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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
A counterintuitive approach to fostering greater innovation, collaboration, and engagement Most of us assume our success relies on a network of friends and close contacts. But innovative thinking requires a steady stream of fresh ideas and new possibilities, which strangers are more likely to introduce. Our survival instincts naturally cause us to look upon strangers with suspicion and distrust, but in The Necessity of Strangers, Alan Gregerman offers the provocative idea that engaging with strangers is an opportunity, not a threat, and that engaging with the right strangers is essential to unlocking our real potential. The Necessity of Strangers reveals how strangers challenge us to think differently about ourselves and the problems we face. * Shows how strangers can help us innovate better, get the most out of each other, and achieve genuine collaboration * Presents principles for developing a "stranger-centric" mindset to develop new markets and stronger customer relationships, leverage the full potential of partnerships, and become more effective leaders * Includes practical guidance and a toolkit for being more open, creating new ideas that matter, finding the right strangers in all walks of life, and tapping the real brilliance in yourself To stay competitive, you and your business need access to more new ideas, insights, and perspectives than ever before. The Necessity of Strangers offers an essential guide to discovering the most exciting opportunities you haven't met yet.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Part One: Frameworks
Chapter One: Necessity
The Necessity of Strangers
Where Strangers Matter
The Value and Limits of Friends
The Limits of Business as Usual
Chapter Two: Aversion
The Race to the South Pole
The Real Challenge of People Who Are Different
What Science Tells Us
Chapter Three: Mindset
The Importance of Mindset
Closed and Open Mindsets
Testing Your Mindset
From Mindset to Guiding Principles
Changing Our Behavior
Part Two: Practice
Chapter Four: Innovation
Helicopters, Hairstyles, and Cars that Won't Collide
From 3M to 3-D and Beyond
Finding the Right Strangers
Chapter Five: People
Brilliance in Our Midst
Recognizing the Genius in Everyone
The Wonder of New Hires
Rethinking Employee Engagement
Strangers in the Workplace
Everyone Matters
Chapter Six: Collaboration
Why Collaborate?
Size Matters—but It Doesn't Have To
Cubicles, Questions, and Nicknames
Reimagining Mergers and Acquisitions
Chapter Seven: Customers
The New World of Customers
On the Front Line with Strangers
Understanding and Empowering Strangers
Strangers Provide Guidance
Strangers Make Offerings Possible
Chapter Eight: Leadership
The Promise of Strangers
Two Essential Questions
Changing the Game
Fostering Cultures of Conversation and Engagement
A Few Notes about Learning
Part Three: Possibilities
Chapter Nine: The Power of Travel
Getting Past the First Bite
The Quiet Car
Daring to Explore
Epilogue: Taking the First Step
Toolkit
Additional Resources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
More from Wiley
Index
“The Necessity of Strangers bothered me in a good way, making me realize how much time I spend with people who are, quite frankly, a lot like me. Dr. Gregerman's book is not only thought-provoking, but very logical. After reading it I made deliberate changes to meet and learn from strangers.”
—Joseph (Jody) Giles, chief information officer, Under Armour
“The Necessity of Strangers provides compelling examples and tools to look, listen, and learn from the world around us in order to create amazing opportunities and results. Alan Gregerman challenges us to think in new ways about how individuals and organizations can learn and grow.”
—Kimo Kippen, chief learning officer, Hilton Worldwide
“The solution to the world's most difficult issues will be found at the intersection of disciplines, not inside disciplines. In The Necessity of Strangers, Alan provides powerful insight and practical tools to accelerate this essential mashing of ideas.”
—Ellen Glover, executive vice president, ICF International
“In a reality that is constantly changing, and where tomorrow's ordinary is today's unthinkable, The Necessity of Strangers challenges and encourages us to take advantage of encounters with strangers. It's a humanistic approach and a vision that clearly appeals to me, tied to my belief in international business. Just playing it safe will never lead to success.”
