“Alone we can do so little; together, we can do so much.”

– Helen Keller

We're jumping back to May 1997. The British Lions rugby squad has touched down in South Africa for its first rugby tour there since the end of apartheid. The media and pundits (both in the UK and South Africa) are viewing the three-match tour as largely symbolic. South Africa are the firm favourites to win, with the British Lions considered significant underdogs.

The first test is played at Newlands and, much to the surprise of the home crowd, the Lions win 25–16. The second test is set for Durban and, despite the upset of the first match, the home crowd is still expecting the Springboks to emerge victorious. There's a roar as the teams step onto the pitch and the match kicks off.

However, with the scores level at 15–15, the home crowd is getting quieter. It watches in disbelief as Jerry Guscot kicks a drop goal to nudge the Lions to an 18–15 lead. As the minutes tick down, and South Africa launches a furious attack on the Lions' try line, there's great anticipation in the stadium. However, the Lions team pulls together, closes ranks, and somehow manages to prevent any of the South African players from breaking through.

The 80-minute mark passes, the ball bounces into touch, and the Lions have, against all expectations, won the series. The final match of the tour allows South Africa to salvage some pride, but despite winning this third test comfortably, it's too little, too late for the hosts.

After the test, it was commented that, “The better players were beaten by the better team.” When the team comes together, and you “row the boat in time”, you can achieve more than you believed was possible. It is not what you have that really matters, but what you do with what you have.

Think about this in the context of rowing. If you have ever watched the Oxford/Cambridge Boat Race, or any competitive rowing event, you'll know that timing is everything. Every person on that boat has to row in time, for the entire duration of that race. If your efforts are coordinated, you have the best chance of winning the race, and to do that everyone on your team needs to be aligned. If not, you risk going in circles.

Culture starts from the top…but lives in the foundations

The first part of the book is based on the importance of strong leadership, and any culture of empowerment that enables people at every level to act with EQ and effectively manage that fluid process has to come from the top.

Leadership in business is like leadership in sport, where the aim is to ensure the right motivation, coherence, and ultimately performance from the team to be able to progress in the right direction. Think back to our Formula 1 principal. He sets the direction for the entire team and makes sure that each element is executed perfectly on race day.

In the same way in business, leadership is then cascaded into ways of working that define how a business collaborates to ensure that everyone is focused on the same goal. Strong leadership is needed to tie together all the elements we've discussed so far in the book.

As businesses and consumers evolve, we're continuing to see a change in leadership styles that are more diverse, inclusive, and future facing. This is something that our existing leaders need to consider in their approach to driving change within businesses today.

One of the things that is starting to change is the way that leaders influence the people within the business or, more importantly, the other way around. The people on the ground are increasingly helping to shape the direction of businesses based on their understanding of their own needs and desires.

We see collective insights being formed to drive business change and reduce the subjectivity of decisions. This is where the values, trajectory, and culture of your business is important. However, this has an impact as it creates subcultures with your business and, in some cases, even subvalues. This is fine and promotes autonomy and diversity of thought, but the critical factor for leaders is to ensure that the overarching culture comes from the top and keeps everything connected. There has to be alignment.

Align the crew behind your purpose

Making sure you have alignment within each of your teams and across your teams is the first main element we are exploring in relation to rowing the boat in time. As we explained in Part One, the purpose needs to be clear. Once you have a clear purpose, the next step is to ensure everyone is aligned to that purpose.

To do this as a leader, you have to get everyone on board with what you're doing and make all feel involved. There is a saying you may have heard, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. In a similar way we believe that purpose eats passion. There is a lot of talk in business about having passion and how this draws people into your vision, but we believe that if you are clear on your purpose and communicate that correctly, it will align people behind what you want to achieve.

Former Merkle CEO David Williams says, “Managers get things done through authority; Leaders get things done through influence.” Strong managers are generally excellent operators and are very task-oriented. These people are a safe pair of hands and will get things done. Leaders are great at creating a sense of belonging, driving inclusivity, and aligning people towards a common goal.

Both of these roles set the culture within the business, but they don't necessarily define the outcome. The definition is built on how the people of the business execute that vision through your leadership and that is then ultimately the perception of your brand to the outside world. Therefore, the ability to think beyond the current status quo can be important when looking at your strategic vision.

