Chapter 11
The Power To Do
The Impossible

What can people achieve with impossible thinking? We've seen how shifting mental models led to running the miracle mile, creating new businesses and transforming lives. This chapter presents three case studies of "impossible thinkers"—Howard Schultz, Oprah Winfrey and Andy Grove—to illustrate the power of new mental models. While these individuals differ in their spheres of action and impact, they all have challenged the thinking of people around them in ways that altered their own lives, their industries and the world.

Howard Schultz

It must have looked as if Howard Schultz had lost his mind.

He'd worked his way up from the housing projects of New York, earned a college degree, and risen to the rank of vice president and general manager of Hammarplast's housewares subsidiary, in charge of their U.S. operations. He had an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a good salary, a company car, and vacations in the Hamptons. He left it all behind—for the impossible.

In 1981, Schultz noticed that a small retailer in Seattle was ordering a very large number of drip coffee makers. He traveled across the country to visit Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spices, a tiny company founded ten years earlier by a team of entrepreneurs and coffee aficionados. Starbucks now boasted four stores, selling high-quality dark-roasted coffee beans to a small but growing following of connoisseurs.

Rethinking Coffee

Seattle in 1981 was in decline. Boeing; the city's largest employer, had made massive job cuts. The coffee industry was in its maturity, experiencing bitter price wars and declining quality. It was a commodity business with no proprietary intellectual property. Per capita coffee consumption was down from its 1961 peak of 3.1 cups a day in a slide that would continue until the late 1980s. To many outsiders, it looked like the worst possible time to enter the worst possible industry.

Yet Schultz saw something different—so different that in 1982 he gave up his job and moved 3,000 miles to join Starbucks as head of marketing. As he writes in Pour Your Heart Into It, life is "seeing what other people don't see, and pursuing that vision no matter who tells you not to."¹

A Journey Of Discovery And Intuition

On a business trip to Italy for Starbucks in 1983, Schultz discovered the European espresso bar. His thinking shifted. He saw a model of coffee drinking and community interaction at cafés in Italy that he determined to bring back to the United States.

Starbucks at that time didn't sell brewed coffee; it only sold whole beans and equipment. As Schultz enthused about the prospect of American coffee bars, he found he could not shift the company's focus. The founders were not interested in changing the direction of their profitable and growing business. Schultz got permission to create a small experiment based on this new model, setting up an espresso bar in the corner of a Starbucks store. The experiment was successful, but the founders remained unwilling to change their model. They wanted to remain true to their roots as coffee roasters.

Facing this "adaptive disconnect," Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to take his experiment onto a broader stage. He set up his own business of espresso bars, Il Giornale. Many people said it couldn't be done—it was impossible to change the way Americans viewed coffee. But, as Schultz writes, "No one ever accomplished anything by believing the naysayers." Two years later, his successful business bought Starbucks.

At the time of its initial public offer of stock in 1992, Starbucks had grown to 165 stores. By 2004, the company had nearly 7,500 stores and 75,000 partners (employees), with more than 4.4 billion in sales. The company had posted 142 consecutive months—nearly 12 years—of positive same-store growth. Since going public, this juggernaut has grown at a rate of 20 percent per year with an annual earnings-per-share growth of 20 to 25 percent.

Bridging Adaptive Disconnects

Schultz not only transformed the thinking and actions of the company, he also revitalized a mature industry and changed the habits and perspectives of a generation of coffee drinkers. Most American coffee consumers were buying cans of coffee in the supermarket on the basis of price. Starbucks invested time and energy in educating people to appreciate fine coffee and a complex array of espresso drinks. The key to its success was to create an experience—the Starbucks experience—in its cafés. Gratified customers told others about the experience, and the phenomenon grew by word of mouth.