—Jan Fager, managing director, Swedish Marketing Federation
“Alan Gregerman stops you in your tracks and forces you to re-examine your behavior and ways of thinking. A wonderful and inviting read, punctuated by practical, well-founded insights, The Necessity of Strangers shows how to lead organizations that explore, connect, innovate, and grow.”
—Amr ElSawy, president and CEO, Noblis
“Everyone looking to expand their creativity, create innovation, and improve service in the workplace will benefit from reading Alan Gregerman's insightful book.”
—John Dillon, senior vice president, Morgan Stanley
“The world is changing! The Necessity of Strangers is a must-read to ensure that you are maximizing all of your relationships.”
—Ed Fuller, author, You Can't Lead with Your Feet on the Desk, and former president and managing director, Marriott International Lodging
“The Necessity of Strangers will open your mind to the importance of meeting strangers and enchant you with the marvelous things that come out of these encounters. Alan Gregerman's unique gift is his ability to teach all of us how to make this happen routinely as a key to business success.”
—Charbel Tagher, CEO, Specified Technologies Inc.
Cover design: Adrian Morgan
Cover art: © Thinkstock
Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gregerman, Alan S.
The necessity of strangers: the intriguing truth about insight, innovation, and success/Alan Gregerman. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-46130-3 (hardback), 978-1-118-53459-5 (pdf), 978-1-118-53455-7 (epub)
1. Creative ability. 2. Inspiration. 3. Technological innovations. I. Title.
BF408.G673 2013
650.1—dc23
2013020945
Preface
If you were asked to make a list of the most important reasons why leading companies and organizations are so successful, what would you come up with? If you are like many people, including leading business thinkers like Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, and Tom Peters, you would probably say that it has a lot to do with having
Visionary and effective leadershipA clear and compelling purpose and strategyGreat offerings tied to a powerful and unique value propositionThe right peopleReal teamwork and collaborationThe right knowledgeA keen focus on the needs of customersA bit of luckYou might also add award-winning quality to the mix, along with the right systems and processes, and cutting-edge or at least the most appropriate technology. If you had been exposed to enough TV commercials and ads for UPS, the giant parcel delivery company, you might even include logistics—the glue that holds everything together. And if I were to ask you about the most important reasons why some people are so successful in their personal, social, and civic lives, you and many experts would probably come up with a relatively similar list. But you probably wouldn't include strangers. And why should you include people you have never met before and are not likely to go out of your way to meet? It's hard enough to get important things done by ourselves or with the help of people we know, understand, and trust, without having to worry about involving people we simply don't know. So strangers rarely figure in our thinking about business or personal success.
Now I'm here to tell you that they should. Or, better yet, to lead you on a journey to discover why strangers are the real key to our growth as individuals, companies, and organizations; to help you understand why they are our best secret weapon or greatest competitive advantage in the battle to innovate, create, and deliver greater value, and make a powerful difference in whatever we choose to do; to convince you, or have you convince yourself, that you will never reach your full potential—or even come close—by simply hanging out with the people you know or, more specifically, people who are a lot like you.
You just won't.
Not that friends, relatives, and colleagues aren't very important. Not that there is anything wrong with people who are a lot like you. They're just not enough. And in some ways they aren't helpful at all.
Your ability to engage, learn from, and collaborate with strangers who are very different from you—in terms of what they know and how they approach the world—is the real key to creating the remarkable breakthroughs that you are capable of, growing the enterprises you were meant to grow, finding and delighting the new customers you were meant to serve, and making the most of your own life. The exciting news is that you have the ability to unlock the real potential in strangers and the real potential in yourself, and all it will take is a sense of curiosity, a spirit of openness, a willingness to connect, and a pair of comfortable shoes.
Keep reading, and I will show you how to make it happen in clear, practical, and hopefully inspiring ways.
The Necessity of Strangers is organized into three parts. In the first part we'll look closely at the promise of strangers, the reasons for our innate aversion to them, and the keys to creating a more open mindset.
In Part Two we'll explore the five important areas of business and life in which strangers are essential to greater success:
Then, in the third part, I'll provide a set of tools that you can use today to unlock the power of strangers in your work and life, and I'll show you how travel to places near and far can be the spark to greater openness, possibilities, and success.
