mountains. In Utah and Nevada, the convoy’s speed averaged five miles per hour and there were whole days when it covered as little as three. During the invasion and occupation of Germany, Eisenhower marveled at the multilane autobahn. “The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways,” he recalled. “But Germany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.”3 As president, he signed the Interstate Highway Act into law.
- Exploration. Visionary projects are launched on the bleeding edge. The leaders of these great public works projects did things that hadn’t been done before, opening up new territory (both figuratively and literally). Each began at times of change and transformation. Perhaps the United States undertakes fewer projects of this scale today because the proverbial edges of its map have been filled in (unlike China, which is building roads, railroad lines, and whole cities at a stupendous rate).
- Competition. Competition is a crucial catalyst for most visionary public works projects. In the case of the transcontinental railroad, the government literally pitted two companies against each other in a race to the center of the continent. The Manhattan Project was funded when it became known that Germany was working to develop its own atomic arsenal. The moonshot was a race with the USSR, which had gotten a head start in the conquest of space with the Sputnik.
- Perseverance. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, and the Panama Canal were all vastly expensive and suffered significant setbacks. Even so, national leaders found the funding and the wherewithal to push the projects to completion. The fact that things often don’t go according to plan must be a part of the plan.
During those same six years, ironically, soldiers in Iraq had been reduced to retrofitting their Hummers and trucks with homemade, so-called hillbilly armor to protect themselves against improvised explosive devices, and carrying off-the-shelf walky-talkies into combat because the ones the army had issued didn’t work. When a reporter asked then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why soldiers had been reduced to digging through landfills for scrap metal, he replied, “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Rumsfeld also asked Lt. General R. Steven Whitcomb, the commander of army forces in the Persian Gulf, to address the question. “It’s not a matter of money or desire,” Whitcomb said. “It’s a matter of the logistics of being able to produce it.”4
We agree that the issue wasn’t money or desire. As with businesses, resource allocation decisions at the highest levels play an enormous role in the success or failure of initiatives. Beyond that, we would argue that there was a failure of vision as well, specifically a failure to envision the military’s future needs in the right ways and at the right time horizons—and to connect those visions to the present in actionable ways. Ever since the attacks of 9/11, the US military’s primary challenge has been asymmetric warfare—combat with less well-armed, mostly nonstate actors, who are dispersed in remote areas. But its legacy structures and practices, and those of the massive contractors it depends on (Eisenhower’s notorious military industrial complex) still incline it to hugely expensive projects that develop so slowly that they risk becoming redundant before they are deployed. The military’s relationships with its contractors can be unhealthily synergistic; as often as not, it shapes its planning around their product cycles rather than the other way around.
We’ve argued that corporate planners tend to be too short-term in their thinking. In the case of the military, the opposite problem has sometimes prevailed. Its leaders need to think as deeply about the next five years as they do about the next twenty, and they need to build capabilities that will allow them to meet their logistic challenges in months instead of years or decades.
That said, the US military is very far from a poster child for non-future-back thinking. It is a learning organization par excellence, and it has significantly remade itself over the past two decades. The military engages in extensive scenario planning and has taught the business world much of what it knows about strategy. The US Army, for example, sets the standard for pre- and postmortems and after-action reports. Much to its credit, it has worked hard since 2009 to understand where the Future Combat Systems program went so wrong. And we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that the MRAP (mine-resistant ambush protected) program, which belatedly got off the ground in 2007, ultimately did deliver thousands of light armored vehicles to Iraq.
As thoughtful and well-developed as the military’s long-term strategies are, it is less able than it should be to develop the visionary ideas that are urgently needed in the immediate present. Vision is about what the nature of warfare will be like tomorrow, and we are living in a world defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (frequently shortened into the acronym VUCA). Yes, it’s likely that another protracted ground war will occur someday, and the military must be prepared for it. Dauntingly complex and expensive aircraft, warships, cyber weapons, and even robot tanks and drones will be needed to fight it, and they take a long time to develop; satellites must be launched and maintained; new strategies must be developed and refined.
But it’s even more likely our domestic power grid will be attacked by cyber terrorists, an American embassy in a far-off corner of the world will be fired on by an ad hoc group with a cache of stolen weapons, or a nation-state we hadn’t particularly been paying attention to will invade a neighbor, destabilizing an entire region. The military must be able to anticipate things that have never happened before, swiftly develop new capabilities to respond to or preempt them, and at the same time, stop doing things that it no longer needs to do.
