Page 155 - The Resilient Organization

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

online discussion forum, and it fed them with provocative ideas that were
disseminated through workshops, social events, and thoughtful seminars.

BORROWED TIME CALLS FOR STRATEGIC IMAGINATION

In many respects, ODD was living on borrowed time, and the ODDsters
knew it. When you believe passionately in your ideas and sense that time is
short, you find creative ways to promote them. To this end, ODDsters
developed strategic infection points (SIPs)—points in the organizational
process at which they could introduce new strategic perspectives.
A SIP might be a neglected internal newsletter, ripe for hijacking by an
undercover heretic who’d “like to help out” in its production and eventu-
ally wrest editorial control. Or a SIP might be a draft copy of an official cor-
porate strategy document. After managing to commandeer a draft of the
CSP’s 1997 AT&T Strategy and Business Planning, ODD issued a much-
revised version of the document. The “new” version got a lot more atten-
tion than any of the earlier editions had, and the CEO even requested that
copies be circulated to the board.
But the best SIPs were often human rather than paper based. Indeed,
ODD used a term especially for the human kind: empty suits. Empty suits
were up-and-coming executives who needed ideas and had no problem
adopting those of others. Because ODDsters cared more for the wider inter-
est of AT&T’s survival than for the narrower interest of gaining credit for
their ideas, this relationship with the empty suits worked well. ODD would
judge the success of its hijacking of empty suits by listening to whether its
ideas (and ODD vocabulary) were making headway in the organization. A
success meant that an ODD-initiated idea was claimed by an empty suit and
introduced as his or her own in an executive, or even investor, meeting. A
few empty suits quickly learned to ride a part of their career on the ODD
idea. It was impact—not credit—ODD wanted. SIPs and empty suits are
just a couple of examples of the unusual approaches and rich vocabulary
conceived by ODD.

Not so long ago, a disaffected employee in one of America’s largest
companies caught up with me at a conference where I was speaking.
In his hands was the company’s glossy new performance assessment