“Space, Wars, and Storytellers”
I.
Playa Las Coloradas, on the southern coast of the island of Cuba, is named for a density of red mangrove trees—mangle rojo—which thrive in marshy water and beneath olive-colored bark reveal red wood. Up the road, the sleepy town of Niquero sits peacefully with its eclectic mix of Spanish colonial buildings, Victorian houses, and plantation manors. To the east, the interior yields miles of sugarcane fields. Beyond the fields lie the Sierra Maestra mountains, a cave-ridden range with luscious jungle and majestic slopes crafted over millennia by earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. To the west, the white-sand shore stares out at an endless green-blue Caribbean.
On December 2, 1956, a leaky yacht from Mexico, christened the Granma, churned into view of that shore.
From it sprang 82 men, a starving band of former Cuban university students and expats. Having crammed together on that boat for seven days, they were delighted to set their wobbly sea legs on land, but perhaps dismissed the mangle rojo as they shouldered their backpacks and beelined into the sugar fields.
They weren’t sightseeing. They were there for a revolution.
Exiled from their homeland after the military tossed Cuban democracy out to sea, this little band was hoping to surprise a military stronghold while a handful of sympathetic saboteurs created a diversion inside the populous nearby city of Santiago. This was to be the spark that would inspire the oppressed Cuban peasantry to take back their country.
Except the revolutionaries were the ones about to be surprised. Having been tipped off, soldiers awaited the seafaring rebels in the fields beyond the beach.
CUBA WAS NO STRANGER to revolution. Fifty-eight years before, the people had wrested their country from colonial Spain, which had occupied Cuba for almost all the years since Christopher Columbus discovered it and had introduced a massively profitable slave and sugar trade. In the late 19th century, led by the national hero José Martí—the George Washington of Cuba, if you will—rebellion gained the support of the United States, sparked the Spanish-American War, and led Spain to withdraw from the island. Yet even after Cuba gained independence in 1902, infighting, insurrection, and civil war plagued the Caribbean’s largest island for decades.
By 1940 Cuba had made some progress. It had a constitution and free elections; however, the fledgling democracy was plagued by political and economic corruption. Then in 1952 a military man named Fulgencio Batista decided to cancel the next election.
Batista was a gangster. With heavy support from the United States—whose investors owned nearly all the power and telephone industries in the country, and who had held Cuba’s trade-dependent economy by the throat since the Spaniards left—Batista’s island became a haven for the American mob, which embedded casinos and brothels into the fabric of Cuban cities like Havana and Santiago. The working and rural class—the vast majority of Cubans—suffered and starved. Though it claimed to be a democracy, the new Cuba was a military dictatorship. Batista censored the media. The police harassed and detained critics and journalists. The military executed politically active students who dared to speak negatively of the state.
Three years before he leapt off Granma at Playa Las Coloradas, a 26-year-old Fidel Castro had led a group of such idealistic academics in a naive confrontation at a military barracks in Moncada, a gesture he hoped would initiate an uprising and eventual restoration of the government to the Cuban people. The attack failed and Castro was imprisoned.
“Condemn me. It does not matter,” Castro said at his trial in a lengthy but eloquent denunciation of the Batista regime. He admitted his hand in the attack, but argued boldly for the restoration of Cuba to its people. Declaring that the authority of government should come from the consent of the governed, he quoted the Cuban Constitution, the US Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther, and St. Thomas Aquinas. “History will absolve me,” he said.
Perhaps mercifully, or perhaps exasperated and not wishing to create a martyr, Batista had released Castro in 1955 as part of an amnesty of political prisoners. Castro and many of his rebellious fellows went into exile in Mexico. Batista would, hopefully, never have to deal with their irritating populist rhetoric again.
And now those rebellious fellows had returned, though things were going badly for them.
Castro had spent the time since his release attempting to raise money and support for a Cuban revolution throughout the United States and Mexico. He was spurned by each, and routinely harassed by Batista agents in Mexico. Both the USSR and Cuba’s communist party wanted nothing to do with Fidel’s little revolt, which wasn’t about the socialism that Cold War–era America would grow to fear, but instead about taking power out of the corrupt hands of the dictatorship and the mob. Finally, the ousted former president of Cuba, Carlos Prío Socarrás, who now lived in Florida, slipped Castro enough money to buy a boat.
The boat was Granma, a 13-year-old, 60-foot yacht made to accommodate, at most, about 20 people. Fidel stuffed 82 on board and cast off at 1:30 a.m. on a November night in 1956. Destination: the southeastern coast of Cuba.
