If you think about it, postal carriers should be a little bit creepy. If someone told you that an agent of the federal government would come to your house everyday with access to information about places you shop, businesses you transact with and people you know well enough to trade holiday cards with, it might cause you some alarm.
Yet we don’t find postal carriers creepy. In fact, despite vigorous efforts to malign the Postal Service, we trust it far more than most institutions. The truth is that we don’t conjure up conspiracy theories to explain the everyday and mundane, but some far off yonder which we cannot clearly designate, yet find threatening nonetheless.
The function conspiracy theories play is to explain things that we don’t understand and feel out of our control. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the age of Covid has spawned a myriad of crazy, dangerous notions. What we need to come to terms with is that the real problem plaguing society is a basic lack of trust and that is where the battle for truth must be fought.
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I was working on Wall Street in 1995 when the Netscape IPO hit like a bombshell. It was the first big Internet stock and, although originally priced at $14 per share, it opened at double that amount and quickly zoomed to $75. By the end of the day, it had settled back at $58.25 and, just like that, a tiny company with no profits was worth $2.9 billion.
It seemed crazy, but economists soon explained that certain conditions, such as negligible marginal costs and network effects, would lead to “winner take all markets” and increasing returns to investment. Venture capitalists who bet on this logic would, in many cases, become rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Yet as Charles Duhigg explained in The New Yorker, things have gone awry. Investors who preach prudence are deemed to be not “founder friendly” and cut out of deals. Evidence suggests that the billions wantonly plowed into massive failures like WeWork and Quibi are crowding out productive investments. Silicon Valley is becoming a ticking time bomb.
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When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of the first things he did was develop a marketing campaign to rebrand the ailing enterprise. Leveraging IBM’s long running “Think” campaign, Apple urged its customers to “Think Different.” The TV spots began, “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes…”
Yet Jobs actual product strategy did exactly the opposite. While other technology companies jammed as many features into their products as they could to impress the techies and the digerati, Jobs focused on making his products so ridiculously easy to use that they were accessible to everyone. Apple became the brand people would buy for their mothers.
The truth is that while people like the idea of being different, real change is always built on common ground. Differentiation builds devotion among adherents, but to bring new people in, you need to make an idea accessible and that means focusing on values that you share with outsiders, rather than those that stir the passions of insiders. That’s how you win.
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In 1929, just before the stock market crash, Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld, sold their department store in Newark to R.H. Macy and Company for $25 million ($343 million in 2015 dollars). Grateful to the people of Newark for their support, they planned to endow a medical college in that city.
Things didn’t turn out that way. They were convinced by Abraham Flexner to create the Institute for Advanced Study instead, and to build it in Princeton. It would soon be the home of Albert Einstein and would become a beacon for scientists fleeing Europe, who would prove critical to winning the war and making America a technological superpower.
What always struck me about the story is that the Bambergers achieved their greatest impact not through greater knowledge or accomplishment, but humility. They could have stuck to their initial plan, but because they were willing to see its flaws and support another’s dream, they were able to change the world. We rarely understand the full impact of our actions.
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In 1891, Dr. William Coley had an unusual idea. Inspired by an obscure case, in which a man who had contracted a severe infection was cured of cancer, the young doctor purposely infected a tumor on his patient’s neck with a heavy dose of bacteria. Miraculously, the tumor vanished and the patient remained cancer free even five years later.
You would think that such an accomplishment would be hailed as a breakthrough, but much like Ignaz Semmelweis a half century before, Coley’s work was met with skepticism. In fact, it would take over 100 years, until the first drug was approved in 2011, for immunotherapy to become widely accepted by the medical community.
This is far more common than you would think. We tend to think that if we get an idea right, that others will recognize its worth. That’s hardly ever true. In fact, if your idea is truly new and different, you can expect to encounter stiff resistance. Success or failure depends less on the actual value of an idea than h0w you overcome resistance and scale to impact.
