How (21 page)

It also strikes me that, as individual a sport as golf is, Toms does not separate his personal success from the larger world in which he exists. He sees himself connected and responsible not just to himself and his self-interest, but to his family, his fans, his fellow competitors, and even to the young person just learning the sport who might be struggling with the easy temptation to cut a few corners and ignore a few putts. He knows that, in a transparent world, everything you do is on the record and stays with you throughout your career. Toms seems to understand innately that his public and private behavior are inseparable, and that to live any other way is to set up the conditions for dissonance to thrive. That internal calm he believes so essential to the constitution of winners is nothing less than consonance, the ability to act in harmony with oneself. Dissonance creates internal tensions that others can sense and, like the free flow of information in a transparent society, those tensions cannot be fully masked or controlled. He stands as a living example that external congruence flows from internal consonance.

Altogether, David Toms seems to crave something more than success, something more than just winning tournaments. He strives each day to fill the synapses between him and all the others in his personal stadium with trust, integrity, and consonance in order to be
significant
in the eyes of those who watch and are influenced by his actions, and it is this pursuit of significance that guides his journey through life.

KEEPING YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME

We all face choices every day like David Toms does, several times a day. To build long-term sustained success we too must learn to take the paths that reduce distraction and dissonance and keep our interpersonal synapses clear. Rules keepers are not always there and the rules don’t always keep us clear. We can seek our advisors and mentors, and they can guide us, but at the end of the day, we are all metaphorically left in that lonely hotel room late at night, with nothing but ourselves to depend on to do the right thing. It is there that we must seek consonance between the various voices in our heads, be guided by those that help us, and turn away from those that pull our heads out of the game. The guidance we need in that moment is not circumstantial (what can I do now?) but rather foundational (what do I believe?), and that foundational knowledge flows from values, connection, and the pursuit of something larger than immediate success.

The ability to keep your head in the game is closely married to the ability to get your HOWs right, to build strong synapses between yourself and others, and to keep them clear and unpolluted in everything you do. If the challenge of living in a connected world requires us to make strong connections with others, we can only do so if we first accept the challenge of making strong connections within ourselves.

Part III

HOW WE BEHAVE

INTRODUCTION: HOW WE DO WHAT WE DO

A friend of mine since law school, David Ellen, is the senior vice president and general counsel for cable, telecommunications, and programming at Cablevision Systems Corporation, a leading telecommunications and entertainment company. In 2005, David and I had a conversation about what LRN was doing and, subsequent to that conversation, I prepared and sent him a personalized packet of information about the solutions I thought might support Cablevision’s journey, including the card of one of our sales executives responsible for David’s area. In mid-2006, Cablevision hired a new senior vice president of corporate compliance, Adam Rosman, to establish and develop a new compliance initiative. In the course of getting the lay of the land, Adam reached out to David. “David had good things to say about the company in general,” Adam said when the three of us got together to recount this story, “and he was candid and up-front about his relationship with Dov.”
¹
During their conversation, David reflected on the work we were doing at LRN, and he gave Adam the packet I had sent him the year before.

On David’s recommendation, Adam called me and left a message with my temporary assistant, which for some reason I never got. “When I got no response, I thought it reflected poorly on the company,” Adam said, leaving no doubt that he thought something quite a bit stronger. Nonetheless, he was impressed by the materials I had put together specifically for them, and there was David’s recommendation, so he took a second step and left a message for the rep listed on the business card in the packet. “No one in their right mind would do this,” Adam said. “Without David’s additional recommendation, I probably wouldn’t have made the second call.” Lots of people want Cablevision’s business, and Adam is used to getting his calls returned.

But again, no one called back. In the intervening time between when I had sent David those materials and Adam called the second time, the sales executive had left the company. Through a technical glitch, his voicemailbox had never closed and forwarded (another example of the ways technology both connects us and keeps us apart).

A few months later, David bumped into Adam, and asked in passing what had come of his conversations with us. Much to his surprise, Adam told him that, despite leaving a couple of messages, he had never received a return call and that, frankly, he was surprised. “It was inconceivable to me,” David said. “It was totally out of character. I told Adam, ‘Something must be wrong. That’s not Dov. You should give them another chance.’ ”
²
The force of David’s reaction impressed Adam. A couple of weeks later, he found himself at a conference with Chris Kartchner, one of my colleagues at LRN. Because of David’s comment, he approached Chris and told him the story. “He was mortified,” Adam said. “A couple of days later, he followed up and explained that they had discovered the unreturned voicemail message sitting in the dead mailbox. He took my ribbing on the subject in good stride.”

When I found out, I immediately called David and apologized. Adam Rosman had basically written off LRN when his call was not returned, and I don’t blame him. How strange it must have seemed to be ignored and disrespected by a company whose business it was to help others get their HOWs right. Although my initial conversation with David Ellen had started a Wave of interest that Adam’s original call perpetuated, our oversights stopped it dead. We didn’t get our HOWs right.