A great example of a leader who set the culture within an organisation is Alex Ferguson during his time as manager at Manchester United. One of his core principles, and one of the things he credits for his success at the football club, was that he believed everyone at Old Trafford was part of the success of the team. It wasn't just about the players and the coaching staff, but about the people working in the shop, the cleaners, the grounds staff, and so on.

Ferguson also made a point of knowing the name of every individual that he came across in the football club because he felt so strongly that everybody was part of that culture and important for the club to come together. He knew everybody; when he walked into Old Trafford, he'd say “Hello” to all he met and ask them how they were because he wanted to instill that culture all the way through the organisation. In an interview, David Beckham revealed that Alex Ferguson once made him change his hairstyle (he had to shave off his mohawk) because it didn't meet the professional standards Ferguson set at the club and didn't fit with the perception he wanted people to have of the organisation as a brand.

Freedom in a box

The concept of freedom in a box encompasses several of the principles we shared in the previous chapter, in particular, knowing what good looks like for you and making sure that you don't let striving for perfection become the enemy of good. This approach needs to be ingrained in the behaviour and expectation of everyone in the business if it is to work effectively.

Jeff Bezos provides an example of how this can be done well. He is known for having coined the concept of 2P teams, which are teams that are no bigger than six or seven people and that can therefore be fed by two pizzas. He wanted to have multiple 2P teams within the business that had a very clear direction and purpose that were aligned to the overall organisation, but at the same time had autonomy and flexibility over how they approached the problem at hand.

This is freedom in a box. Under this model, there are multiple small teams, all solving individual problems and all aligned with a common purpose. This common purpose is the box that they operate within, but how they solve the problems themselves is much more flexible and determined by the members of each team. This is a big part of what has driven innovation at businesses like Google, Meta and Amazon.

As a leader, you have to find a way to strike the right balance between autonomy and alignment.

What you are aiming for is that top-right quadrant, where there is high alignment, the leaders are able to focus on which problems need solving, and then the teams are given the freedom to find the best solutions.

As Steve Jobs said, “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” While this principle is important, as the leader you still have to set the direction of travel. Autonomy equals empowerment, but it is understanding this direction, or the common purpose, that empowers people as well as giving them some ownership of that common purpose. When you can bring these elements together, people will feel a sense of belonging in the organisation and they will feel part of the transformation you're driving.

The key for leaders is to find the right measurements to track whether the autonomy and freedom within your teams is still aligning to the overall purpose of the organisation.

Is your organisation a spider or a starfish?

The analogy of the spider and the starfish is an old one, from the book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organisations, but a useful one for understanding the difference between a command-and-control hierarchical business and an autonomous organisation.

If you cut the head off a spider, the spider dies, and if you cut a leg off a spider then you have a seven-legged spider. However, if you cut a leg off a starfish, the starfish will grow another leg. Some starfish are even able to grow a new body on a severed leg (and then also new legs). In this example, the spider represents the command-and-control business, and the starfish represents the autonomous business.

In a command-and-control hierarchical structure, every decision runs from the tip of the leg, up to the head, and back down again. This makes it much more difficult to be highly responsive and adaptive in today's fast-moving world.

What you are aiming for is to become an autonomous organisation with a clear purpose, and teams that function in a much more integrated and autonomous way. This will allow you to adapt and respond quickly to change, which is essential in the modern business environment. You want to be like the starfish and grow another leg.

The value of autonomy

In the modern world, the value of an organisation is increasingly tied into the experience it can build for its customers, so therefore being highly adaptive will have a positive impact on your business' value. Digitally native vertical businesses like Dollar Shave Club, Harry's, and Glossier are highly adaptive, highly integrated, have few silos, and view customers as the core of their business. This is what enables them to respond and adapt much more quickly than traditional organisations that might have more of a “spider” structure. They are small by comparison to their spider peers, but they have started to make a material dent in the competitive landscape.

The challenge, particularly for organisations that were built in the 1980s and 1990s, is that they were designed for total quality and not to make mistakes. To achieve this, everything had to be tied down and constructed with very strict rules and processes in place. They weren't built for adaptiveness, they were built to compete on quality. However, these organisations are now operating in a new era and are having to behave in a flexible, autonomous way even though they aren't designed to.