Soon after the would-be revolutionaries hit the shore, the Batista army hit them. Hungry, seasick, and outnumbered, Castro’s crew was wrecked; some 60 to 65 of them killed, either immediately, or after being scattered and pursued. Fidel, his brother Raul, and a dozen remaining men escaped into the jungle. As the rebels staggered through forests and up slopes and past rural villages, attempting to regroup, the Batista government reported how it had crushed the Granma rebellion and “killed” its leaders.
The last part, at least, wasn’t true.
Castro and the remaining outlaws made camp in the Sierra Maestra, foraging for food and sneaking out of the woods at night to steal ammunition from Batista outposts. Led by the group’s doctor, an idealistic Argentine named Ernesto Guevara (the Cubans called him Che) who, it turned out, had a knack for guerrilla warfare, the little band began sabotaging Batista facilities and taking small military squads by surprise—hitting targets one-by-one and fading into the jungle. The rebels made bombs out of soup cans and Molotov cocktails from rum bottles. They established a small “liberated area” that they declared sovereign territory. They gathered disenchanted peasants from the rural areas, trained them to fight, and grew ranks to 300 guerrilla soldiers.
They were a tiny, hopeless group. Three hundred was nothing compared to Batista’s army occupying the island’s 42,000 other square miles. And Batista had tanks and planes. At the current rate, the rebels would die of old age before they wore down the enemy. And in the meantime, millions of Cuban citizens for whom they were fighting didn’t know the rebels existed. The only sign of this handful of unshaven idealists came from the occasional rat-tat-tat of gunfire in the distance, muted by a hundred miles of fog and sugarcane fields.
Then one day some of Dr. Guevara’s men showed up to the rebel camp with a device that would change the revolution.
WHICH IS EASIER—MAKING FRIENDS with a thousand people one by one or making friends with someone who already has a thousand friends? Which is faster—going door to door with a message or broadcasting the message to a million homes at once?
This is the idea behind what I call superconnecting, the act of making mass connections by tapping into hubs with many spokes. It’s what Castro needed to do if he ever wanted to convert the Cuban people to his cause.
Imagine you’re at a party and you don’t know any of the other guests. You look around at the dozens of people and, if you’re extroverted, you’ll probably strike up a conversation with someone nearby. If you’re a little more timid in unfamiliar territory like I am, you might wander around in hopes that someone strikes up a conversation with you.
Now imagine that a friend of yours shows up. She happens to know everybody at the party and she decides to take you around and meet everyone whom you should know. You soon meet a dozen people, with very little effort. Your friend is a superconnector.*
That’s the role that mass media has played in our lives for the past two centuries—superconnecting sources of information to relevant audiences all at once and superconnecting businesses to millions of potential customers through advertising.
Before newspapers could reach hundreds of thousands of people in a day and before radio and television and Internet publishing could reach millions at once, there were few national- or international-scale businesses. And there certainly weren’t fast-growing startups and consumer brands in the numbers we see today. But once companies could communicate to many, the number of fast-growing and large-scale businesses in the world skyrocketed.
That was the kind of influence the Castro brothers attained when Che Guevara brought the contraband equipment to their mountain camp in February 1958. The device that helped turn the tide of the revolution, if you hadn’t guessed, was a radio transmitter.
WHEN THE CUBAN REBELS began broadcasting in February 1958, radio had the most reach of any medium in Latin America. Much of the population was too poor to afford television, lived too far out in the countryside to receive newspapers, or simply couldn’t read. And as the rebels correctly theorized, the urban poor and rural peasantry would be crucial to overthrowing Batista’s brutal regime.
The first broadcast from Guevara’s ham radio transmitter only went a few hundred yards. But with a little work—Guevara recruited a technician, a newspaper reporter, and a couple of radio announcers from among rebel supporters in nearby villages—he could broadcast to nearby towns, and eventually, after secretly airlifting in more powerful equipment, the entire island. Every broadcast started the same way, “Aqui Radio Rebelde! Transmitiendo desde la Sierra Maestra en territorio libre de Cuba.”
The goal was to shed light on what was really happening in Cuba, and to inspire potential supporters to spread the “Free Cuba” message. Each day, Radio Rebelde transmitted reports of Batista troop movements and the military skirmishes the rebels had with them. Castro and his lieutenants gave speeches, local musicians played patriotic songs, and soldiers delivered personal messages to their families. When revolution supporters were arrested in a given city, Radio Rebelde announced the names, hoping to galvanize local outrage. The rebels let the islanders know that someone was out there fighting for them and detailed the horrors Batista wreaked on Cuba’s citizens. Batista’s credibility eroded.