Building A New Order

Beneath the transformation lay a lot of hard work. To change the American pattern of coffee drinking, Schultz had to rethink everything about the experience, from the design of furniture and stores to the training of baristas. He had to generate a supply of quality coffee large enough to support the enterprise along with a cadre of baristas who could create the coffee experience in city after city. He built a new infrastructure to support and deliver this mental model, giving this process the close attention to detail that was a big part of the company's success. Where other retail companies offered employees minimum wages and no benefits, Starbucks provided stock options and benefits even to part-time workers. While other coffee buyers took advantage of market downturns to cut the prices paid to growers, Starbucks sustained the prices it paid to growers, thus securing their loyalty and ensuring a long-term supply of fine coffees.

As Starbucks grew, Schultz had to continuously challenge his own thinking and conventional Wall Street wisdom, even as he remained true to the company's core values. To move from a small startup to a respected global brand, Schultz declared, the biggest personal challenge was "reinventing yourself." He reinvented himself from a dreamer who saw the possibilities of espresso bars and raised money to realize them, to an entrepreneur who built a successful business, to a professional manager who built a major corporation. He also had to challenge his own thinking about his personal success, leaving good-paying, secure jobs to pursue his passion.

Zooming In And Out

During the 1995 Christmas season, Starbuck's hit a slow spot, and Wall Street complained that the company's leaders had taken their eye off the ball in their pursuit of rapid growth. The company made some short-term operational changes to address investors' concerns but continued to focus on long-term innovations, such as the introduction of ice cream and the forging of a strategic alliance with United Airlines that ultimately helped it emerge even stronger.

Over the years, Starbucks has introduced such innovations as prepaid cards (which grew to 70 million in 2002), sales of games and CDs in its stores, international partnerships and alliances with such firms as Pepsi-Cola, Capitol Records, Barnes & Noble, Nordstrom, and Kraft (for supermarket distribution) to expand its reach. Meanwhile, the company has kept an eye on vital short term performance and operational issues. As Schultz observes, the CEO needs to be both nearsighted and farsighted. In other words, leaders need to be able to zoom out to see the big picture and zoom in to focus on the detail.

Continuous Experimentation And Challenging The Model

As it continued to grow, the company transformed its product line, introducing drinks with both regular and nonfat milk as well as new beverages such as Frappuccinos. While managers have planned systematically and been resolute about protecting the culture and the brand, the pursuit of success and rapid growth has meant transforming their thinking along the way.

"We have been willing to change our minds about things, and as a consequence changed our company," said President and CEO Orin Smith, who joined the firm when the entire operation was supplied by a single coffee roaster in a drafty warehouse. He commented:

The big barriers to growth are often self-imposed. When I came to this company, the big debate was that we are a coffee company. We buy the best coffee in the world and roast it in the best way. If people don't like it, too bad. What is this milk stuff we are putting in the coffee to create lattes? Then it was nonfat milk. Then we had Frappuccino (which now accounts for 20 percent of our business and is the most important innovation we have had). We were never going to franchise because we needed total control over the stores. Today, we are doing third-party licensing. We have been willing to change the things we'll never do, time and time again. We continue to redefine and expand what is the core business.

The company continues to experiment with innovations such as express preordering (tested in 60 stores in the Denver area), breakfast offerings (tested in 20 stores in Seattle), and wireless Internet connections throughout its network of stores in partnership with t-Mobile. Not all of these ventures succeed. A Starbucks furniture store—offering home versions of the furniture in its cafés—died a quiet death. But many experiments have led to new sources of revenue and profit, as well as keeping the brand and the stores fresh.

Stretching Beyond The Possible

Throughout its history, Starbucks set out to do the impossible, and then achieved it. It set stretch objectives. As early as 1993, the company told Wall Street that by the year 2000 it would have 2,000 stores. It was a long shot, but seemed doable. By 2000, the company had already opened 3,000 units—and it just kept going.

As a small upstart, the company set the outrageous goal of building a brand that was as strong as Coca-Cola's. For the past few years Starbucks has been named one of the most respected brands in the world. "We set extraordinarily high expectations that border on the ridiculous," Smith said. "At every step, we set that bar really high and then tried to meet or exceed it."