While this transformation to an adaptive “starfish” business from a hierarchical “spider” business won't happen overnight, you can already see the competitive advantage that starting that transformation has. Compare the value of Tesla to its automotive counterparts and you will see that Tesla is worth significantly more, in large part, because the company has demonstrated many of the characteristics of an adaptive organisation.

Becoming an autonomous organisation also has benefits internally, which can have a positive effect on a business' value. Empowering people and building an autonomous culture will naturally reduce attrition, which is a large problem in many industries and one that is only being compounded by significant skills shortages in many areas.

This concept of breaking down silos and encouraging collaboration is something we discuss in greater detail in Chapter 6. There will always be metaphorical walls in businesses, however what autonomy does is reduces the size of those walls and makes it easier for individuals and teams to work together across the organisation as a whole.

Both of these examples also relate back to what we have already discussed in terms of measurement, and knowing when you have to change direction or do something differently. These are the decisions that need time as they can have an adverse effect on your business. In both the Theranos and Fyre Festival stories, the organisations didn't measure or disclose the measurement of the right things. They kept pushing ahead, despite the fundamental flaws underpinning both of their models.

With the Fyre Festival example, the organisation's biggest problem was that it had nothing in place and this didn't allow it to pivot. It didn't have the ability to change the nature of the event or to transform into a different type of business.

Contrast this with a product like Slack, which was initially developed as an internal tool for the company Tiny Speck during the development of its online game Glitch. In the context of the game, it didn't achieve expectations. However, the company saw an opportunity to repurpose Slack as a proprietary business communication platform and pivoted its use. In 2020 it was sold for $27 billion, not bad for a failed product!

When an organisation has teams that are aligned to a common purpose, as well as giving those teams and individuals autonomy, it is much more adaptive and therefore better able to pivot as and when challenges arise. Although traditional organisations may struggle to introduce this autonomy and alignment within their current structure, the examples we've shared here show that a lack of alignment isn't only a problem in existing organisations. It can just as easily occur in new organisations and cause serious issues if it isn't embedded within the business' culture from the start.

Who's on the bus and where are these people sitting?

In his book Good to Great,² Jim Collins talks about the importance of getting people on your bus, which refers to making sure that everyone within an organisation is aligned with the purpose and that those are the right people to have on your bus. Once you have the right people on the bus, you have to make sure that they are sitting in the right seat and playing the right role within the company. Finally, the bus will have to stop quite regularly to let people off. Despite your best efforts, you might not always hire the right people, so you have to find a way to let those who don't fit in with your teams or align with your purpose off the bus. In some cases, you might just have the right person in the wrong seat, or you might have to provide additional training to enable someone to contribute in the way you need them to.

What typically happens if you have people in the wrong seats, or the wrong people on your bus altogether, is that you end up with motion without any progress. A global telecommunications company that reorganised its structure in 2011 and, as part of that process, brought a lot of services and functions it had been outsourcing in-house.

During this reorganisation, the business moved its existing people into new roles, despite the fact that many of those people didn't have the skill set required to fulfil their new role. In creating these teams of people who didn't have the skills and experience to do their jobs effectively, progress stalled. On that particular “bus” several people were in the wrong seats and some of them probably shouldn't have been on the bus at all because they didn't fit into this new organisational structure. However, this isn't to say that you should always look externally. Sometimes the answer can be right in front of you, and promoting from within can be a very positive step if the opportunity is a good match to someone's skills. Essentially this comes down to balancing potential with experience. Getting people on the bus in the first place, and then ensuring they're in the right seats, is easy when your vision and culture is clearly defined. Take Disney theme parks as an example; everyone who works for them knows what kind of culture they're joining. Disney's focus is on instilling happiness throughout every one of its parks. Where possible, the company encourages its people to deliver magical moments to visitors. As a result, people go back time and again, despite the price being high, because they love that magical experience.

Making the most of what you have

As well as looking at the skills within your teams, you also have to consider the tools and technology that your people have available to them. We have often seen organisations throw all of their tools and technology out of the window because they deem this to be the problem, and replace them with something new.

However, it is often not the tools that are the problem, but how those tools are used. There is a wonderful video of a very unusual sport: brick racing. Each person is given three bricks and they have to cross a room always standing on those bricks. In this particular video, there are three participants. Two of them have a clumsy and slow way of stepping onto two of the bricks and moving the third one ahead of them, taking a step forward and repeating the process.

The third participant has developed a hunched walk with a rhythm that allows him to lift the brick that is under his lifted foot and move it ahead of him seamlessly. He makes the whole process look easy and like little more than a slightly odd stroll. All three of the men had the same tools, three bricks, but one of them used his bricks much more efficiently than the other two. If those bricks represented technologies in most businesses, the first two would have thrown out their bricks and bought new ones.

Raising and training unicorns

We know unicorns don't exist, but the word is often used today to describe multi-skilled talent in organisations.³ Hootsuite Chairman and Co-Founder Ryan Holmes describes unicorns as “a member of the staff who possesses a unique set of qualities that make them extremely rare and valuable.”

In modern organisations, it's becoming increasingly important to raise and train unicorns because they offer enormous benefits in the workplace, and their qualities make them extremely rare and hard to find.

The concept of training your weaknesses or training in areas that aren't necessarily essential is one that is often overlooked in business. Unicorns are the people whom everyone wants working for their organisation. We've already said that experience is the next battleground in business. Every organisation and brand is looking at how to evolve its experience, but it's the unicorns who build those experiences and fight that battle. As a result, there's a lot of competition for those “right” people.

If we go back to Formula 1, a great example of a unicorn here would be Lewis Hamilton, seven-time world champion. Not only is he a phenomenal driver on the track, but is often one of the last people off the track after the race as he works with the team of engineers and analysts to find new ways to help the team improve the performance of the car. He is also passionate about supporting causes that prevent social injustice off the race track to ensure that his role influences more than just the racing community.

If you have unicorns in your organisation, you want to keep hold of them. You also want to get everyone involved in delivering the best experience possible for your customers. As Richard Branson said, “If you look after your staff, they'll look after your customers. It's that simple.”

As well as finding the right people for the right seats, you also have to consider the diversity of skills across your teams and the diversity of the people you employ to ensure they reflect your customers and enable you to look at different perspectives across your business.

This whole concept of rowing the boat in time is about having the right team in place, which doesn't necessarily mean they all have to be the very best. Herb Brooks was the US ice hockey team coach in 1980. Following the trials for the team, he picked his squad and gave the list to his assistant coach Craig Patrick, who looked at it and said, “You're missing some of the best players.” Brooks' response was, “I'm not looking for the best players, I'm looking for the right ones.”

To put this in context, at this time, Russia was the dominant national team and it was unstoppable. The Russians had great talent, but the difference between the Russian national team and its competition was that it put that talent into a system that worked for the benefit of the team.

By the time Herb Brooks was picking his squad in 1980, the Russian team had proved time and again that it could beat the best players the NHL had to offer. Brooks took a group of younger players, who had the mindset of wanting to work as a team as well as diverse skills on the ice, and he brought them together. This US team went on to win the Olympic gold medal at the 1980 games, beating Russia who was the four-time defending champions in the semi-finals, and going on to defeat Finland in the gold medal match.

This focus on diversity of skills and talent, and on finding the right people for the team, is something all businesses can learn from. It's just as important to consider diversity in your teams in terms of how those teams represent your customers.

Establishing a programme that helps to drive the preceding values is important, but it's even more critical to ensure that these are ingrained into your day-to-day operations as a business. Authenticity is an important factor as it's easy to see when this agenda is important to businesses or when it's bolted on. Don't tick the box; as leaders, it's our responsibility to ensure that we are continuing to be forward-thinking in our approach to workforce representation and culture. This, in turn, will see your business scale and diversify in skills and attributes that could help to positively transform the business from the inside out.

Efficiency: The final piece of the puzzle

When it comes to the concept of row the boat in time, you have to think about how you can be efficient with how you're using your resources, how you're using your people, and also how you're building your culture. It's important to consider where you can productionise and create processes and frameworks around what you do that will make your business more efficient, without losing autonomy.

A field that has great inefficiency is data science. In many businesses, data scientists can spend as much as 90% of their time collecting, cleaning and organising data and just 10% of their time analysing the data, despite the fact that their value comes from the analysis. That means 90% of their time is essentially wasted effort. Inefficiency will cripple any of your efforts to create alignment and build autonomous teams that are made up of the right people with the right skills for the job.