So thank you for being here and being open to the possibility that all of us and the companies and organizations we work in can become even more remarkable than we ever imagined by becoming more open to the ideas, insights, perspectives, and magic of strangers.
Alan Gregerman
Silver Spring, Maryland
2013
Part One
Frameworks
One
Necessity
It is better to walk than to curse the road.
— African proverb
On a beautiful fall morning in 2006, a walk to the school bus with our daughter Carly—who was nine at the time—would challenge my thinking about life and the real keys to personal and business success. It was a walk that my wife or I made almost every school day, but on this particular morning, Carly and I would pass someone we'd never seen in our neighborhood before—a middle-aged gentleman who looked more than slightly disheveled, somewhat distraught, and, from my overly protective parental perspective, potentially dangerous. So once we were out of listening distance, I turned to Carly and said: “You know sweetheart, Mamma and Papa won't always be able to walk you to the school bus. So we'd like you to promise us that when you are walking by yourself you won't talk to strangers.” It seemed like an important and necessary thing to say, especially at that moment. And it was something my parents had told me when I was Carly's age at a time when the world was a whole lot safer.
Yet I could never have imagined her response as she looked up at me and said: “But Papa, if I don't talk to strangers, how will I ever make new friends? And how will I ever learn new things?”
Her simple words would quickly challenge me to recall all of the “strangers” who had changed my life in some meaningful way.
Like Mrs. Marshall, my kind and encouraging kindergarten teacher at Heights Elementary School in Sharon, Massachusetts. She would set the tone for my love of learning from the moment we met by letting me know that it was perfectly okay to be a slow reader and by teaching me the importance of getting along with other people, even when they were exceedingly different—in other words, girls.
Or like Bill Ihlanfeldt, dean of admissions at Northwestern University in the 1970s. After interviewing me over a bowl of buffalo stew at Tommy's Joynt in San Francisco, he would send me a handwritten acceptance letter to a college that was clearly a stretch for a young man who was working as a subway mechanic, volunteering at a nursing home, and spending a lot more time playing basketball and repairing his car than studying to retake the SATs. Bill would end up checking my transcripts every quarter for four years and following up with handwritten notes of encouragement that continued unabated until I graduated summa cum laude—forcing me to learn the meaning of these three words and, as a result, double my knowledge of Latin.
Or my very first customers at GTE (now part of Verizon), First Union Bank (now part of Wells Fargo), and the NutraSweet Company. They would take a big chance on my brand-new business and our unique ideas for unlocking the genius and innovation in all of their people at a time when they could have chosen the “safer” path of working with a much larger and more established partner. I'm proud and humbled to report that each would say they made a wise business decision.
Or Lisa Otterström, my wife of twenty-three years, who—wearing an unusual wool sweater she had made by hand—opened her door to a stranger on a blind date with the kindest smile I had ever seen. I would quickly discover that she was one in a million and that her love of life and dedication to making a real difference in the lives of others were simply irresistible.
Or Dr. Louis Kanda, a renowned cardiac surgeon who, in the summer of 1994, would use his considerable skill and even greater humanity to reconstruct my heart, correcting a major defect that threatened my life. It's hard to imagine that this doctor from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), who trained in Washington, Cleveland, and Paris, would not only come into my life but also be the only person to literally hold my heart in his hands.
Or all of the other teachers, mentors, colleagues, customers, and partners—all of whom were once strangers—who have helped me to think in new ways about the practice of business and how companies and organizations can innovate and grow by unlocking the real genius in all of their people.
Or scores of other people throughout history and today whom I've never met, who continually sparked my curiosity about people, places, ideas, inventions, and a world filled with limitless possibilities.
