Adrian Gostick - The Orange Revolution: How One Great Team Can Transform an Entire Organization

Other books by Gostick and Elton

The Carrot Principle

The Daily Carrot Principle

The Invisible Employee

A Carrot a Day

The 24 Carrot Manager

Books by Gostick and Dana Telford

The Integrity Advantage

Book by Gostick and Scott Christopher

The Levity Effect

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gostick, Adrian Robert.

The orange revolution : how one great team can transform
an entire organization / Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton.
1st free press hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Teams in the workplace. 2. Incentive awardsUnited States.
3. Employee motivationUnited States. I. Elton, Chester. II. Title.
HD66.G674 2010
658.4'022dc22
2010006091

ISBN 978-1-4391-8245-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-9666-3 (ebook)

Every great team has a great leader.
To one of the best weve ever known:
Dave Petersen.

A small group of thoughtful people
could change the world.
Indeed, its the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

THE ORANGE REVOLUTION

Breakthrough Teams

I t was 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, October 22, 1879, and experimenter Francis Jehl was still at work. He had been at his desk for ten hours, hunched over, carefully evacuating the air from a pear-shaped lightbulb. It wasnt an unusual workday for him. His bosss log routinely noted curious work habits: we worked all night or 32 continuous hrs. or 60 hrs. or six days this week.

In fact the Old Man, as the boys affectionately called their boss even before his hair turned gray, preferred to work at night when the team would not be interrupted by distracting visitors. As a result, Jehl often began work at 7:00 p.m. and continued until 7:00 the next morning.

We work all night experimenting, lead experimenter Charles Batchelor wrote to his brother, Tom, and sleep til noon in the day. We have got 54 different things on the carpet and some we have been on for four or five years. [My boss] is an indefatigable worker and there is no kind of failure, however disastrous, that affects him.

As Jehl finished removing the air from the bulb, the Old Man called his glassblower, Ludwig Boehm, to fully seal off its base. Over his head, twelve telegraph wires formed an intricate spiders web, all ending at a large battery at the center of the room.

Placing the bulb on a test stand, the Old Man connected it to the nearby battery. Suddenly, the room was awash with light that illuminated work tables, machinery, and jars of chemicals on glass shelves lining the walls. The men quickly fell into the usual laboratory routine to observe the lights brightness and steadiness. They waited to record the moment when it finally burned out. But this experiment played out differently than ever before. While earlier filaments had burned out within several hours, the carbonized sewing thread that Batchelor had carefully threaded into the bulb stayed lit. As the hours passed, team members came and went: head machinist John Kruesi, who translated sketches into working devices; Francis Upton, the American scientific researcher who proved the concept mathematically; and John Lawson and Martin Force, laboratory assistants. Each of them felt a growing excitement at having earned a front-row seat to the historic event. They understood better than anyone else the difficultyand benefitsof earning a place on the Old Mans team. The Old Mans name? Thomas Alva Edison.

On October 22, the remarkable bulb dreamed up by Edison, drawn by Batchelor, mathematically proved by Upton, built by Kruesi and Boehm, and tested by Lawson, Force, and Jehl, burned for thirteen and a half hours, with a light described by the New York Heralds Marshal Fox as, the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdins lamp, before Edison determined he had seen enough. If it will burn that number of hours now, I know I can make it burn a hundred! he cried exultantly.

If you were asked who invented incandescent electric light, and you answered Edison, youd be right and youd be wrong. The revolution that Edison wrought was the product of a team. Thats how he thought of it, and thats how the team thought of it. For some reason, its easier for us to assign credit to a single person than to a team. We love the idea of a lone genius, the mastermind, the hero. From an early age, were indoctrinated with the single-achiever ideal in school. Our textbooks boil things down to their simplest form, and for a fifth-grader, its easy to say that Edison = lightbulbs.

The reality is very different. Heres what geniuses do: they build great teams.

Never intimidated by other great minds, Edison actively sought out men with a broad base of knowledge, a passion for learning, impeccable character, and a commitment to excellence. He then organized them into small teams comprised of an experimenter and two or three assistants. They were given a goal and allowed to pursue it independently. The story is told that once, when an experimenter asked Edison what he would do with a particularly difficult problem, Edison replied, Dont ask me. If I knew, I would try it myself!

Thats not to say Edison didnt care about the process: quite the opposite. He was intensely interested, neglecting sleep and personal hygiene to pursue his inventions. Edison was known to flit around the factory in a black floppy-rimmed sombrero and dirty suit with his hair uncombed, checking in on his teams of experimentersexamining and instructing, but rarely interfering. He recognized that by allowing each of the talented people hed assembled to stretch and succeed independently of him, he got the best results.

As Edison explained: I generally instructed them on the general idea of what I wanted carried out, and when I came across an assistant who was in any way ingenious, I sometimes refused to help him out in his experiments, telling him to see if he could not work it out himself, so as to encourage him.

Unbelievably, Edisonone of the most brilliant minds in the worldhad accepted that he alone did not possess all the answers; but together, his team usually did.

Edison shared the vision, the work, the funand the rewardswith his team. One lab assistant described his work as strenuous but joyous. In a letter to his father, Upton wrote, The strangest thing to me is the $12 that I get each Saturday, for my labor does not seem like work, but like study. Key team members received shares in Edisons companies and he let them invest in the projects to which they contributed. Perhaps most significant, when the time came to expand operations, Edison rewarded members of his team with leadership positions at the new companies, enabling many of them to retire wealthy men.

Recent research confirms the wisdom of Edisons approach to collaboration. University of New Mexico professor Vera John-Steiner explains that collaboration enables people to compensate for each others blind spots. Collaboration operates through a process in which the successful intellectual achievements of one person arouse the intellectual passions and enthusiasms of others.