Page 202 - The Resilient Organization

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

The departures, especially Blonder’s, put ODD in a vulnerable position
just when it was achieving success that might have led to real power.
Neither the head of the labs’ research division nor the head of the corpo-
rate strategy and planning department supported ODD’s work. The
research division head who had approved the creation of ODD had left
AT&T soon afterward. His replacement opposed general distribution of
ODD analyses.
Competition destroyed long-distance telephone service as a business,
and few other AT&T businesses succeeded. When SBC took over years
later, the company operated under the AT&T name but with a completely
different leadership from the firm where ODD had operated. The problems
that ODD had recognized had destroyed AT&T as an independent
corporation.

DISSIPATED POTENTIAL FOR REAL SUCCESS?

All the data suggest that ODD’s campaign had potential for creating real
ability to innovate. ODD moved strategic thinking in AT&T toward much
better cognitive management. It involved the company’s best experts in
important strategic analysis and brought about careful examination of
scenarios. It opened the organization to intelligent consideration of new
ideas and the creation of credible new strategies for business units that had
not had them. Within two years of its founding, it was surprising itself with
its influence at the highest levels of the firm. Though opposition proved
powerful, ODD clearly had potential to conceive strategic actions if not
change them in ways that could have transformed its performance.
However, the case also shows the difficulties of achieving strategic
transformation through a social movement. ODD spawned opposition not
only from managers who had reason to fear loss of their power but from
the new head of Bell Labs who took for granted the existing system.
Equally important, the ODD movement suffered from difficulties likely to
plague social movements of all kinds, including a lack of sophistication
about political management. As mavericks, its members were inexperi-
enced in or unwilling to deal with hierarchical power. They failed to plan