Radio Rebelde became a formidable weapon for the revolution, and “made concrete to the whole nation the most far-reaching and resonant events in the armed struggle against the Batista dictatorship,” wrote rebel soldier Ricardo Martinez Victores. “Each night, the air of the island thrummed to the radio waves of the world of the Sierra Maestra, cascading down onto the citizens of the plains and cities.”
Every night, Cubans in the cities and Cubans in the fields huddled around their radios for those words, “Aqui Radio Rebelde!” Even Batista’s jailed political enemies furtively tuned in from their cells, waiting for the moment when perhaps they could distract the government from the inside.
“The fact that we were outnumbered so greatly by Batista’s army did not deter us,” said William Gálvez Rodriguez, a young activist who heard the Radio Rebelde and joined the movement, eventually becoming a captain of the guerrilla army. “Fidel was putting into words things that we all felt. Our morale was strong.”
In three months, half the island was listening to Radio Rebelde.
By winter, the rebels turned the popular tide against Batista. Radio Rebelde drew volunteers to the Sierra Maestra and won supporters in the major cities.
The guerrillas, whose ranks had swelled, could now challenge Batista on the plains and in the cities. And they did. The overwhelming majority of Cuba wanted revolution. City after city fell to the rebels.
When Guevara marched troops to the key city of Santa Clara on December 28, 1958, peasant crowds cheered. Residents used overturned cars to create makeshift barricades that blocked the advance of Batista’s armored vehicles, and citizens within the city threw Molotov cocktails at the defending army from the inside. Batista soldiers defected to join Guevara midfight, saying they were tired of fighting their own people. Batista was practically defeated before Guevara’s troops arrived.
Within hours of his thorough defeat at Santa Clara, Batista had fled the country. On New Year’s Day 1959, the rebels marched triumphantly into Havana and Fidel Castro declared Cuba free.
Revolutions are a slow, deadly business. Before radio, 300 outcasts hiding in the jungle could not have overthrown a powerful military dictatorship. But with radio, those outcasts could connect to the 5 million oppressed Cuban citizens who secretly shared the rebellion’s dissatisfaction, and turn the tide against the dictator, tanks and planes and all. The radio had superconnected the revolutionaries with the Cuban people, and together they achieved victory in astonishingly short time.
THE CLASSIC MYTH OF Guevara and the Cuban revolution is that it was the pirate radio itself that helped the rebels win. But that’s not the whole story. Radios don’t come with built-in fan bases. Uneducated farmers generally won’t put their lives in some foreigner’s hands just because he says to on the radio.
Tapping networks is not as easy as simply shouting a message. Guevara became a successful superconnector not because he broadcast, but because he managed to build a relationship with the people.
This chapter, and the third lever of this book, is about his formula for doing so.
II.
The guy who makes Star Wars movies for a living works out of a three-story building in Santa Monica, California, that bears the moniker “National Typewriter Company.”
No, it’s not George Lucas, and the guy doesn’t actually make typewriters; he just likes them. His company is actually called Bad Robot Productions, and the tiny wooden plaque on the charcoal door to the left of the typewriter sign—next to the door with no handle and above the keypad with the glowing green button—reads, “Are you ready?”
I was ready. But I didn’t make it inside that door. Reports from those who have indicate that the office beyond is full of eclectic sci-fi artwork and a bookshelf that opens to reveal a secret toilet. The middle-aged man in business attire who approached me from outside after I knocked said that, “The typewriter repair shop isn’t open to public,” but I was welcome to check out the website, nationaltypewriters.com. I peeked beyond the door when he used his key to slip inside, and it certainly wasn’t a typewriter shop.
I’d been e-mailing with the Bad Robot people earlier and they’d tried to shield me from this place, and from the man behind the company: Jeffrey Jacob Abrams, the recently tapped director of Star Wars VII.
Born in New York City, with a Super 8 film camera already in his infant arms, Abrams had spent his entire life wanting to make movies. By his early 40s, he’d become one of the most successful and sought-after directors in the business, and possibly the most powerful man in sci-fi since Steven Spielberg. Abrams had created the hit TV shows Alias and Lost, directed Mission Impossible and Star Trek films, and made a movie with Spielberg himself. And now, Abrams had been anointed heir to George Lucas’s legacy, meanwhile launching and maintaining a dozen other high-profile directorial projects.
