Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win. William Taylor

Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win - William  Taylor


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from the small screen. But one vital constituency would suffer irreparable harm—the ever-growing collection of writers, directors, actors, and producers who believe they have no other outlet on television for their most daring work. “They say, ‘We want your voice. We want your vision. We want the story that you see.’ And they mean it,” marvels Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball. “That might seem obvious, but at the networks every decision is second-guessed by every single executive. At HBO they leave you alone for the most part and trust your instincts.” (Instead of returning to film after Six Feet Under went, well, six feet under, Oscar-winner Alan Ball has re-upped with the network on two major projects.)

      Forget HBO’s programming library and technology strategy. The network’s hardest-to-duplicate advantage (and thus, the piece of its business that would be most sorely missed) is its ability to attract and unleash Hollywood talent that once shunned TV. “People always fixate on the content freedoms at HBO as a kind of unfair advantage,” says Carolyn Strauss, a network lifer who is president of HBO Entertainment, “but the freedoms that are really important aren’t the freedom to swear, or to be naked, or to blow somebody’s head off. They’re about expressing a distinct point of view and allowing the creator’s voice to come through in as unencumbered a way as possible.”

      Those freedoms, carefully guarded by the network’s leadership team, are why some of the world’s biggest stars and most-respected filmmakers—from Paul Newman to Tom Hanks to Mike Nichols—bring their passion projects to HBO. Albrecht understands that there is a “limited supply of supremely talented people who can create successful television,” and that most of them “have a better chance of getting rich and famous elsewhere.” So he focuses on making the experience of working with HBO memorable—the kind of experience that writers, directors, and actors would miss if it went away. “If you’re interested in the work itself,” he says, “there are very few other places in the broadcast business where you can call your own shots as a creator.” These creative freedoms are an essential part of HBO’s competitive strategy.

      Can you identify one piece of how your company operates that, if it were to disappear, would be sorely missed in the marketplace? If not, can you identify one good reason why your company is not at risk of disappearing?

      NOTES - CHAPTER THREE

      MAVERICK MESSAGES (I): SIZING UP YOUR STRATEGY

       PART TWO

Reinventing Innovation

       Chapter Four

       Ideas Unlimited: Why Nobody Is as Smart as Everybody

      Gold mining is an old industry, a tired industry. The pace of change is glacial. Traditionally, mining companies have worried about how strong your back is, not how big your brain is. We wanted to do something that no one in the industry had done, to tap into the intellectual capital of the whole world.

      —ROB MCEWEN, FORMER CHAIRMAN AND CEO, GOLDCORP, INC.

      Rob McEwen was running out of ideas—and out of patience. It had been more than five years since he’d made a gamble that most executives in his business thought was fool’s gold, acquiring a mine with a history of low productivity, bare-bones investment, and bitter labor relations. But McEwen’s mine was in the Red Lake district of northwest Ontario, which, since the discovery of gold there in the 1920s, has produced more than 24 million ounces, nearly 10 percent of gold-rich Canada’s total output. And this out-of-favor property bumped up against the reliably productive Campbell Lake mine, which had churned out 9 million ounces over the years.

      There had to be rich deposits of ore somewhere below his 55,000-acre site, McEwen reasoned. But where? So he raised the stakes and provided his geologists at Goldcorp, Inc., with a fresh $10 million to spend on exploration at the capital-starved Red Lake mine, situated more than 1,300 miles from company headquarters in downtown Toronto. Soon, the geologists reported some tantalizing news: in nine of the exploratory holes they had drilled, the average concentration of ore was 30 times richer than what Red Lake was currently producing. Eureka! Goldcorp had discovered gold. But the discovery raised as many questions as answers. How big was the deposit? McEwen and his geologists didn’t know. Where were the best spots to transition from exploration to deep drilling? The team couldn’t say. How much time and money would it take to figure it out? No one was prepared to offer a firm estimate.

      Another year went by as Goldcorp struggled to make sense of its promising find and to understand just what it was sitting on. Tired, frustrated, and eager for a break from the grind, McEwen, an unabashed science and technology enthusiast, decided to spend a week at MIT with a delegation of presidents and CEOs from other companies, learning about trends in information technology. Part of the weeklong program focused on Linux and open-source software—computer code written by programmers scattered all over the world, people who are passionate enough about their craft, or who have a strong enough stake in the success of the project on which they work, to volunteer their time and expertise to write software that no company owns but millions of people can’t live (or at least work) without. For years open-source programs such as Apache, Perl, and Sendmail have been the unseen, mission-critical backbone of the Internet. It’s a taken-for-granted part of life among the Internet cognoscenti, but something of a mind-bender for us civilians: the world’s most important technology platform relies on ideas and computer code generated largely by a decentralized corps of volunteer programmers, most of whom have never met one another and few of whom work together in any formal setting.*

      In the case of Linux, a worldwide collection of grassroots, self-directed teams have built an operating system that powers a fast-growing share of the world’s computer servers—and has become a power player in the software industry. Some of the biggest technology companies in the world, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel, devote hundreds of programmers and major financial resources to the Linux cause. But the real action is with the grassroots volunteers who cook up features, write code, fix bugs—and share their ideas with everyone else on the project.

      The more McEwen learned about the open-source phenomenon, the more intrigued be became. People didn’t have to work for his company, he realized, in order to work with his company. He could prospect for drilling strategies from the farthest reaches of the world. “All of a sudden a light went on,” he recalls. “It was like a flash: this is the


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