In your travels around the world or into new domains of thought, what new ideas like Schultz's European espresso bar have you recognized? How can you bring them back home to change the way you approach your work and life? What can you learn from Starbucks about the difficulty and possibility of changing the mental models of people around you? Have you given up on your impossible ideas too soon?

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey began her broadcasting career as an unlikely talk show host. She grew up in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in a house without electricity or indoor plumbing. Her unmarried parents separated soon after her birth, leaving her to be raised by a maternal grandmother. At age six, she moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother. As a child she was sexually abused by male relatives and friends. She ran away and was sent to a juvenile deten­tion home at age 13. This difficult childhood later affected the way she approached her show and the topics she chose for her talk show and her books.

At the age of 14, she went to live with her father, whose guidance and discipline (for example, she went without dinner until she learned five new vocabulary words a day) helped put her on a path to success. She won a college scholarship for her oration and in 1971 was named Miss Black Tennessee. She graduated with a degree in communications and theater from Tennessee State University.

Oprah started broadcasting in college, becoming co-anchor of the evening news of the Nashville CBS affiliate. After graduating, she became reporter and co-anchor for Baltimore's ABC affiliate. She looked so little like what they envisioned as a successful anchor that the station sent her to New York for a beauty makeover. She was told that her hair was too thick, her nose too wide and her chin too big. But she was successful, not by fitting into the mold but by breaking it.

Rethinking The Talk Show

In 1977, Oprah became co-host of the Baltimore is Talking show. Under her leadership it boasted better ratings than Donahue, who had been the reigning king of the format. After seven years in Baltimore, she was hired by ABC's Chicago affiliate, where she became anchor of the failing A.M. Chicago show in 1984. Because the show was doing poorly, she was given free reign to experiment. After she overhauled its contents, A.M. Chicago went from last place in the ratings to rank even with Donahue in just one month and then surged ahead. In September 1985, it was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. In less than a year it became the number one national talk show. She was on her way to a nearly two-decade reign as the Queen of Talk. The Oprah Winfrey Show is seen by about 23 million viewers in more than 100 countries.

Oprah had a very different model for the talk show. While Donahue worked his audience with microphone in hand like a reporter, interviewing for information, Winfrey met the audience as friends. She engaged in a dialog with them that was self-revealing. She told about her own challenges and experiences. Her style appealed to women viewers. She recognized the need for connection with viewers sitting in living rooms in the afternoon. She talked about personal issues, her childhood abuse, her relationship with her partner Stedman (who, like Oprah, is known to viewers by first name). She made a public medium into a private, intimate one—as intimate as several million viewers can become.

In the process, Oprah changed the nature of the talk show, democratizing it, and making it more personal. She adopted a goal to "transform people's lives." She changed the way people thought about talk shows and about their own lives—in effect, challenging their mental models. In her shows and choice of topics for her book club, Winfrey also dealt with difficult issues that were personally important to her. At the same time, she worked to transform the mindsets of viewers and readers, encouraging them to challenge themselves.

Adaptive Experimentation:
Books, Magazines And Other Media

Once Oprah had developed this new, personal view of the talk show and established a loyal group of followers, she could take her audience in new directions. She applied her new view to other areas, challenging the thinking in other industries in ways that sent shockwaves through them. In 1996, she created an onair book club that encouraged millions of viewers to read serious fiction. These were not the kind of books that traditionally became popular successes, so she created a whole new segment of readers.