Any possible collaboration between us could have ended right there, but there were a few powerful forces at work in this small, but common, interaction. The first was the reputation and trust I had built with David over the years. He knew that I placed the highest premium on getting my HOWs right. That reputation bought us a second chance. “It was not the ordinary benefit of the doubt you extend to companies,” David told me. “In the ordinary course of things, you make a call or two and you move on. Too many people want our business to waste time with those who don’t seem to.” The second force lay in David’s HOWs with Adam. He was transparent about our prior relationship when he first recommended us to Adam as a company he should definitely meet with, and equally forceful about that fact in his immediate response after learning of our failings. Adam could sense that David truly believed we were a company for Cablevision to know more about. The third force, of course, was Adam’s perseverance and thoroughness in his search for the right company to assist Cablevision.

When Adam met Chris at that conference, he was impressed with the way Chris immediately owned the situation, discovered the miscommunication, and made it clear that it was out of character with what we believed in as a company. Chris was able to restore the reputation that had been damaged. In the ensuing months, Cablevision conducted a selection process during which they gave us full and honest consideration on the merits of what we had to offer. In the end, they selected one of our competitors that they felt better met their current needs. But I believe that we built a strong and trusting relationship, and as their needs evolve, I believe our dialogue will continue.

A small moment. A technical glitch. In a hyperconnected world, where the Expectation of Response factor is almost instant, such small moments can mean the difference between sustained, ongoing success and looking for your next job. Me to David, David to Adam, Adam back to David, Adam to Chris: To thrive in business today, these are the sorts of interpersonal synapses that we must seek to strengthen and extend. This is the sort of Wave that we need to make every day. Ours continues because, despite the “wardrobe malfunction” that almost killed it, our synapses were filled with some powerful forces.

Frameworks of understanding begin in the mind, in the actual chemical processes that fill the synapses between the active neurons in our brains, in the way we choose to see events and interactions, and in the language we choose to craft our thoughts. As we begin to see the connections and connectedness of the world around us in the light of HOW, we begin to look for ways to act on those connections, to affect them in powerful and productive ways. This part looks at the HOWs of behavior, the ways of conducting ourselves in an internetworked world: transparency, trust, and reputation.

CHAPTER
7

Doing Transparency

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

—Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

F
or years, the bicycling community considered the locks made by Kryptonite, now a division of Ingersoll Rand, the gold standard in bicycle security. In 2001,
Bicycling
magazine made its New York 3000 lock an editor’s choice, saying, “The company that invented the U-lock just never quits raising the bar on theft prevention. . . . if you want peace of mind when securing your pride and joy this is about as good as it gets.”
¹
Kryptonite confidently marketed the U-shaped devices as “tough locks for a tough world.”
²
Then, in 2004, Chris Brennen came along.

Brennen, a 25-year-old cycling enthusiast, regularly posted to a small online bulletin board for fellow bike nuts, and on September 12 he posted a small notice claiming that Kryptonite’s famously impenetrable locks could be opened by anyone with a 10-cent BIC pen and a few seconds to spare.
³
Fourteen hours after Brennen’s initial post, another user posted video using Brennen’s instructions to demonstrate how quickly and easily he could compromise Kryptonite’s star product. The impact was astonishing. Details of the product failure crossed the globe within hours. Within two days of Brennen’s first posting, more than 11,000 people had visited the discussion thread and 40,000 had downloaded the video. Early on in the crisis, concerned forum users contacted Kryptonite’s public relations manager to alert the company to this critical product failure; Kryptonite had built terrific customer loyalty over the years, and these lock owners wanted to help Kryptonite to protect their bicycles before savvy thieves caught on. What did Kryptonite do? Not much. It was, after all, just a bunch of online nuts. But other online forums linked to the posts, and bloggers trumpeted the failure loudly. After a week, the numbers jumped to 340,000 views and three million downloads.
⁴
Worse, the
Boston Globe
,
New York Times
, and Associated Press grabbed the story and nearly instantly transformed what years ago might have been a quiet-but-manageable embarrassment into a multimillion-dollar hit to Kryptonite’s reputation. By the time Kryptonite developed its definitive response 10 days later, it was in the midst of one of the first large-scale, Internet-spawned public relations (PR) disasters on record. Their entire brand promise, years of work, lay in ruins.

Patricia Swann, assistant professor of public relations at Utica College, studies this phenomenon, known as
issue contagion
, and published a paper on the Kryptonite debacle. “Kryptonite’s decision not to respond provided the bike forum’s posters even more motivation, as the fear grew that the company would ignore their concerns unless many people complained,” Swann said. “The Internet has totally changed the rules of the game. You used to get a couple of days, or at least 24 hours, to prepare a response to something like this. Now, it goes everywhere, fast like wildfire. You have no control of the story.”
⁵

The mass-media society of the twentieth century was built on a discursive, top-down model of communication. Information flowed through centralized channels and was easily dammed and harnessed. As Swann suggested, you had time to control the story. Powerful organizations, powerful societies, and powerful people were built on this vertical information structure. Now, consider the following, an eloquent summation of the world as we now know it, reported in May 2006 by Kevin Kelly in the
New York Times Magazine
: