What Works: Success in Stressful Times. Hamish McRae
can make other things work better-the aspects of our daily life that we can improve. By any rational calculation the world is better placed now to make good choices about the future of our species and our planet. We are better educated than ever before; have better health and better information; technology continues to leap forward; and, of course, we are-notwithstanding the odd bump-richer than ever before. But if we are to face the many challenges we have to try to learn from each other. We all have to do it. It is the millions of acts by ordinary people that will eventually make a difference. In a modest way, it is to help us make a difference that I have tried to tell the stories in this book.
What Works has been more than a decade in gestation. In 1994–5 I published a book on the future of the global economy, The World in 2020. I then spent a huge amount of time travelling the world, talking about the future I had sketched with companies, academic institutions, management schools, professional bodies-and writing columns for The Independent newspaper in London all the while. The more I travelled, the more I began to marvel at the range of things I came across in every part of the globe that worked really well-success stories that deserved a wider audience.
So this book started as a desire to report, to share stories. But, of course, there have been many studies of success, particularly business books promoting apparently successful forms of organization, usually with an ideology attached. This study differs from those in that it does not aim to sell a theory-the notion that if companies or governments adopt this or that form of management theory or organization then they, too, will succeed. Actually they seldom do. You cannot, for example, transport the American corporate model to, say, India and expect every firm there to prosper. Besides, the shelf life of apparently great ideas is short indeed. Companies universally admired by one generation as models of managerial excellence are reviled by the next as failures. Government initiatives launched by one generation of ambitious politicians are quietly abandoned by the next. And economic principles embraced by one generation of academics are disputed by the next. After all, if financial markets were really as efficient as economic theory suggests, they would not have created two classic bubbles in the past decade: the internet craze and the dot-com crash; and the sub-prime boom and bust.
THE LESSONS
1 Optimism, balanced by realism: pessimism paralyses
2 Excellence, tempered by decency: if you neglect your wider responsibilities, you’re liable to end up in trouble when you meet headwinds
3 Community works, if it is allowed to: look at things from the ground level up and mobilize community
4 Government works too: compare like with like
5 Become a true magnet for talent: put out the welcome mat
6 Be honest about failure: keep learning, keep making mistakes
7 The need for humility: be as sensitive to success as you are to failure
8 Be nimble: make sure you are quick to adapt
9 Listen to the market: remember, it’s about more than money
10 Have a sense of mission: keep the long game in view and do right by those who share your objectives
So what does work? Instead of finding case studies to promote a theory, I worked from the other end. I observed success and tried to draw lessons from that. But the more I travelled, the more I became aware of different examples of successful organization, in different countries, on different continents, on different scales, and in a mixture of the public, private and voluntary sectors. The problem was not how to find case studies offering practical insights into what works-plenty of friends with whom I discussed the project offered candidates of their own-but how on earth to whittle them down to a manageable number.
More about this selection process in a moment. What became clear pretty early on was that for organizations to work really well, they needed to combine two features, the final two are noted opposite.
1 They had to have a deep-seated sense of mission-a vision, drive and commitment to do something that is worth doing even better. This sense of purpose could initially come from an individual but frequently it sprang from a group of like-minded people. Or it could develop from a general ethos accumulated over many years, so that no one could quite identify just who picked up the baton in the first place and who carried it forward at any particular time.
2 They had to be acutely sensitive to the market. They worked because they went with the grain of the market, listening to its signals and being guided by them, and applying its disciplines and adapting to whatever these required.
One without the other does not work. A plan or project that operates with a mission but fails to listen to the market may carry on for a while on a tide of early enthusiasm. But it cannot be sustained.
Pure market-driven endeavours can carry on for much longer. Most good businesses perform the essential task of seeking to fulfil people’s needs and desires, and if they do that competently, they make a solid contribution to the material world. However, they cannot change it. Market without mission can certainly help us get richer, improve our living standards and lead a materially better life. But add the sense of mission and you get something much more: a success that can be replicated and scaled.
Each case study in this book is a mix of these two attributes and each is tackled in the same sequence. First, I tell the story, explaining how I came to include this example and trying to capture and explain its special features. Then I seek to draw out some general lessons. Then, because nothing progresses in a straight line, I have to acknowledge what may go wrong and, in some instances, has already gone wrong.
Two other points emerged during the research and writing. One was that there has been a host of ‘near misses’-things that ought to work very well but have in some way fallen short. I considered trying to capture this because failure can sometimes carry more messages than success. History is littered with examples of clever and thoughtful people making huge errors, and of plans hatched by apparently very competent organizations resulting in disasters. The ‘best and the brightest’ get things wrong. In the end I rejected this approach because there were many different reasons for failure. There are common features to the successes but each failure failed in its own particular way. To give a flavour of this, I have sketched some of these near misses in the next part of this introduction.
The other point that became clear is that what happens in a global economic downturn is more interesting than what happens in the good times. Many of these case studies were researched and written in the boom years, with the result that the ‘what could go wrong’ section of some chapters has become more a tale of ‘what has gone wrong’.
I am not at all discouraged by this; indeed I am rather relieved. We are all in some measure prisoners of the moment, and while I was very conscious of the danger of writing a bull-market book, it was hard to lean against the prevailing wind. But a bear-market book, intoning that all is disaster, is not much use either. What Works has been completed during the downturn but it does, I hope, retain both its optimism and its perspective. If something does not work in tough times as well as easy ones, what is the point of examining it?
I have tried to look through the current difficulties evident in several of the case studies and make a judgement about the future. If I had not been confident, I would have dumped the example and chosen another. As it has turned out, I have not had to do this in any instance, for what seem to me to be sound reasons that I try to explain. Of course, I face the charge of being an eternal optimist, but I would rather answer to that than be a Dr Doom.
And so to those case studies. These are grouped geographically, partly for clarity but also because to look at the world this way emphasizes the message that really interesting things are happening in all corners of the planet. Some wider themes are drawn out in the final chapter.
It is a personal selection, of course, and it might be helpful next to describe quite how these choices came about.
2. WHY THESE CASE STUDIES WERE CHOSEN – AND A WORD ABOUT THE ONES THAT WERE LEFT OUT
Picking