Page 200 - The Resilient Organization

186 Part Four: Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience

A SOCIAL MOVEMENT AS A RESPONSE
TO AT&T’S PROBLEMS

AT&T was hobbled by institutionalized behavior that prevented it from
changing and that the ODDsters represented a genuine social movement
promoting transformation. To see a strategy as appropriate because it is
the same as that of other firms in its industry is common in institutional-
ized organizational fields (Scott & Meyer, 1991), but it is inconsistent with
success in competitive fields where many firms doing the same thing
quickly turn a profitable product into a commodity (Porter, 1980).
AT&T’s planning resembled systems described in Grant (2003), who notes
that they help firms adapt to turbulence but rarely support nonincremental
innovation.
The response of Blonder, Muller, and their associates embodied each of
the elements of McAdam and Snow’s (1997) definition of a social move-
ment: “(1) collective or joint action; (2) change-oriented goals; (3) some
degree of organization; (4) some degree of temporal continuity; (5) some
extra-institutional collective action.” (We say the work represented extra-
institutional action because it violated both official rules that defined
ODD’s tasks and informal understandings of what scientists and other
low-level professionals did at AT&T.)
For survival, this movement required support inside AT&T’s domi-
nant coalition. Senior executives could have fired participants.
However, there was good reason for many to support or tolerate the
ODDsters’ work. Though they had not created the means to address
them, many senior executives did recognize that the company faced
huge challenges. ODDsters, coming from Bell Labs, were given leeway
to think about them.

ODD’S STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

By 1997 ODD was making significant contributions. In May executives of
AT&T’s $26-billion-a-year consumer business asked ODD to help them
develop a new strategy. The result called for migrating AT&T home users
to AT&T Wireless as the sale of stand-alone long-distance became less