While book reviews had once been the domain of print publications such as The New York Times, her show represented a new format for discussing books with a very broad audience of viewers. This made Winfrey an arbiter of taste in the publishing industry, where her endorsement could mean an additional half-million or more copies in sales. Within two years she had helped two dozen books onto the best seller lists. Time writer Richard Lacayo remarked:

It's not true that Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was the most important development in the history of literacy. For instance, there was the invention of the written word. Then there was movable type. So Oprah comes in third. But no lower, at least not in the opinion of publishers and booksellers, who binge every month on the demand for whatever title she features on her show.²

She then shook up magazine publishing in April 2000 with the creation of O, The Oprah Magazine, which became the most successful magazine startup in history, rapidly growing to more than two million readers monthly. As periodicals such as Mademoiselle folded in a tough advertising environment, hers continued to grow. While other magazines featured models on the cover, O featured Oprah Winfrey. She extended her personal connection and perspectives to this new channel. She broke the rules of some leading magazine publishers by placing her table of contents on page 2, instead of 22, so readers would not have to wade through countless ads. She also co-founded a cable and Internet company for women, Oxygen Media, in 1998 and created a movie production division that has turned out award-winning films such asTuesdays With Morrie.

Her personal involvement doesn't end with her business activities. She has worked actively on behalf of many charities around the world. Her "Oprah's Angel Network" has raised millions of dollars from viewers to help build schools and aid children throughout the world. She also has been active in promoting legislation related to child abuse and other topics of importance to her.

Bridging Adaptive Disconnects

In developing her book club, Oprah used the popularity of her talk show to bridge the "adaptive disconnects" between her audience and the intimidating world of modern literature. She showed the connections between the themes of these books and the themes that she addressed in her shows. She transformed this rarefied world into something personal, engaging and transformational for her audience. In the process, she was able to serve as a guide or interlocutor to lead millions of viewers into this new territory. This approach had tremendous power in creating a new segment of readers. It changed the way her viewers saw literature and changed the way many writers and publishers looked at their audiences. No longer were they publishing just for reviewers. They were publishing for Winfrey and the readers she represented. Once her audience began to follow her lead, she could take them in many directions because she was a trusted source of advice.

Build A World Order: The Harpo Infrastructure
To Support The Oprah Brand

Winfrey created an infrastructure to support her new model of a personal talk show. While others such as Martha Stewart went public or added their names to diverse products, Winfrey jealously guarded both her name and her growing empire, protecting the brand and her model for her entertainment company—a private company, Harpo, Inc. (Oprah spelled backward). This tight control not only helped to build her personal fortune, but also ensured control over the editorial content of her show, magazine and other projects. She made sure that these projects expressed her own thinking and personality.

The Oprah Winfrey Show won several Emmys for Best Talk Show, and Winfrey was honored as Best Talk Show Host. In 1993, she won the Horatio Alger Award, given to people who overcome adversity to become leaders in their fields. She was named by Time in 1996 as one of America's 25 most influential people. She has also appeared on the Forbes list of the highest-paid entertainers.

Along the way, she has consistently reinvented herself, her industry, and the thinking of her viewers. She brought her mental models to the talk show and transformed it. Her message to her viewers is to challenge themselves as well. She made her viewers aware of the limits of their own mental models and the possibilities in their own lives. As she said during one of her live "Live Your Best" road shows, "If you're open to the possibilities, your life gets grander, bigger, bolder!"³

What are the distinctive experiences of your own childhood and background, and how have they shaped the way you look at the world? What possibilities do your unique mental models allow you to see in the way that Oprah Winfrey saw the opportunity to re-envision the talk show? What new perspectives have you applied in one area that might be carried out to other areas, in the way that Winfrey transferred her personal approach to communication from broadcasting to the book club to magazines?

Andy Grove

Andy Grove, who would become the fourth employee and the driving force of chipmaker Intel, began his life in turbulence. Born in 1936 of Jewish parents in Hungary, he lived through the harrowing times of World War II and the Holocaust. He then lived through the Communist takeover of Hungary and in 1956 fled to the United States at the time of the Hungarian uprising.⁴ After studying chemical engineering and earning a Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1963, he joined the startup Fairchild Semiconductor at the outset of the semiconductor revolution. His very harsh childhood may have shaped his "resolute nature," determination and drive to succeed. The discipline of a deep engineering education provided him with formidable analytical skills, an understanding of the importance of detail, and a bias toward data and its meaning. He continued to build new perspectives on this base as he built Intel into a leading corporation and transformed his own thinking in the process.