The Necessity of Strangers
In an important way, practically all of my best ideas are built on the ideas and insights of others who were at one time strangers. So you might say that I am keen on the importance, or should I say the necessity, of strangers and their powerful role in our lives and our success as individuals, companies, and organizations. I would even venture to guess that you might also be surprised by the powerful impact that strangers have had on your life and work. You might enjoy taking a moment or two to start your own list of important strangers as a simple way to give even greater personal meaning to the necessity of strangers in your own life. It is an idea that runs counter to the way that most of us, and most of our companies and organizations, think and act.
We live in a world filled with strangers and also in a world where most of us have been conditioned to fear or at least avoid people we don't know or understand. People whom we see as different from us in any number of ways and who can seem, by our own quick assessment, to pose a threat. Strangers we pass on the street or sit next to—sometimes uncomfortably—on the bus or the subway, or at a local restaurant or movie theater. The strangers who come to work every single day in the very same companies and organizations that we do—whom we stand next to in the elevator, pass in the hall, meet at the coffee pot or break room, or see at the holiday party. Strangers in other companies and organizations we might someday choose to work in or possibly collaborate with. Strangers who live just around the corner or halfway around the world whom we learn about in books, in magazines, online, on milk cartons, or on the radio or the nightly news. These strangers, whom we quickly choose to ignore or form an opinion about, are the people who force us out of our comfort zones and challenge us to question the knowledge, beliefs, and habits we hold dear. Most of us assume that strangers are a problem rather than a remarkable opportunity to learn, grow, and reach our full potential. It is a view that translates to our belief that the people we know best are the real keys to our success as companies, organizations, and individuals.
But what if this isn't the case? What if strangers are actually, in many ways, more important than friends? More important to our growth as individuals, more essential to the success of our companies and organizations, and more critical to the prosperity of our nations and the stability of the world we share with seven billion other strangers? And what if in order to succeed in anything worth doing we must engage, learn from, and collaborate with people we don't know, in new and compelling ways?
It may seem counterintuitive that strangers are to be embraced rather than ignored or avoided, but they are a necessity—precisely because of their differences and what they know that we don't know; their objectivity and ability to be open and honest with us about the things that really matter; and their capacity to challenge us to think very differently about ourselves, the problems we face, and the nature of what is possible. Finding and engaging the right strangers has the power to make all of us more complete, compelling, innovative, and successful.
In fact, this premise is at the heart of my consulting work with leading companies and organizations in the United States and around the world that strive to innovate, grow, connect with customers in new and more meaningful ways, and bring out the brilliance in all their people.
It's work for which I have created the following shorthand:
Explore. Connect. Innovate. Grow.
These four simple words express not only my experience over the past twenty-five years, but also my optimistic bias that we can do more remarkable things in our work and personal lives if we are open to exploring the world around us, connecting with the right people and ideas, turning those connections and ideas into conversations and then innovations that matter, and using those innovations as the catalyst for business and personal growth.
And it is an idea that I am passionate about sharing.
Where Strangers Matter
It turns out that in most areas critical to business and personal success, our ability to engage and learn from strangers is vital. This includes all five of the areas we'll delve into in Part Two, the first of which is innovation and the challenge of bringing the right new ideas to market. As we will discover in Chapter Four, real innovation and most important new ideas occur when we make connections and put together insight from strangers in other industries, places, and walks of life. As the poet Robert Frost once said: “An idea is a feat of association.” It also includes the critical area of people. As we will see in Chapter Five, companies and organizations can reach their potential only by hiring and fully engaging the right strangers who will challenge them to reach beyond the way that things have always been done. And it includes uncovering the hidden promise of real collaboration. In Chapter Six we will show how bringing strangers together can unlock all of the know-how in our enterprises. We'll also show how companies and organizations can use mergers and acquisitions as a way to become more remarkable rather than simply bigger. In Chapter Seven we will see how the most astute businesses are creating powerful relationships with the strangers we call customers and why this is likely to be the wave of the future. In Chapter Eight, we will think about the implications for leading in a world filled with strangers. Then finally, in Chapter Nine, we will think about the importance of travel—to places near and far—and its power to break down the barriers that separate people and limit possibilities.