Your resources, platforms, and infrastructure need to be efficient, connected, and accessible so that your autonomous teams can deliver the results you're striving for. What can happen when you don't have efficient systems in place? Take a business that went through a tender process for a new omni-channel capability that then took two years to add tags to its website. This was due to the organisation's siloed structure where legal and marketing were not measured on the same objective.

If you don't row the boat in time, your boat just ends up going round in circles. When this happens, many organisations make the mistake of throwing money at the issues they perceive and then wonder why they are just going round in circles. So many of the organisations that we've worked with have invested in pretty much every product and tool you need from a marketing perspective, but many of these companies don't have the skills within their teams to implement them. They can't turn motion into progress.

A modern example of this is Elon Musk's first principle thinking. If he hadn't focused on improving the efficiency of the batteries used in electric cars, for example, the adoption of electric vehicles would have been slower.

We've mentioned Amazon and its AWS service earlier in the book, but it's interesting to note that Amazon developed this technology initially because it needed a way for its data scientists to access their data via the Cloud if it wanted to use data to drive the business. Of course, Amazon has since sold it to other organisations and it's now one of the largest parts of Amazon's business, which is just incredible.

Amazon is also one of the first and most effective examples of headless commerce, which we mentioned in Chapter 4, but one of the reasons it has been able to do this is because of its flexibility and the way it has become adaptive around its technology capabilities.

Why aren't we moving faster?

One final point on efficiency is that cost cutting doesn't necessarily equate to efficiency. There are many examples of organisations that make cuts to their teams to deliver cost efficiencies and then wonder why they aren't moving faster. The answers are usually because they have made the cuts in the wrong places or they have failed to consider the outcomes that they're trying to achieve and the impact of those outcomes on the business' progress.

We talked about the concept of freedom in a box, and that box needs to be a lot bigger in some organisations than it currently is; otherwise, you won't see the benefits of that autonomy in the context of the whole organisation. Businesses have to be bold and be prepared to potentially let their people make some mistakes along the way; otherwise, they will find they are constantly hitting roadblocks in their quest for progress and people will simply find ways around the guard rails that they put in place.

The key is to find the right balance between autonomy and efficiency; otherwise, you have process for the sake of process, which only holds you back. You can use measurement as the control, to provide you with a tangible way of seeing whether the outcome you want has been achieved. This is also why knowing the outcomes you're aiming for is so important. During cost-cutting exercises, many businesses focus on headcount. However, whilst headcount may meet cost reduction needs, it often significantly impedes progress because it doesn't always equate to value.

Highlights

We have covered four key principles in this chapter: alignment, autonomy, skills and talent, and efficiency. You need alignment to drive autonomy; for autonomy to work you need to have the right people with the right skills to do the work; and you also need an efficient platform to enable those people to do the work in a way that doesn't hold back your business.

In a similar theme to “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, the Heath brothers said that, “If culture eats strategy for breakfast then purpose trumps passion.” The idea being that if you have a clear and aligned purpose, then culture and strategy will follow.

Everything to do with the culture in your business needs to be driven towards that purpose, including the likes of your social impact and responsibility, which makes a huge difference. This purpose has to be ingrained in everything that you do, and you also need to measure it from a cultural perspective. We always talk about moving forwards and looking forwards, but every so often you need to look backwards to see how far you've come.

Within business it can be harder to measure some of these softer elements so you have to think about what the proxies are for the behaviours you're trying to create and make sure you're looking at the right things without getting too bogged down in data.

This is particularly important where autonomy is concerned and you can use flow efficiency to track the effect autonomy has on the whole business rather than simply measuring autonomy in an individual environment. You need to have measures to show that autonomy is working beyond a single department because that department can't do anything in the context of the wider business if the organisation around it is inefficient.

Let's come back to our Formula 1 team and look at the pit crew as an example. There are typically around 20 people involved in a single pit stop. Each one is exceptionally well trained and each one knows exactly what the individual job involves. However, that knowledge is underpinned by the understanding of what it means in the context of both the race and the overall season.

A pit crew might be delivering the fastest pit stops on the grid, but if the car isn't performing, the driver isn't on form and the processes to develop and improve both the technology and performance isn't in place, then ultimately that fast pit stop won't make a difference to the eventual outcome, either in an individual race or across the course of a season. The principal has to lead from the front to set the purpose and direction of travel with clear measures, and once that is in place, it's crucial to build and align teams around this purpose.