Some of the military’s lack of agility stems from sheer size. It has 1.2 million men and women in uniform, and they’re led by 1,000 flag officers. Each of the armed services has its own bureaucracy, which is set in its present-forward ways of thinking and doing, and each is answerable to the civilian government, which is even bigger and more bureaucratic. Structure and civilian resource allocation decisions shape its operational and strategic thinking at every level. Meanwhile, its civilian leaders change with every new administration, and its senior officers are constantly being rotated into new commands. The problem with leadership continuity in businesses we addressed in chapter 7 is even more acute in the military. “I report to a 535-member board of directors,” a general once told Mark (meaning the House of Representatives and the US Senate). “The secretary of defense changes between and within administrations, and I’m only in this position for a few years, until they rotate me out to another assignment. Even if I do make some headway, my successors have to reinvent the wheel.”
To develop a real actionable vision about what the nature of threats like cyber warfare will be in three to five years, military and civilian leaders from the top to the bottom of the command structure must shift more of their thinking to the right side of the leadership framework and spend more time in an explore, envision, and discover mode. When new leaders come in, they need to continue those efforts and not simply reset things to their default positions on the left.
In 2018, the US Army announced the formation of a new Army Futures Command (AFC) to modernize its weaponry, organization, training, and acquisition processes. One of its goals is to reduce the time it takes to define its technical requirements for acquisitions from sixty to twelve months. With its emphasis on outside partnerships and rapid prototyping so new initiatives can “fail early and cheaply, and then increase learning,”5 it is clearly on the right path. But while twelve months is a lot shorter than sixty months, it’s still a long time when people are being killed. The AFC’s chief challenge, we suspect, will be to ensure that it not become as captive to its newer-and-better structures and processes as its predecessors were to their old ones—that it develops and retains the capacity to vision and revision so it can fight the wars of the future with the army that it both wants and needs to have.
Higher Education
American higher education faces a number of challenges that will likely combine and tip in the next decade, among them a demographic shift that will reduce the number of traditional college-aged students (starting around 2025, the number of high school graduates is projected to decline precipitously, by as much as 20 percent in some regions). A perfect storm is brewing, as the public clamors for more affordable or even free college educations at the same time that state and national governments radically reduce the funding they supply to support public education. Given the unsustainably high levels four-year-school tuitions have reached already—they have tripled over the past three decades, far out-pacing inflation, wage growth, and the means of many middle-class families to pay them or manage the debt they must incur to do so—most colleges will not be able to fill their growth gaps by raising their tuitions even higher.
Meanwhile, the continuing rise of new entrants through online education is challenging the traditional model for college education. Schools will likely place a greater emphasis on job training and certificate programs than they do today, reaching out to include more adult learners in their classrooms (virtual and bricks-and-mortar). To maintain their revenue streams, many will develop or expand partnerships with governments and corporations to provide targeted research and specialized training. Others will likely undertake dual transformations, optimizing their cores by streamlining their cost structures, centralizing their administrations and removing layers from them, eliminating duplication across schools and departments, culling their least successful programs, and making deeper investments in the ones with the most potential. Further, they will protect and build their endowments with better investment strategies, and work to improve their academic brands.
Some of this is already happening. The workforce accelerator Trilogy Education, a for-profit enterprise that provides training, professional certification, and job placement assistance to students, may be a harbinger of what’s to come. So is Southern New Hampshire University, which has vastly expanded its profile and its footprint by building its College of Online & Continuing Education, which grew from 8,000 students in 2001 to 80,000 today.
Still, the likeliest outcome in the nearer-term is disruption, with many small liberal arts schools and underperforming state and community colleges with low completion rates being forced to merge to create economies of scale, change beyond recognition, or close their doors. A few years ago, Clay Christensen predicted that as many as half of American universities will go bankrupt within the next decade or so—a percentage that has been widely challenged, but as with climate change, even the best-case scenarios are troubling.6
How can a future-back framework help the leaders of colleges and universities make better choices? As the leaders of Australia’s Deakin University did, looking out ten years and more forces them to think harder about the new environment they must survive in, the jobs to be done of their future students, and the implications for their current practices. Many will realize that business as usual is no longer sustainable. For them, developing a viable future state portfolio is an existential imperative.