Continuous Reinvention And Experimentation

The founding of Intel by Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore forms the starting point for Grove's personal business journey. His initial responsibilities were engineering and production, and he brought a hard-driving focus to operations. Grove was known as the details guy. He was, observes Tim Jackson, the weekly technology columnist for the Financial Times, "brilliantly intelligent and articulate, driven, obsessive, neat, and disciplined." His personal and business experience led him to recognize the importance of impermanence, which led to what he later cultivated as an attitude of "paranoia" and a focus on the dynamics of changing his thinking and transforming the business.⁵

In the late 1970s, as the complexities of the microcomputer revolution took hold, multiple challenges faced Intel. To deal with them, the firm had a formidable set of management talent across many areas, including marketing and design. Its main strength lay in semiconductor manufacturing, a notoriously difficult technology to control. More innovative microprocessor designs began to appear in the market from Motorola and Zilog, and Intel felt the threat. The firm's reaction was the infamous "Operation Crush"—an uncompromising effort to destroy the burgeoning competition. It was quintessential Grove, total paranoia and a focused "no-holds-barred" effort to eliminate the threat. It worked, and Intel went on to dominate the world's microcomputer industry with a market share exceeding 90 percent.

Grove set a pace for continued leadership through experimentation and a planned obsolescence of chip designs, from the x86 series through multiple iterations of Pentium and beyond. This was a courageous path for a market leader, which suffers the most from disruption and cannibalization. But the relentless pace of change in the industry, Grove recognized, meant that either he would obsolete his own products or someone else would. He saw the opportunity to keep advancing chipmaking and creating new value. Intel was able to sustain profits and market leadership by continually moving forward. This model in itself differed radically from the classic one of protecting current technology and advantages. The pursuit of "smaller, faster and cheaper" led to experimentation in leading-edge fields such as nanotechnology. It also led to exploration of applications such as multimedia that would draw upon the added power of the chips.

Changing Horses: The Strategic Inflection Point

The journey of both Intel and Grove, now at the epicenter of both the semiconductor and the microcomputer revolutions, was rife with change and stress. The industry undergoes periodic revolutions that require players to reinvent themselves along the way. The unrelenting progress predicted by "Moore's Law," enunciated by one of Intel's founders, Gordon Moore, required a continuous investment in all aspects of research and production on a staggering scale. Grove had to balance the need for discipline and predictability in the production of devices of ever-increasing complexity against the need to evolve and grow in areas where there was very little previous experience or knowledge.

During the 1980s, Intel made the courageous decision to abandon its core business, that of semiconductor dynamic memory (DRAM), and focus instead on the microcomputer. This decision and Intel's subsequent in microcomputer chips provide a dramatic example of a "strategic inflection point," one of Grove's evolving concepts. He has likened it to "a mental map of the New World," where the territory may be unknown but the need for a shift in thinking and action is recognized. He argues that these points can be found in businesses outside of high technology and even in one's career, where one sees the need to change horses.

In his writing, Grove describes the challenge of determining whether one has reached a true inflection point. Change is often a gradual process, and we normalize small changes until they become more serious. The problem is to detect whether the change we observe is a meaningful signal or just noise. The ideal is to make important changes while the business is still healthy. Often, warning signs are overlooked. Different people, too, can see the same picture and make very different interpretations, which Grove calls "strategic dissonance" and we have referred to as "adaptive disconnects."

Using Paranoia and Cassandras to See Things Differently

Grove encourages the role of Cassandras, prophets of doom, within the business. These doomsayers can give early warning of impending change. They can also suggest new mental models that the business should consider. Grove encourages broad and extensive debate involving multiple levels of management and external perspectives, particularly those of customers. These diverse perspectives help to challenge the current mental model and change it when it needs to be changed. Given the uncertainty of the environment, Grove also argues for experimentation to resolve "strategic dissonance"—such as trying different techniques, products or sales channels.