In each of these areas so essential to business, organizational, and personal success, strangers are a necessity, and our ability to engage the right strangers in the right ways will determine whether or not we ever reach our full potential.
I'm not simply suggesting that it is important to engage people from other cultures, countries, races, genders, or religions, although of course that is true. One of our biggest challenges as individuals and organizations is being open to and learning from people who may speak the same language as us but who think and act with very different meaning—people from other disciplines, from other walks of life, and with distinctly different personalities from ours, some of whom we might already work with. People who have different training, different expertise, and a different approach to looking at the world.
Here are a set of common challenges that underscore the real potential of strangers in our companies, organizations, and personal lives. Take a moment to look at these questions and then think about how often they come up in the place where you work and how strangers might be part of their solution.
These questions are all about the future of business and success in a world in which all of us can—and, quite frankly, must—have access to more new ideas, insights, perspectives, and relationships than ever before. A world filled with more customers, competitors, and potential colleagues and collaborators than we ever imagined. And a world that is also filled with more personal, business, economic, and political challenges and opportunities than we can comprehend. Success in this world requires new, better, and much more open and collaborative thinking and action that includes strangers.
But if left to our own devices, we probably wouldn't turn to strangers. So let's put a bit of context around the role of friends and strangers in our success.
The Value and Limits of Friends
If you ask people to identify who matters most to their success, most people are likely to give you a very quick response—friends, of course, our closest connections in the world other than our immediate family. And for many people, friendships are their most important relationships—which is not surprising given the changing, more mobile nature of society and the reality that many of us no longer live in close proximity to our extended families. And that even assumes that we like and get along with most of our relatives. I'm often reminded by friends who have issues with their families that “you don't get to choose your family, but you do get to choose your friends,” which suggests the outsize importance that we place on them.
And, at one level, I don't disagree. Our closest friends are the folks we are most likely to confide in, hang out with, party with, learn with, and grow with; the folks we feel most comfortable bouncing ideas off of; the folks we know will be there for us in good times and tough times. We ask them for guidance when we need a second opinion or to confirm our judgments when we don't feel up to facing something on our own. They've even been immortalized in one of the most popular TV shows in history, Friends —a show about six quirky friends going through life together in New York City. And though they weren't exactly like all of us, their less-than-settled world and less-than-settled relationships struck a sympathetic chord with viewers around the world, who enthusiastically and loyally viewed every episode for ten years (and who continue to view it in syndication).
We've also been taught to believe that friends are the real keys to our success—a teaching that can be summed up by the common notion that “it's not what you know but whom you know.” Clearly, we believe as a society (and most societies around the world share this belief) that friends—especially friends in high places—are our greatest personal and professional assets. As a result, we work very hard to go to the right colleges, to live in the right neighborhoods, to work for the right companies and organizations, and to build the right circle or networks of friends. Although friends are important, their value is somewhat misunderstood and decidedly too limiting in two vital respects. First, most of us just don't have enough friends or a diverse enough set of them to give us the breadth of insight and perspectives we need to continually stretch our thinking and to grow. And second, the exact reasons why we count on friends are the same reasons that their input may not be ideal for our efforts to stretch and grow.
The Numbers Limit
To put the first concern in perspective, let's spend a moment thinking about our friends “by the numbers,” and let's assume that we're all average—that is, right smack in the middle of the statistical bell curve. Now I know that very few people like to think of themselves as average, and, if you can keep a secret, I'm certainly assuming that readers of this book are way above the norm. I might even conjecture that you are similar in your profile to the residents of Lake Wobegon—the fictional Minnesota town in Garrison Keillor's popular radio show A Prairie Home Companion —“where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” But if we are average—or, using the measure of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, if we're simply human—we are likely to have about 150 friends.1 That's 150 other people with whom we can have a meaningful relationship based on some “personal connection and a level of trust and commitment.”