More importantly still, it will force them to revisit their vision and values and ask themselves some gut-wrenching questions. Can the liberal arts curriculum survive? Will students still read the classics and study history, ancient languages, comparative religion, and philosophy, or will all of that fall by the wayside as colleges turn their focus to the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), business, and other practical areas that can justify their cost by qualifying students for high-paying jobs? Will universities become extensions of corporate research and development and Human Resources—or turn into venture capital incubators, real estate developers, sports franchises, and business consultancies? How can they cut costs while still delivering quality educations to as many students as possible? In chapter 3, we said leaders should use their deepest aspiration as their touchstones. Building a future state portfolio, we said, gives you the opportunity to design the ideal organization of the future, irrespective of what it is today. Taking that to heart may mean making the choice to become smaller but more effective, to do fewer things better.
Every leader will approach these questions in different ways; our task is not to prescribe the solutions but to provide the ways of thinking that will allow the best answers to come to the surface. Simply taking the future seriously, acknowledging the urgency of the crisis and the need to change in fundamental ways to meet is a big step forward.
Like America’s healthcare system, our higher education system serves a vital and growing need. At its best, it is the envy of the world. But it’s also safe to say no one would have deliberately designed as inefficient, costly, and unsustainable a model for it as we have now. There are as many potential strategies to fix our system for higher education and make it more sustainable as there are schools and students.
Churches, Charities, and Activist Organizations
When we told a colleague about this book, she remarked rather wistfully about how eager children are to engage with the future. Beguiled by the wonders of space travel, flying cars, and other miraculous advances, they talk endlessly about what they want to be when they grow up. But as they get older, their imaginations become less vivid and their view of the possible more constrained. “Envisioning in the way that you describe,” she said, “Is about reawakening the most creative parts of ourselves. Executives should regard the time they set aside for thinking about the future as an almost sacred obligation, like going to church.”
In principle, churches and other religious institutions are built upon a foundation of vision, but when you look into their back offices, where the humdrum work of temporal administration is carried out, most look and feel much like any other present-forward organization—sometimes so much so that it interferes with their ability to fulfill their customers’ spiritual jobs to be done. Though it might sound like bringing coals to Newcastle, future-back thinking can also help the leaders of religious institutions reconnect with their loftiest purposes.
Most of the people who administer religious institutions are people of deep faith and conviction. But they tend to spend more of their time on the left side of the leadership framework than is good for either them or the faith communities they work so hard to serve. As interested as they are in eternity, they rarely look ahead more than a few years when they are making their resource allocation decisions. It’s not that the present-forward, operate-and-execute activities they prioritize aren’t important. Their human and material resources are limited and therefore must be apportioned wisely. Budgets need to be drawn up and closely adhered to; religious school curricula proposed, approved, and developed. Professional staffs need to be hired and trained; volunteers coordinated; real estate bought and sold.
But to borrow a phrase, man does not live by bread alone. Like the military, religious institutions must contend with all of our VUCA challenges, from cyber threats and terrorism, to the material and spiritual repercussions of climate change and income inequality. Gender roles, indeed gender itself, is being questioned. Genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics are changing our conception of what it means to be human—and the singularity, the moment when computers become smarter than people, is rapidly approaching. To stay relevant to its members, religious leaders must overcome the tyranny of the urgent, step off the present-forward treadmill of project reviews and financial projections, and move to the right side of the leadership framework, asking themselves such hard questions as:
- What must we do and what must we stop doing to ensure that we attract, serve, and retain all the members of our communities—and new adherents as well?
- As we expand our global footprint, how do we ensure that we form enduring relationships with our new members?
- Are younger members, women, and gay people leaving our faith because they perceive its message and its programming as hostile or retrograde? Doctrine permitting, what can we do to change that?
- Are we using the right metrics to measure our successes and failures? How do we keep them simple and focused?
- What are the impediments to change? Are we putting stumbling blocks in our own path?
This goes way beyond mere messaging. In spiritual as in secular organizations, resource allocation speaks louder than words. Future-back thinking can help religious leaders decide which activities should be standardized and centralized to drive uniformity and consistency, and which diversified and decentralized so local leaders can customize to better meet their communities’ particular needs. It can help them take the long-view when they consider who and what gets more, and who and what gets less, and how they can help those who will get less to adjust. Putting vision first will remind them that their goal is to ensure the continuing relevance and sustainability of their organization, not to simply maintain and preserve it as it is.
