Page 149 - The Resilient Organization

136 Part Three: Step 2. Building Resilience into the Organization

by Greg Blonder, an MIT and Harvard–educated physicist who directed
AT&T’s Customer Expectations Research Laboratory and also served as
AT&T’s chief technology advisor. ODD’s mission—at least, its nominal
mission—was to help AT&T make smart choices in the allocation of its
enormous research and development budget. For most of its 100-plus year
history, AT&T, through its famed Bell Labs, and by virtue of its monopoly
status, had dictated the technological future of networks. But with new com-
petition and disruptive technologies looming, AT&T Bell Labs was no longer
in charge. It was time for a forward-looking view of technology strategy—one
that recognized the existence of other players in the new world.
As Blonder diplomatically framed his proposal, the corporate strategy
and planning department (CSP)—which held exclusive responsibility for
3
corporate strategy —might benefit from ODD’s ambition to understand the
longer-term future of technology and its implications for AT&T’s business.
In addition, ODD would develop tools and content for strategy making,
introduce a more scientific basis to the strategy-making process, and serve
as a listening post for technology developments outside AT&T. Blonder’s
pitch was persuasive. In February 1995, with a budget of $2 million, ODD
opened for business.
The ODDsters had a higher agenda that exceeded a focus on the strate-
gic implications of technology development. Their real mission was to chal-
lenge the status quo in order for AT&T to realize its potential as a viable
competitor in the telecommunications industry. Above all, ODD hoped to
accelerate the corporate recognition of what the group felt was an increas-
ingly uncertain and challenging future by raising the quality of the strategic
dialogue, by increasing the range of strategy-making tools available, and by
making the strategic issues more widely and deeply felt. In ODD’s view,
AT&T—an incumbent exmonopolist—had become complacent. There was
an urgent need to acknowledge reality. Was AT&T, with its communica-
tions technology, talent, and assets, going to direct the future of the new age
of communications?
AT&T’s strategy in the predivestiture years was focused on incremental
growth in market share, and each year’s “strategy” simply reflected the
arithmetic of annual growth targets. What AT&T was doing defines the
essence of a nonstrategy; it amounted to a linear extrapolation of the past
growth curves and did not even begin to address the uncertainties around