Dunbar would argue that we fit a pattern along with all other primates. It's a pattern that dates back to our earliest ancestors as they hunted for game and gathered nuts and berries. These folks tended to live in villages or communities of roughly 150 people—which, according to his research, turned out to be a manageable number for living and surviving together. In earlier times it was a pretty darn significant number of people to count on and learn from. After all, there weren't that many people around, or at least not that many people we could gain access to. And there wasn't that much knowledge floating around. So if we were lucky, our group of 150 “friends” contained some very clever and very handy people. People who knew how to hunt, forage, find water, make warm clothes that wouldn't give them a rash, and make a mean guacamole, and who ideally knew how to build a perfect fire.
However, in a world that today has over seven billion people, your 150 friends constitute an incredibly small percentage of the total population.
In other words, when challenged to think about and solve a pressing problem or create a new opportunity, as awesome people with an average number of friends, we're not playing with anything that approaches a full deck. And though our friends are a reasonable starting point to a broader world filled primarily with strangers, relying on friends is remarkably limiting, even if you count among your friends some of the world's leading authorities on the issues at hand.
But let's increase the number by adding in more casualacquaintances—the rest of your Facebook friends and/or your LinkedIn contacts. That should make your number quite a bit larger—maybe up to five hundred people or more—and though you don't have a lot of face time with these folks, it's reasonable to think that some might come in handy at some point in the future for reasons that seem obvious and other reasons that are less obvious but are at the heart of this book. Yet even if your “new and improved” number is five hundred or a thousand friends, it pales in significance to the number of folks that you could know, learn from, and collaborate or innovate with. The seven billion–plus just mentioned. And that doesn't include the folks who are no longer here who may have left ideas and insights to share.
So if we do the math once again, our fraction of the people we could know or connect to is dramatically higher (that is, almost seven times higher) but only slightly more impressive.
That's the percentage of people on earth that one well-connected person is likely to know. So relying on our circle of friends is quite limiting. Now I can hear some of you saying that your network of 1,000 LinkedIn contacts puts you only two calls away from 13,743,301 other people, and that's certainly enough folks to have as resources in the battle for truth, justice, innovation, and greater success. And that's not a bad point at all, assuming of course that you could figure out which of these folks to reach out to—especially the ones who are very different from you—and which of your friends could begin the process by opening the first door.
The Similarity Limit
This leads us to the second limitation of our friends, because the biggest challenge isn't that we don't know very many people or that we don't know very many people that well. The biggest challenge is that the people we do know well are probably a lot like us—especially our closest friends, who are a small but very influential subset of the 150. Most of them are likely to have a very similar educational background to ours, a similar socioeconomic position, similar interests, similar views about the things that we consider important, and even a similar type of job. They may have even had a relatively similar upbringing in a relatively similar community. And, according to Bill Bishop in his book The Big Sort, they have probably settled into a relatively similar way of life in either our community or another community just like ours.2 More interestingly, they are likely to see the world in a somewhat similar way and share many or most of the beliefs about living that we hold dear.
That doesn't mean that they will necessarily root for the same teams, listen to the same music, have the same hobbies, or enjoy the same foods, but in the most essential aspects of life they are a lot more like us than different from us. And, most important, they are likely to think like us, which makes them less than perfect when it comes to questioning our thinking, pushing our understanding, stirring the pot, and helping us to do new and better things. Sure, they're encouraging, but sometimes that means agreeing with us even when they shouldn't—when we'd be better served by a divergent opinion. In fact, they're typically programmed to agree with us, to see things the same way we do, and to be content with the things we are content with—whether it's because they actually do agree or because they are disinclined to undermine our plans or risk our friendship. And in our Facebook world, no one wants to be “unfriended.”
All of which means that they are likely to agree with us way more often than they disagree.
Now, most of us have at least a few very eclectic friends that we are quick to point to in order to show our open-mindedness. And some of them will see the world very differently than we do and may be more likely to speak their minds when they disagree with us. But generally we tend to feel most comfortable hanging out with people who think like we do. It's simply human nature.
