Tony Athos

In Search
of Slack

Pressed to distinguish between Dick Pascale's approach and Tony Athos', I keep coming up with the theological terms gnostic and agnostic.

A gnostic believes that enlightenment can be attained by mastering selected disciplines -- magic, yoga, asceticism, talking in tongues. The gnostic arts delight in subtlety and "I know something you don't know."

An agnostic believes the opposite -- that if something is true, it should be apparent to anyone, without initiation rites or any of that mumbo jumbo.

Pascale and his theory of being remind me of the old gnostic disciplines. Indeed, you can picture him as a Shaolin master in the old Kung Fu monastery flashbacks, lecturing the young monks ("grasshoppers") on the paradoxes of the world.

Whereas Tony Athos is just there. He stood before The Masters Forum and announced he was following Pascale's injunction to manage from the future. What he was managing, he said, was his own old age and death.

Athos had recently turned 60, and he saw the passage as an opportunity to get his affairs in order. Most Americans say 60 isn't old, he said. In fact, most Americans won't let you even use the word old unchallenged.

"I told my friends, 'You're out of your mind. I don't do anything like I used to. I am old.' "

His family asked if he would like a testimonial dinner to mark the milestone. People could take turns saying how great he was. That idea horrified him, but he promised to give the idea some thought. He finally decided that what he really

wanted was to spend some time by himself. He rented a furnished room in San Francisco and for two months he just sat and walked and read and thought.

"Somehow in that two months I stopped being middle aged and started being old," he said. "Finally I started to feel the presence of death around me. When I saw what it was, I was relieved. My life changed dramatically."

In America, said Tony Athos, if you can manage to look at your own death, you can create a life to live until you get there.

So instead of feeling depressed, he felt oddly jubilant. He could say what you never, ever hear CEO types saying: "I am going to die." Instead of coming right out and saying that, we tend to couch the thought in subjunctive cushioning: "In the event I should
die . . . "

"Aren't executives wonderful?" Athos asked. "'If I should die' -- as if it were debatable. It's very funny, but you can't laugh at them or you will hurt their feelings."

Luxury liners

Athos was in full ramble mode now. "When I was young the idea of the corporation was a cross between a nation-state and a luxury liner. Each corporation was a law unto itself. The trick was getting invited aboard.

"If you got an invitation you told people you were offered a 'position,' and that was a big deal, a free ride for life. If you wore a white shirt and a tie and avoided conflict you could count on a tiresome but peaceable life aboard the liner."

And you had to keep your nose clean. That was very important, Athos said, though why you would want your nose any other way was a mystery to him. It meant, don't rock the boat.

Don't make anyone uncomfortable by proposing change. This despite the fact that it was far from a perfect boat. Racism and anti-Semitism were givens. The Depression itself left a lengthy scar on the public psyche.

But if you could just be invited aboard! If you could just get a berth on the corporate boat. A position. A job. Once you had that, life was smooth sailing. Athos' generation rode the biggest economic wave in the history of humankind.

But it was all a lie. There was no ship, really. A corporation wasn't a ship. It wasn't a metaphor, it was just a "legal thing," and a fragile one at that. The position or job you thought you held you really had no hold on at all. It too was a fiction, and the untruthfulness of it all was brought crushingly home when the economic pleasure cruise hit the doldrums of the 1970s and 1980s.

These were the "discontinuities" Pascale had just talked about. Global competition. Wage and price pressures. Hungry pirates climbing the rigging of the corporate liner.

Swapping metaphors

American corporations sought desperately to find ways to explain the new realities away. Since metaphor had always worked before, they turned to metaphor again. The corporation wasn't an ocean liner; it was a "family." Remember Delta Airlines' ad campaign in the early 1980s? "The Delta Family."

The problem was that corporations were even less like families than they were like ocean liners. Unless you were in a family accustomed to frequent restructuring, downsizing, and hostile takeovers. Well, maybe corporations are like families.

Tony Athos likes his metaphors to be apt. Inept ones are a turn-off. "Cyberspace -- I can't take that at all. It means that there is some actual or virtual place where computers take you. Don't you believe it. Cyber is no more space than a corporation is a liner."

Reengineering is another metaphor that bugs him. It seems to suggest that process review is the equivalent of time and motion studies for managers.

"The reengineering phrase I hear all the time is lean and mean, lean and mean. It makes me think of those storefront aerobic exercise parlors that I see in San Francisco. People in there are working out like crazy. There's not an ounce of body fat in the whole room. If that's what lean and mean means, it worries me, because the look I see on those people's faces is kind of crazy."

Athos even took a mini-whack at Pascale. "Even transformation can be carried too far. If companies feel the need to make massive changes, fine. A little transformation is necessary every now and then. But executives should bear in mind that that much change is terrifying."

He says he has had CEOs say to him, "If I had known before that I would be putting the organization through that much pain, I wouldn't have done it."

On the other hand, they then say, "But -- I guess I'm glad we did it." Athos looks at it this way: Even if you didn't succeed in transforming your organization utterly, you still probably got it to change in a lot of little ways. Even when you fail at something, you still get a lot done. Maybe instead of thinking success/failure, which we tend to do -- we either/or everything in American life -- what we might say is, "Let's see how much we can get done."

While the audience pondered that one, Athos shifted the topic back to his incipient old age. Then he paid homage to Pascale's idea of "managing from the future" in a uniquely personal way.

"I decided to manage my old age as if I was now what I'm going to become. What would my old age be like if I designed it instead of inheriting it? What would it mean to be old on your own terms? I set out to find out."

The ultimate paradigm shift

At this point, I suspect that many of us in the audience were in a state of disbelief. Here was a fellow who we expected would speak incisively about organizational something, but was instead confiding to us his plans for retirement and death.

Think of it as a paradigm shift. Athos was illustrating that a person can change his way of thinking (his way of being) on a matter very close to him (his life) by discarding the metaphors, prejudices, and habits of thought that hinder optimization. Like Thoreau in an earlier time, Tony Athos is conducting an experiment not just in living but in being. His message is the same: Simplify, simplify.

One of the ways to simplify is to look for the hidden meanings of things. What are the stories, the truths that create the meanings of an organization? he asked. What does an organization really care about?

He recalled how, when he began teaching at Harvard after teaching at Southern Cal, he asked a colleague if it would be OK to have a research assistant lecture on a substitute basis while he did some consulting work, as had been the practice at USC. The colleague replied, "Here at Harvard we lecture class even if our leg is broken. If your leg is broken, feel free to bring it with you."

Again nodding at Pascale's work, Athos suggested we use conflict to achieve our ends, instead of squelching it. "Mine conflict for creativity," he said. Some people do this well, perhaps because they come from large families where noise is the rule. Athos confessed his was the sort of family where, if you raised your voice, the result was assassination.

A shortage of slack

The freedom to disagree is a blessing too precious to repress. People in the workplace today are so driven and so busy and so scared, that unless they are allowed to express themselves, all that stress hardens into anxiety. "Lots of people get absolutely zero slack on the job," he said. "People need a little slack."

After 30 years of thinking about management, Athos thought the best manager he had come across was still his sister. ""She raised nine children. So on Thanksgivings, which were always at her house, she would have eight whole families visiting. The kitchen was huge, but the dining room was small. She would put the food on the table and people would have to mill around, buffet style, filling their plates. It was an impossible situation, really -- you couldn't get around the table. I asked my sister once if there wasn't a better solution. She said to me, 'You're interested in the meal. I'm interested in the family.' It stopped me cold."

Sometimes Athos thinks that all the business concepts and organizational fashions should be set aside, and managers should consider a simple truth: that too many managers are poor fathers, and not enough are good mothers. A poor father is demanding, cold, and often absent. A good mother is forgiving, encouraging, and always there for you.

We need to be both good mothers and good fathers, he said. The good mother says, "I hope you never injure yourself or others but if you do I will love you anyway. The good father says, "I trust you to become the equal of all other persons."

"My father," Athos said, "expected me to be superior to as many people as possible." He says he knows men who have not made a single friend since college.

The world is getting to be a colder and harder place, he said. People are told to work harder, take more responsibility for themselves, endure more conflict and stress, undergo (as at Pascale's insistence) enormous culture shock. Companies drive their people to the limit. People burn out -- literally, to Athos' way of thinking. Without slack we literally burn out the connections in our brains that make us limber and creative.

Desiderata

Some random observations about future management opportunities:

"We need new titles to deal with the changing world. I would like to see a vice president for rewards. This is not the same as compensation. This is someone who sees to it that people are acknowledged when they do good work. People need to be seen. Someone must know what they did.

"I'd like to see the position of vice president for learning. This is not the same as training. Organizations have no idea how to create conditions where people can learn.

"There should be someone who helps create teams and assigns people to them. We should be thinking about what kinds of minds people have, and who they will work together well with.

"We also need someone to help people leave the organization and then return to it. That's the way it is nowadays -- corporations are porous. People move in and out, and this often creates problems."

At one point Athos asked if members were setting aside enough money to live on when they are older. Again, 300 chins dropped. "Some people assume they'll just keep working past retirement age," he said. "Has it ever occurred to you that they won't want you?"

Athos looks at all the difficulty and striving and intensity, and it looks like a younger man's game. "You know what I'm doing now? I'm reading novels, great long historical novels. I never thought I'd have time for that.

"When you're young, you have a great need for celebrity. You need people to know you are there, period. When you are older, you focus on reputation. You know that soon you will exist only in the minds of other people. You know that what you value is revealed in your behavior."

Designing the remainder of his life has become a passion for Athos, and it is starting to eclipse his other interests. He has sold off properties, gotten rid of things he doesn't need, and identified the few things he has always really cared about.

"I am downsizing my future," he said. "You'll all get the chance to do the same thing -- if you're lucky."

Richard Tanner Pascale

Nothing Fails
Like Success

Richard Pascale began with the observation that "excellence" is a fleeting thing. Of the companies cited in Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's 1982 classic In Search of Excellence, hardly any can still claim to be "excellent." IBM, the company most salivated over in that book, is in discernibly different straits today.

"Excellence," of course, was a fad. It was just one of scores of promising ideas presented to business in the past decade. Like excellence, they all had their moment in the sun. They all had a six-month period of implementation that gave every indication of moving the organization to a higher level.

But each time, something happened. The excellence proved unsustainable. Quality improvements hit a wall. Teams formed -- and disintegrated. The best-laid plans always seem to find a way to go awry. Find a company that has everything going for it at its high-water mark -- capitalization, market share, innovation, the best people. Then look in on it again five years later -- the water level will almost always have sunk.

Success to excess

Pascale describes the rise-and-fall effect in five stages. It begins with a strategic concept, a product or service. Around that basic product or service the organization organizes itself, and in the process creates a culture and personality for itself. Third, the company basks in the success that naturally befalls an organization with good products or services and a good organizational "fit." Fourth, the company's great resources and natural advantages lead it to a stage of fine tuning -- nothing major. Fifth, bloat sets in -- a stage Pascale calls "excess."

It is as if success were itself the cause of failure, and Pascale does not back away from that thought. "Nothing fails like success," he said. What goes up spectacularly usually comes down with just as big a splat.

You would think that with all the sharp managers, visionary leaders, astute consultants, and insightful observers there are out there, excellence would be a no-brainer. But it isn't, and Dick Pascale thinks he knows why:

"We don't know what we're doing. We really don't know how to keep healthy companies healthy." It is Pascale's belief that management science in the United States, despite its vitality as a kind of fashion industry, knows as much about ensuring long-term organizational health as black-robed physicians of the Dark Ages knew about prolonging biological health. We have our medicines at the ready -- continuous improvement, process overhaul, workforce shake-ups -- and they have proven no more nor less effective than bloodletting, cauterization, and gnostic potions.

"They put one leech under your armpit and another on your groin. You pay your fee, and you swear you feel better."

One contemporary superstition is moral blaming. Pascale cited our tendency to blame the demise of good companies on complacency: that leaders were asleep at the switch and allowed their organizations to deteriorate. It's a comforting idea -- all we have to do is not fall asleep at our switches. The problem is, no one fell asleep at those companies. People were working like the dickens, using above-average brainpower to maintain performance. "Complacency" as an excuse lets us off the hook, but it is just ignorance, like accusing a deformed person of misbehavior in a previous life.

A refrigerated pickle

You think you're in a bad business? Consider the plight of refrigerator makers.

Imagine it's 1960. If you're the obvious success story in your industry you are probably General Electric or Whirlpool. You have everything going for you. Pascale puts you in the circle that only companies with very high operational capabilities occupy. Your company boasts deep pockets, tremendous sales volume, and wide access to markets.

But Pascale drew two other circles that explain why your success is hard to sustain. The first contains smaller specialty competitors who focus on features, innovations, and top quality -- the Maytags and Sub Zero folks. They are continually coming up with new ideas -- self-defrosting freezers, flat-top ranges -- that put your machines behind the eight ball.

The second circle, containing Sears and J.C. Penney, is an even bigger problem for you. These companies have access to even more customers than you do. They are dying to hook young families on the habit of buying from them on credit. What better big-ticket item to hook them with than a refrigerator or washing machine? Price it low, at cost or even below cost, and they will be customers for life.

Facing such nontraditional competition, how can GE and Whirlpool hope to stay at the top of their game? Are they good enough, swift enough, efficient enough to match the innovators on features and the lowballers on price? Course not. Fortunately for refrigerator makers, shipping and poor margins make invasion by foreign manufacturers
unattractive. Which is more than the once-excellent, now-fallen companies on Pascale's list can say.

What happens to companies at the top of the heap is that they become geniuses at adaptation. They create hierarchies to analyze and understand every wrinkle, every freckle in the market. But their analysis arises out of their own organizational culture. They can "see" only with their own eyes. And the way the business world works these days, it is only a matter of time before something unforeseeable, some discontinuity from outside the cultural circle plants a foot inside it.

• Whirlpool never foresaw having to wage war against department stores.
• IBM was devoured by its own offspring -- makers of chips, operating systems, and clones.
• Citicorp and Chase Manhattan were not equipped to see that in three years AT&T could become the top provider of MasterCard and Visa cards.
• Did the U.S. Army realize, when the draft was abolished in the early 1970s, that judges would be remanding criminal offenders to the army en masse, instead of sending them to jail?
• What happens to a company like 3M, which prides itself on maintaining autonomous business units, when a big customer like Wal-Mart requires it to simplify its monthly selling and invoicing events from 65 to 1?
• Though it sounds sacrilegious today, what chance did Japan seem to have, 25 years ago, of selling its dinky little cars here? Talk about discontinuities.

These initiatives succeed on the good graces of the Hawthorn effect -- the phenomenon in which workers seem to perform better when they see management fussing with them, no matter what kind of fussing it is. But, Pascale said, eventually the honeymoon comes to an end. The Hawthorn effect loses it magic, and the dark forces that dwell at the heart of every organization, with their suckers of negativity clasped around its lungs, start to squeeze again.

Corporate naysayers note that former Baldrige winners have fallen on hard times, and so they start whispering that TQM doesn't work. Reengineering's own proponents concede that it usually doesn't work (because it isn't done right), and the naysayers have a field day with that. A CEO of a major company who was managing-by-walking-around when he disappeared 20 months ago is found huddled in a utility shack, muttering something about a wrong right turn after Plant D.

Organizations can initiate all the changes they like, but nothing will really change or transform until they attack the root of their problem. They're not doing anything wrong, Pascale says. But they may be being wrong.

The word being stands out in the previous sentence like a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake. It is a touchstone for Pascale's most recent thinking. Harking back to his interest in Japanese culture, he suggests that we pay too much attention to doing things, in our usual go-go, bumptious Yankee way, while overlooking what is really behind our flurry of activities.

In Japan, the concept of being, kokoro, is not so alien or mystical sounding. It is an everyday idea denoting the way things are. Being is thought of as a dynamic, something one does on purpose, not as an accident or automatically. The root ki appears in many words, like aikido.

To make a fuzzy concept clear: we may be doing TQM, but not being TQM. We go through the motions of performing an idea, but inside we don't believe in it. It's no more part of ourselves than a Styrofoam cup.

Companies can foresee every kind of eventuality except the one that drops from a tree and wrestles them to the ground, because they can only foresee eventualities that fall within their paradigm, their way of seeing the world, their way of being.

A creative company deliberately messes with its paradigm in order to shake people out of a stale way of being so that they can at least entertain the idea of other ways of being. Jack Welch used to have McKinsey or some other consulting group come in from outside and help GE make major decisions because their outside view freed GE from its paradigm/prison.

But then Welch had a better idea: push executives to break through the paradigm themselves. He sent two teams of ten persons each, plus a facilitator for each group, to China. There, as strangers in a strange land, they battled their way toward a strategy. Unfettered by familiarity, their ideas roamed wild and free. Back in the United States, each team was given four hours with the board to pitch its plan. Result: a startling new level of thinking, teamwork, and executive ownership of ideas.

If you have ever traveled abroad and discovered that you learned more there about the USA than about the country you were in, you understand the power of an altered paradigm. Pascale recalled an uncomfortable evening Tony Athos spent in Israel, where a woman at a party kept moving closer to Athos, who kept retreating through the room to get away from her. Her paradigm said that to converse seriously, people had to be face to face. His paradigm said that when a woman gets too close to you at a party, it's time to signal retreat.

Smashing paradigms is like smashing pumpkins -- the excitement is more in the process than in the results: "It means abandoning the predictable, Newtonian, billiard-ball view of the organizational universe and replacing it with the science of complexity."

Speaking of physics, Pascale invited members to imagine the anxiety felt by the scientists of the world upon publication of Einstein's first papers, which turned the orderly paradigm of Sir Isaac Newton upside down. They had developed a powerful but unprovable theory of a mysterious, absolute ether that papered over some of the inadequacies of Newtonian thought. Einstein called on them to set aside the ideas of an ether and accept that light travels at an absolute speed, but that time itself is a variable! The change in thinking was so great that we still call it today "a quantum leap."

Thinking in terms of being instead of doing would certainly constitute a major paradigm shift. It means disabusing ourselves of the very practical side of our cultural character. Forget the Harvard Business School case notes approach to understanding management. Forget seeing every circumstance as a "problem" to be "solved."

Forget that managing is even "managing" -- something you do. In the 1940s Wm. Edwards Deming traveled to Japan to teach manufacturers there how to do statistical process control. He explained to them the doing, stepped back, and was astonished to see the Japanese graft onto his concept their own deep sensibilities about being.

Because being is more constant than doing, the Japanese version of SPC blossomed into a passion for quality that Deming found very moving. Japan spurred the statistician to become a philosopher, much as Pascale is urging us to do -- make that to be -- today.

• Intention. Changes in being occur because you design the changes into your organizational life.
• Listening. More communication occurs on the listening end of a conversation than on the talking end. Really, it's the only part you can control.
• Intensity. Transformation occurs most readily when commitment to change is total.
• Learning. Special transformtion environments, like boot camp or air combat school, eliminate distraction and focus the mind on its task. Transformation on a companywide scale is a kind of re-indoctrination, out with the old and in with the new.
• Honesty. A company aware of its mission and vision is also aware of its inevitable death. The caterpillar may not be aware what is happening when it starts to enclose itself in a cocoon. Leaders of organizations must be aware of death and, ultimately, be willing to die.
• Agility. The best way to alter organizational being is by pretending the changes have already occured. Pascale calls this "managing from the future" -- act today as you would act if all the changes you seek are in place. Be, now, what you would be later. It is easier to act your way toward a new mode of thinking than to think your way toward a new mode of acting.

After all the riddles and epigrams, one wants to stop and ask Pascale: Will a change in being really bring about life-prolonging transformation? Could a change in being have rescued Whirlpool from Sears, Macy's from Nordstroms, IBM from Intel?

In all likelihood, no. Pascale is the first to admit that the number of truly "excellent" companies, those that seem able to withstand every kind of discontinuity and shift intuitively to understand and meet new challenges, is almost zero. Motorola is the only company he cites often as an all-weather winner.

Competition is tough, and change is even tougher. But we do have a choice, all of us. We can be assured of a quick and early death by denying its possibility. Or we can take pains to study what is happening, who we really are, as organizations and as persons, and design a way out of the trap.

We may not make it. But at least, if the worst case scenario takes place, we went down with our neurons still firing.