Charities, nonprofits, and activist groups can similarly become prisoners of their structures and short-term interests, rather than emissaries of the transcendent missions and goals they came into being to serve. The need to be sustainable can devolve into a push to grow for the sake of growth, while the desire to stay true to one’s founding values can lapse into a kind of cultish extremism. The competition for scarce resources like donations and talent can cause them to be overly secretive and hence heedless of the consequences for the future—for example, hiding their failures rather than publishing them and sharing them in public forums so that other organizations that are working the same territory can learn from them. It can lead them to protect a leader who has misused his or her position because they excel at fundraising or are inextricably identified with their brand. And like so many for-profit organizations, nonprofits can become stuck in the past, retaining practices and programs long after they have become obsolete. As Peter Drucker wrote, “Sloughing off yesterday is particularly important these days for the non-business public service institution. It is all but impossible for most of them to accept that success always means organizing for the abandonment of what has already been achieved. In turbulent times, an enterprise needs to be able both to outride sudden hard blows and to avail itself of sudden unexpected opportunities.”7
The discipline of future-back thinking compels leaders to ask hard questions about both their future and their present—and reminds them of their ultimate purpose.
Future-back Yourself
Future-back thinking and strategy development are key competencies for leaders of long-established organizations. But can you use them to help you fulfill your personal goals? You can, up to a point, but perhaps not in the way that you think.
As innovative and thoughtful as many leadership development programs are, their records are spotty when it comes to identifying the leaders who are ready for advancement to the very highest levels. Sadly, the single biggest cause of director and higher terminations are ill-starred promotions of the sort that inspired Laurence J. Peter to identify what we now call the Peter Principle: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”8 Taking a future-back approach to career development (designing high-promise executives’ career tracks backwards, starting from their intended destinations) could help reduce some of that churn for the people you oversee and for yourself. Having a clear idea of your intended destination (future-back planning) allows you to make better choices as opportunities present themselves (emergent planning).
Many career choices fall squarely under the heading of common sense. Know your strengths and leverage them; be cognizant of your weaknesses and be sure to compensate for them. Don’t stay in a job that requires you to work against the grain of your values. But we would be disingenuous if we said that it’s as easy to create an actionable vision for yourself as it is for an organization, because, first, it’s not easy for organizations either; and second, because the future-back strategies organizations pursue are almost always directed toward goals that can ultimately be captured by financial or other kinds of quantitative metrics.
Your long-term goals as an individual are much harder to quantify, because success will mean different things to you at different times in your life. Making money and achieving power are important to many people, but at the end of the day, both are means to ends. As we are far from the first to observe, when rich and powerful people are on their deathbeds, they tend to want the same things that everyone else does—the presence of a loving touch, the assurance that their lives added up to something worthwhile, that they made a difference in the world.
Your personal visions and values and your professional aspirations may seem to run on different tracks, but sometimes, especially at those crucible moments that define a leader, they can come together decisively. In 1982, when someone laced Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol brand capsules with cyanide, killing seven people, James Burke, J&J’s CEO at the time, swiftly recalled every Tylenol product from store shelves nationwide and destroyed them. That prompt and transparent response helped J&J regain its customers’ trust when it re-released Tylenol in tamperproof packaging a few months later—and allowed it to recapture all of the market share it had lost within a year. Burke gave credit to the famous credo Robert Wood Johnson II, the son of one of J&J’s founders, wrote when he took the company public in 1943. The credo formalizes J&J’s responsibilities to its customers, its employees, the public at large, the planet, the future, and only last and as a matter of course, its shareholders (“when we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return”).9 “The credo,” Burke said, “made it very clear at that point exactly what we were all about. It gave me the ammunition I needed to persuade shareholders and others to spend the $100 million on the recall.”10 Of course, other companies that have handled crises less honorably or adeptly have also published value statements just as high-minded as J&J’s—and J&J itself has come in for its own share of criticism. When push comes to shove, what really makes the difference is the character and courage of individual leaders.
For all of our emphasis on strategy in other realms, we recognize that serendipity plays a huge part in what a lot of very successful people end up doing with their lives. Most successful romantic partnerships begin by happenstance, and few of us have the opportunity to future-back the trajectories of our children’s lives, as much as we may wish we could. Where visioning and future-back thinking become truly important for individuals is when the goal is not to predict or reverse-engineer one’s desired future but to understand what those desires really are. You must ask yourself hard, open-ended questions, and pay as much attention to your intuitions and your feelings as you do to your present-forward logic. What do I truly want? What do I truly value? What will be meaningful to me in ten or twenty years? Are the choices I am making compatible with those things?
Growth is not just about scale; value is not only about dollars. As the economist John Maynard Keynes wryly put it, “In the long run, we are all dead.”11 But in the time we have in this world, there is much that we can do to grow our characters while working to ensure a better, more-sustainable future for the generations to come. At the end of the day, the same is true for organizations, no matter what their size, sector, or ecosystem may be. In the time they have, all of them must change, regenerate, and grow in capability and focus.