Intuition

Given Grove's reputation for valuing data and associated analytics, it is extremely interesting how he invokes the role of intuition. He has observed that data is usually about the past, whereas inflection points are about the future. While information and perspectives from customers and Cassandras can help, there is often no straightforward, logical path to the recognition of an inflection point. One must move beyond the rational extrapolation of data, and Grove has compared the leap from one business paradigm to another at these inflection points as going through "the valley of death."

A Two-way Street: Adding Market Perspective to Engineering Through "Intel Inside"

While the technology continuously changes, the marketing of new chips demands continuity. Intel recognized this by developing the Intel Inside campaign to build the brand. Until then, chip making had been primarily a business-to-business (B2B) activity where chips were sold based on performance and price. With rising competition, a recognizable consumer brand had become more important. The branding strategy shifted the chip from a hidden piece of hardware inside the machine to something of value that consumers were willing to pay extra for. The brand advertising was iconic and emotional, without any mention of processor speed or other specs that were typical engineering concerns. This was a shift from a purely engineering view of the world to a marketcentric one.

The increasing brand recognition had its downside, posing a challenge to the thinking of an organization built upon engineering. The difficulty of balancing an engineering and marketing perspective showed up in the so-called floating-point problem in the 1990s. Intel microcomputer chips are hideously complex and carry out a wide range of complex actions, so testing all the possible permutations of use is immensely challenging. Intel had shipped a new product, and errors were detected in using the processors for certain complicated mathematical calculations. This was not surprising, and it affected only a small number of customers. It had been viewed as an engineering problem, but it became instead a major media event, of the sort engendered by defective consumer products, with CNN turning up at Grove's office for comment.

Because of its history and old mental models, Intel initially handled this problem the same old way—as an engineering problem. It did not recognize that its world was now radically different. Grove ultimately grasped the situation and initiated a consumer-style product recall, even though in most instances it was probably unnecessary. This cost Intel around 500 million, but preserved the company's reputation in the market. Grove later recounted the lesson this episode taught—that Intel needed to look at things in different ways than they had traditionally. The business could no longer be approached from an engineering perspective alone. Consumer perceptions were increasingly important, even though the "old order" of an engineering mindset continued to influence thinking in the company.

Grove and Intel have been phenomenally successful by consistently challenging their mental models and the models of their industry.

What are the "strategic inflection points" in your own business and life? How do you recognize them before it is too late? When you reach such a point, will you have the courage to give up your current mental model to embrace a new one, in the way that Grove shifted from DRAM chips to PC chips? Do you have the fortitude to cannibalize your current business to continue to shape the models of the future?

Conclusions

Each of these profiles demonstrates the power of impossible thinking. Howard Schultz, Oprah Winfrey and Andy Grove were told at various points along the way that what they were trying to do was impossible. Yet they were able to embrace a different view of the world. For Schultz, it was the vision of an American espresso bar, for Winfrey it was an intimate talk-show format focused on the personal transformation of the audience, and for Grove it was a continuous evolution of the company and industry across discontinuous "inflection points." The stories of their successes reinforce some of the key messages of the book:

• Recognizing the influence of childhood, education and early work in shaping their mental models. These innovators drew upon their childhood and early career experiences to develop a distinctive world view. Schultz used his concern for workers developed while growing up in the housing projects as well as his experience in sales and his exposure to the coffee knowledge of the company's founders. Winfrey drew upon the themes of a difficult childhood and the transformation of her own life in re-creating the talk show. Groves drew perspectives from the chaos of war in Europe as well as his engineering education to combine hard-driving precision with a "paranoid" commitment to change. Each was able to leverage the distinctive perspectives arising from their early experiences, which some might have seen as a liability, as a platform for challenging the current view of their companies, their industries and the world. Part of their power was in tapping the perspectives of their personal lives and applying them to their business initiatives and to making changes in the broader society. What unique perspectives have you have gained through your life and career experience that you can apply to current challenges in work, life and society? How can you use the parts of your experience that you might have thought of as failures or hardships to take a fresh view of these challenges?
• Keeping their models relevant. Even though they used their early experiences as a starting point to challenge current models of those around them, these innovators did not become fixed in their views. All three were committed to seeking out fresh perspectives and continuing to challenge the status quo. This allowed their organizations to continue to grow and helped them avoid the one-hit-wonder syndrome of a great idea that becomes calcified. They continued to experiment with fresh ideas. Starbucks experimented with global expansion, new channels such as supermarkets and new products in its stores. Winfrey stretched from her success in broadcasting to books, magazines and the Internet. Grove preserved the engineering genius of Intel with constant product innovations, even while embracing the foreign territory of marketing. Their models were not fixed and static. They were vibrant and alive, which allowed them to sustain growth and success long after their original model might have become mature or entered decline without this attention to renewal. How are you challenging your current mental models? What are you doing to experiment to keep them fresh and relevant?
• Making things happen by transforming the world around them. Many people have radical ideas and perspectives on the world that amount to nothing. These three individuals have had a major impact on our world because they not only challenged existing models but were able to bring many other people along with them on this journey. They paid attention to the infrastructure needed to support the new order—from Star-bucks' network of well-paid and trained baristas and coffee suppliers, to Winfrey's tightly controlled operating company, to Grove's initiatives in engineering, manufacturing and marketing. People who a decade ago had never heard of an espresso drink now find themselves ordering a "venti Caramel Macchiato" without a second thought. Television viewers who had never read a work of serious fiction are led by Oprah Winfrey into this new territory. Computer buyers who know nothing about hard drives and processing speed are looking for the "Intel Inside" symbol or thinking about how to speed up multimedia applications. These three leaders not only came up with a new way of seeing things, but they were able to change the way we look at the world and how we act. They reframed the dialog in a way that had broad repercussions across our society. To do this they addressed very hard operational and human issues, overcoming obstacles and converting the doubters. They built organizations to support their views of the world and created reinforcing infrastructures. They engaged in the difficult process of changing the minds of people around them, first in their own organizations and then in the broader world. All of this was what Edison referred to as the 99 percent perspiration that must support a dash of inspiration to comprise genius. This sweat and attention to operational details separates the radical thought from the transformational idea. How can you get others to see and follow your new way of thinking? What combination of education and supporting infrastructure is needed to allow you to go from thinking the impossible to doing the impossible? How do you retain the humility to change your own thinking in the process?
• Acting quickly and effectively. These three individuals were not afraid to act. While they continued to learn, challenge and change their models, they often acted on their own intuition against the advice of advisors. Schultz drove forward with his intuition about his espresso bar against the opposition of the Starbucks founders. Winfrey resisted attempts to make over her image and render her more mainstream, maintaining faith in the power of her distinctive view of the world. Grove was able to make the gutsy move out of DRAMs, abandoning the source of Intel's past success, to bet the company on the microcomputer chip business on the other side of this inflection point. Do you tap into your intuition in making decisions? How do you ensure that you intuition is still valid in the current environment?

These three profiles demonstrate the power of challenging the current model. Stories of this kind are easy to tell with hindsight, but very much harder to live with foresight. Thinking impossible thoughts and acting upon them takes great courage and perseverance. As these stories have shown, new mental models can have tremendous transformational power for the individuals who champion them, their companies and the world.

Endnotes

1. Schultz, Howard. Pour Your Heart Into It, New York: Hyperion, 1997, p. 44.

2. Lacayo, Richard. "Oprah Turns the Page," Time, 15 April 2002, p. 63.

3. Sellers, Patricia. "The Business of Being Oprah," Fortune, 1 April 2002.

4. Jackson, Tim. Inside Intel: The Story of Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Chip Company, Dutton, 1997; Grove, Andrew S. High Output Management, Vintage Books, 1985.

5. Grove, Andrew S. Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company, New York: Doubleday, 1999.