The Limits of Business as Usual
In the world of business, conformity is even more pronounced. Companies and organizations typically hire people with whom they “connect,” who will fit in and get with the program, and who won't shake things up too much. Sure, we say we want to hire very different people who will bring in new ideas and perspectives, but the reality is quite the opposite. When push comes to shove, we seek out people with easily understood degrees from well-regarded colleges and universities, people with easily understood resumes and apparently successful work experiences in the things we need to get done, and people with similar backgrounds, personalities, and worldviews that will fit easily into the department and the culture we've worked hard to build.
But business and organizational success requires us to be different in ways that really matter to the customers, colleagues, and shareholders we serve. The companies and organizations that don't change are severely penalized. And even businesses that create major breakthroughs must figure out what comes next more quickly. Remember how impressed you were with Blockbuster, the video rental company? They helped to reinvent the world of home entertainment by building convenient retail stores where we could easily find all the latest movies and games. At their peak, in 2004, they had over nine thousand stores and revenues of almost $6 billion.3 Yet somehow they got stuck in their own best thinking and couldn't reinvent their business model fast enough to meet the challenge of Netflix—a company that changed the game and made Blockbuster's stores obsolete by quickly mailing videos directly to customers. By the beginning of 2011, Netflix had over twenty-six million subscribers and seemed to be on top of the video world. But less than a year later the game was changing again and, after a few major customer relationship blunders, the smartest people at Netflix were trying to figure out how to survive in a cable TV and internet-based world dominated by digital streaming. A world where customers had an ever-growing number of choices for content, how they received it, and how they used it.
And that's just one example of an industry turned upside down by change and an unwillingness to be open to the ideas of strangers. The same thing is happening to books, appliances, education, music, car buying, professional services, fundraising, real estate, political campaigns, and every other field in which we can drive knowledge and connect with people using technology and the power of our social networks. Social networks that are increasingly made up of strangers. This suggests that all of us, and all of the companies and organizations we work for, must continually do things in new ways just to keep up; that there is now a premium on continually being different in ways that are more valuable to customers; and that being different requires us to welcome very different people, ideas, and points of view.
What we should believe is that “it's not whom you know but whom you could know” that determines our success. In a small, fast-changing, and increasingly competitive world, friends and familiar colleagues simply aren't enough. Sure, we need them because they are in many ways an essential part of the equation in enabling us to do the basics well, and they are critical to our personal well-being and sense of sanity and security. But they are not going to get us all the way to where we need to go. We don't know enough, and neither do they.
The exciting news is that we now have the ability to reach out and connect with literally anyone else on the planet, including people with very different backgrounds, sets of knowledge, and perspectives on how to get important things done, and different pieces of the puzzles we are trying to solve—or totally different puzzles that could change our world. It is a prospect that wasn't nearly as easy even ten years ago. But now, when faced with a challenge or an opportunity that matters, we don't need to think about only what we know or whom we know. Instead, we can imagine what we would like to know and find the people who know it. That is a remarkably liberating proposition and a great equalizer for businesses and organizations of all sizes, because in today's world of networks and potential connections, the companies, organizations, and individuals that make exploration and openness part of their DNA have a better chance to win.
And that's where the real power of strangers can change the equation.
So now imagine this new paradigm:
But first, we have to overcome our aversion to people we don't know, armed with a strong belief that they really do matter. And that means understanding more clearly why we tend to avoid, dismiss, and even fear strangers. Then we have to figure out how to create a new habit of openness, engagement, and embracing possibilities.
Notes
1. Robin Dunbar, How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
2. Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
3. Securities and Exchange Commission, September 20, 2004, filing by Blockbuster, Inc.
Two
Aversion
Civilization is the encouragement of differences.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Let's go back to my walk to the bus stop with our daughter Carly and a moment in time when my aversion to strangers, disguised as fatherly instinct, got the better of me. After all, most of us have been conditioned to believe that strangers are dangerous—through books, movies, the media, the cautionary guidance of family and friends, and even our own humanity. Maybe we're simply wired to fear or avoid strangers through some combination of nurture and nature. We even have a phrase, “stranger danger,” that is part of our collective vocabulary and highlights the reality that there are