But before all that, like most artists, Abrams struggled to get his first break.
He wrote nine screenplays that went nowhere. “I think each one was worse than the one before it,” he once told author Steven Priggé. “I couldn’t do it.” Then he ran into a writer friend, Jill Mazursky, whose father was a well-connected movie director. Abrams proposed that Mazursky and he cowrite a script and that she work her father’s network to get it into some high-profile hands. The plan worked, and Abrams’s first screenplay became Taking Care of Business, starring Jim Belushi.
This is the classic Hollywood networking story: make friends with people who have connections and work them to your advantage. Be nice to them when you need them, then move on.
When we look at Abrams’s subsequent film credits, we can see that the method worked well for him. He collaborated with bigger and better writers and directors and actors, from Harrison Ford to Michael Bay, and used their credibility (Sinatra style) and networks to work his way up the Hollywood chain.
But then something curious happened. The self-serving Hollywood networking theory starts to break down when we look at Abrams’s credits from after he became wildly successful; it turns out that even once he was on top, he continued to cowrite, codirect, and cocreate almost all his projects. He started lending his own Sinatra-style credibility to less known but talented writers and directors and actors, so they could climb their ladders faster.
Dr. Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says this is because J. J. Abrams is “a giver,” a rarity in an industry full of takers. No good TV show or film is made by one person, but whereas Hollywood bigshots are known for being credit-hogs, J. J. Abrams is a fantastic collaborator.
Grant would know. He wrote the book on the subject. In his bestseller, Give and Take, he presents rigorous research showing that a disproportionate number of the most successful people in a given industry are extremely generous. From medical students to engineers to salespeople, his studies find givers at the top of the ladder.
“Being a giver doesn’t require extraordinary acts of sacrifice,” Grant writes in Give and Take. “It just involves a focus on acting in the interests of others, such as by giving help, providing mentoring, sharing credit, or making connections for others.”
Abrams is known, acquaintances tell me, for his kindness and lack of ego, in addition to his penchant for mystery. That’s how he attracts the best people to his staff. And that’s how he’s managed to climb so far so fast.* Staffers with whom I e-mailed and met at the “typewriter shop” were eager to keep Abrams away from me because, according to his reputation, he’d probably spend way too much time helping this shaggy-haired writer out when he ought to be, you know, filming Star Wars.
Initially, Abrams helped out better-connected people than himself, and doing so helped him superconnect. But once he was the superconnector, he still helped people. That’s how to tell if someone is a giver, or a taker in giver’s clothing. “If you do it only to succeed,” Grant says, in the long run, “it probably won’t work.”
Sonny Moore, from chapter 5, leveraged this concept of helping better-connected artists and accelerated his own success. A peculiar culture of remixing and collaborating with other DJs became a strong element of the electronic dance music scene in Los Angeles in the late 2000s, and when Sonny remixed artists like Lady Gaga or Avicii or Nero, he gave their tracks a boost and helped them reach new fans. This in turn superconnected Moore to audiences larger than his own and led to surges in his popularity. And after winning six Grammys, Moore started paying things forward, incubating new and young artists in his recording warehouse and promoting their music to his fans.
Jack Canfield, from chapter 2, similarly superconnected into networks when he released his book, Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul. He partnered with a national pet supply retailer to offer a half-price coupon for the book to anyone who bought a 50-pound bag of dog food. The company promoted the deal across the United States. “The principle was partner up with somebody who is already a gorilla, that has huge reach and impact, and create a win-win,” Canfield explains. Eager for a deal, dog owners bought half a million books—and in the process, a lot of dog food. It was one of the fastest book launches of Canfield’s career.
“The number one problem with networking is people are out for themselves,” says Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, who coined the term superconnector. “Superconnecting is about learning what people need, then talking about ‘how do we create something of value.’”
This is a twist on the classic networking advice, which advocates boldly meeting people and asking them for things. Building relationships through giving is more work than begging for help, but it’s also much more powerful.
And there’s a simple way that companies can do it, too. . . .
III.
In 2006 a Silicon Valley engineer named Aaron Patzer quit his job to start a company called Mint Software, Inc., an online service that helped people simplify their personal finances. Mint users could collect all their bank accounts and credit card information in one place and track their spending and savings with nice charts. Mint would then suggest ways to save money, such as by transferring balances to credit cards with lower rates (at which point the company received a commission).
At the time, the convention was for startups like Mint to acquire users by spending heavily on advertising. But Mint tried something different.
