'Be reasonable!' How many times have you heard that in your life? How many times have you said it yourself? If those admonitions have any meaning at all, why should you do the opposite? For most occasions, being reasonable -- acting in the way most people expect -- is the right thing to do. But not always.
And thank goodness. This wouldn't be much of a book to read if the subject itself was so unreasonable as not to be worthy of serious consideration. Yet the idea is so important that you must take it very seriously if you are committed to making your business take off from wherever it is right now.
What do you do when the reasonable thing -- the expected thing - isn't working the way you planned? What do you do when the reasonable thing -- the way you and your peers were taught to behave -isn't getting the results you'd hoped for? What do you do when the things that have worked so well in the past - things that, in fact, are still working - just aren't working well enough?
By now you should have figured this out: you become unreasonable. Occasionally you come across an individual who acts in a brash, creative, counterintuitive way, and does it all the time. As a consequence, people like this produce some pretty striking results day after day. But this doesn't describe most people, and it may not describe you.
Most of us act in ways that are acceptable and predictable. We respond within certain boundaries and limitations. WE respond reasonably. And most of the time this is OK because reasonable behavior gets us pretty good results. But there are times that call for something beyond OK. They call for a stronger response, a different response - perhaps a response that's so unusual that everything we generally know about getting things done falls short. That's when you need to be unreasonable.
When Things Go Well, We Don't Question
When things are going well, we don't question our everyday actions. Why should we? What we're doing is making our business hum along just as fine as we'd like.
Consider that American car industry, circa 1970. It had a reasonable formula that had worked quite well. Not only Americans, but prospectus car buyers around the world wanted larger and faster cars, and American manufacturers were able to churn them out year after year. They kept buyers buying with lots of model variations, ample chrome trim, and occasional new technology like headlights that dimmed themselves and automatic retracting seat belts, producing sufficient profits year after year to keep shareholders happy. Nobody really worried about foreign car manufacturers that were turning out undersized, underpowered, and no-frills cars - distinctly un-American cars.
Then came the first oil crisis in 1973, and Americans suddenly stopped buying leviathan cars because they couldn't afford the fuel. Japanese cars started grabbing all the headlines; these once marginal producers began stealing market share form General Motors and Ford. They even bankrupted Chrysler.
When things go well, we don't question the accepted wisdom. Americans like large cars. Our recent history reconfirms this, but all it takes is a sharp change in outside circumstances for the reasonable to become unreasonable, and ice versa. All of a sudden, small cars, even tiny cars like the original Honda Civic-first introduced in 1972, ahead of the oil crisis (were the Japanese clairvoyant?) - caused a run on the market, completely reversing 50 years of car-size inflation. This about-face contradicted every-thing that the entire industry had been raised to expect, and it caught the American manufacturers completely by surprise. How could this happen? Because when things go well, we don't question. We just do what is expected and what has worked for so long.
Let's roll the clock forward a few decades and consider the energy business. Some big energy producers are thinking about the future, and others are -- ell, we're not sure. The years 2005 and 2006 were banner years for the oil-producing giant Exxon Mobil. When things are going well, most companies don't want to rock their own boat. In late 2005, on the heels of a record $10 billion in quarterly profits, Exxon Mobil announced that it had no plans to invest any of those earnings in developing alternative or renewable energy.
"We're an oil and gas company. In times past, when we tried to get into other businesses, we didn't do it well. We'd rather reinvest in what we know," said Exxon spokesman Dave Gardner at the time. Of course, this makes sense, and it's very reasonable, except in the context of an explosive Middle Eastern political climate and a dwindling and increasingly expensive resource.
Compare that to another giant oil company, Chevron. Chevron is thinking seriously about the time when the oil wells will run dry, and it is making plans to produce energy in other ways. This is pretty unreasonable thinking for a company that currently produces most, if not all, of its income from petroleum extraction, refining, and distribution. Chevron is examining a variety of advanced energy technologies and is funding clean energy research.
Chevron's experiments range from the some-what conventional (squeezing more energy out of feedstocks like coal and tar sands) to more radical approaches like fuel from biomass, hydrogen, and even nanotechnology. Chevron's chief technology officers, Don Paul, unreasonably believes that rather than finding more stored energy to mine form the ground, molecular engineering - literally rearranging the sequence of atoms and molecules -- is the key to the global energy future.
Whether or not he's ultimately right about this particular approach, the point is that he's thinking along unreasonable lines. While traditional producers like Exxon Mobil see the future through rose-colored glasses and are happily embracing the status quo, former "oil companies" like Chevron, Shell, and Great Britain's BP are conferring what must happen if they are to continue to provide energy in a world of rapidly changing political, economic, and environmental conditions. They've chosen to break with their own very successful traditions and find a way rather than stick their heads in the sand and hope that things don't change too much.
It's difficult to consciously break with the status quo, and it appears that the larger and more entrenched a business is, the harder it is for that business to take actions that are counter to a thought framework grounded in a strong-but possibly false -- sense of well-being.
IBM dominated the market for large computers so well and for so long, with each year brining new meaning to the word big. There was just no way that this company would embrace the possibility of small computers. Big was reasonable. Centralized was the only right way to look at things. That point of view controlled not only the company's product philosophy, but also its manufacturing, its selling process, and its own internal corporate structure. This was clearly a case of what's good for the goose serves the gander equally well.
The 1970s trend toward departmental computing, championed by companies like Digital Equipment and Data General, did little to impact IBM's "bigger is better" philosophy; the goliath's response was mostly to make big computers smaller. When microcomputers started to gain inroads, IBM's response was typical. First it tried to marginalize PCs. It kept the products on the sidelines and sold them via separate channels.
It tried to preserve its traditional mainframe business instead of realizing that it's "big iron" game was ending and that it was only a matter of time. Had IBM taken the point of view that small computer power could grow and would do so dramatically, it could have led the PC revolution instead of ceding the bulk of the profits to other companies such as Intel, Compaq, and Microsoft.
In the end, IBM was forced to shift its entire business into the services sector, shutting down or selling off various parts of its hardware manufacturing capability. It is when things cease to go well that we are forced to switch gears and look for solutions in unreasonable places. If only we could get ahead of the curve instead.
Excerpted from:
Be Unreasonable by Paul Lemberg.
Copyright 2007 by Paul Lemberg. Price: Rs 295. Reprinted by permission of Tata McGraw Hill Publishing Company Limited. All rights reserved.
Lemberg is chief business accelerator and CEO of Quantum Growth Consulting. He has worked with Accenture, Adobe, American Skandia, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, IBM, OpenText and hundreds of other companies.
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