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Some years ago, I wrote an article in Harvard Business Review about stock buybacks, which were being pilloried at the time. Many people thought that companies were spending too much money to gin up their stock price when they could be investing those funds into innovation, making better products and creating new markets.
Yet I pointed out that things weren’t as they seemed. As Clayton Christensen had showed around the same time, there was a superabundance of capital (in response to the financial crisis, central banks had been flooding markets with money) and corporations had more money than they could profitably invest.
I also suspected, although the evidence was scant at the time, that the extra money was going to Silicon Valley startups, which seemed to me to be less potentially problematic, especially when the public sector was being woefully underfunded at the same time. Today, we can see the results and they aren’t pretty. Without constructive constraints, even good ideas go bad.
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In 1973, in the wake of the Arab defeat in the Yom Kippur war with Israel, OPEC instituted an oil embargo on America and its allies. The immediate effects of the crisis was a surge in gas prices and a recession in the west. The ripple effects, however, were far more complex and played out over decades.
The rise in oil prices brought much needed hard currency to the Soviet Union, prolonging its existence and setting the stage for its later demise. The American auto industry, with its passion for big, gas guzzling cars, lost ground to the emergent. The new consciousness of conservation led to the establishment of the Department of Energy.
Today the Covid-19 crisis has given a shock to the system and we’re at a similar inflection point. The most immediate effects have been economic recession and the rapid adoption of digital tools, such as video conferencing. Over the next decade or so, however, the short-term impacts will combine with other more longstanding trends to reshape technology and society.
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2020 was a year to be endured more than to be lived. The Covid-19 pandemic arrived as a curiosity, then a panic, extended into tragedy of genuine loss and, hopefully, is emerging as a set of concrete problems to be solved. Clearly, we are not through the worst yet, but at least we can begin to see the other side.
At first, like most people, I was unaware of anything afoot, besides the emergence of longstanding trends I was already tracking. Slowly, however, I began to realize that 2020 was going to be something very different, an inflection point. Yet one thing I’ve learned about crises is that, eventually, they end and, even in the darkest moments, we need to learn and prepare for what comes after.
As I was going through Google Analytics to determine which were my most popular posts for 2020, I noticed a chronological story emerging. So this year, I’m listing my top posts not in order of popularity, but roughly chronologically. My hope is that by laying bare how I tried to make sense of the events of 2020, you are able to glean some small glimmer of insight.
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It’s interesting how often books seem to reflect the zeitgeist, or at least our perception of it. As I prepared this year’s list, I began looking through earlier versions and was struck by how each seemed a remnant from a different age. Undoubtedly, some of that is a product of my own curation, but I do feel that books tap into important undercurrents.
I wrote some years ago that 2020 was shaping up to be a pivotal year, although I had no idea the extent to which it would be. I think it’s safe to say that we all got more than we bargained for. This year has tested us, individually and as a society, in ways we couldn’t have imagined and, in many ways, we fell short.
So looking at this year’s list, I am heartened to see that so many books point the way forward to a new, more promising era in which we begin to solve some of the problems that have been lingering for so long. It seems to me that we are starting to come out on the other side, but there’s a lot of work to do. I hope some of these books help you make some sense of it.
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Change isn’t what it used to be. Where earlier generations had leaders like Gandhi, King and Mandela, today’s change efforts seem rudderless. Movements like #Occupy, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo hold marches replete with strident calls for change, but they never seem to get anywhere. Lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Many believe that if only these movements had more charismatic leaders or more inspiring oratory they would be able to gain more traction. Others say that society has become too corrupt and our politics too coarse to make change happen. They want to blow the system up, not work within it.
The truth is that leadership has little to do with fancy speeches or clever slogans. The notion that today’s call for change face greater opposition than the British Raj, Jim Crow or Apartheid is simply laughable. In researching my book, Cascades, however, I found that, despite important differences, transformational leaders had these four things in common.
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