Instead of interrupting people with ads, Mint decided it was going to become a media company that taught people to better understand finances. It started a blog on which it posted helpful articles about money management and savings. The blog chugged along, slowly winning audience members to its free content, and then it found a way to tap into a large broadcast channel: social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking sites were all the rage in the mid-2000s. Here people shared links to content they liked, while others “voted” on which links they liked best. The highest voted stories every day surfaced to the front pages of bookmarking giants like Digg.com and Reddit.com, where millions of people saw them.
So Mint started making blog posts its editors thought were likely to be voted up by the bookmarking crowds. Its editors commissioned infographics* (illustrated stories that made sense of data) explaining economic trends in terms a normal person could understand. These were entertaining, informative, and visually striking stories, and they helped people grasp money management in a fun and noncondescending way.
Some of the most influential Digg and Reddit users fell in love with the Mint blog, which gave them content that would make them look good to their own fans. Those influential users shared these stories, sending millions of visitors to Mint.com.
Thus Mint built relationships with an enormous number of people—by helping them. Over the next two years, 1.5 million people who discovered Mint through its blog posts ended up actually signing up for Mint’s service. In 2009 Patzer sold the business to Intuit for $170 million.
Mystic energy isn’t the secret to the success of Grant’s givers; just as we learn from Mint, when we give and teach, we build up fan bases that become more likely to support us.
And that, actually, was the key component of Che and Fidel’s revolution.
IV.
When Che Guevara began broadcasting Radio Rebelde’s revolutionary message into Cuba’s villages, the locals didn’t instantaneously rise up to join the cause. If Fulgencio Batista’s regime provided one thing, it was predictability. Yes, the people were oppressed. Yes, the poor starved and the mob ran amok. But as history has repeatedly shown, people with lives and families tend to favor predictability even in the worst of circumstances. Revolution would probably mean deaths—all the worse if the rebels lost—and surely the upending of what meager livelihoods many peasants already struggled to cling on to. If you were uneducated, illiterate, and barely surviving, leaving your job and family to fight for “the greater good” would seem highly irrational, wouldn’t it? That job and family might not be there when you returned, and then what?
“Radio Rebelde truly became our means of mass communication, to talk to the people,” Castro later recalled. But he and his crew knew that talk was not enough to win the people to the cause. Their countrymen’s basic needs had to be met, and trust had to be gained.
So, Guevara started teaching peasants how to read. The revolutionaries, largely an educated bunch, walked into villages and set up classes. They taught the poor how to farm, how to be self-sufficient. They taught them self-defense. The villagers began to see the rebels as their allies—people actively improving their immediate circumstances. The rebels’ service spoke much louder than Batista’s pompous speeches.
Radio Rebelde became a tool for reinforcing that service, for teaching and inspiring during the day, and reporting the news at night.
Guevara was adamant that everything Radio Rebelde broadcast be 100 percent true. Batista used radio to spread lies about false victories and impress people with his supposed power, but he was a taker. The lies caught up to him as rebels detailed the destructions of military convoys and revealed troop movements and inventories; they reported the news, and the regime was frequently embarrassed.
“The radio should be ruled by the fundamental principle of popular propaganda, which is truth,” Guevara later wrote. “It is preferable to tell the truth, small in its dimensions, than a large lie artfully embellished.” He knew that if his message was honest, he’d win the hearts of the people in the long run.
And, unsurprisingly, a strong relationship developed between the rebels and the proletariat. Castro’s movement earned the citizens’ trust. And then together they took back their country.
Despite the ensuing decades of tension between the United States and Cuba, and despite Cuba’s stagnant economics, Cuba’s literacy rate is 99.8 percent today, putting it in the top ten countries in the world (and slightly above the United States). And although Fidel has turned out to be a less-giving ruler than a younger version of himself might have hoped, the octogenarian Castro’s approval rating in Cuba remains higher than the percentage of Americans who approve of their own Congress.* Che, true to his giving self, eventually headed off to Congo and Bolivia to teach them and join their freedom fights.
In the end, Castro’s revolutionary message reached a massive audience through a superconnector—a radio—but the rebels won the people’s hearts because they showed that they sincerely cared. The movement harnessed the power of the superconnector by giving service as a publisher and educator. J. J. Abrams built his career by collaborating with talented, fast-rising, and well-connected people and by making them look great. And Mint grew business via its own broadcast on the Web, tapping superconnected people and then helping the members of those people’s networks through meaningful content.
No matter the medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity.
What happens post-serendipity—as we’ll learn in the final part of this book—is where things start to get really interesting.