The David Lynch Approach to Business
Pitney Bowes executive Fred Perdue is highly representative of the aggressive approach of his fellow execs at the company. The corporate culture is built upon the inescapable reality that avoiding or ignoring the ugly realities of the business you are in is not the path to success. This results in a highly effective, if somewhat unpleasant bit of imagery:
“When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say `My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,’ even if what you see can scare the hell out of you.”
Get on the Bus
The imagery of the Bus is pervasive. It is essential and elemental to book’s entire concept. The Bus is the imagery most closely associated with teamwork. It is all about finding the right people a company needs to be successful, but more complicated. It is a bus always in motion so you have to be ready to stop and pick new passengers who can help, kick off unruly passengers and know when some have reached their final destination.
Fannie Mae
Fannie Mae is an example of a company that successfully makes the leap from good to great. They do this after many years of struggle and under the guidance of David Maxwell whose strategy was not merely to restructure, but completely rebuild the company in the image of its strengths and weaknesses. A callback to a cheesy 1970’s science fiction show is utilized as imagery to make this idea clearer:
“During a research meeting, a team member commented that Fannie Mae reminded her of an old television show, The Six Million Dollar Man with Lee Majors. The pretext of the series is that an astronaut suffers a serious crash testing a moon landing craft over a southwestern desert. Instead of just trying to save the patient, doctors completely redesign him into a superhuman cyborg, installing atomic-powered robotic devices such as a powerful left eye and mechanical limbs.”
The Stop-Doing List
One of the simplest bits of imagery is also potentially one of the most effective. It involves the idea of recognizing that coming up with a list of things to stop doing is every bit as important as the more famous list of things to do. In fact, the author goes one better with a single line assertion:
“Stop doing” lists are more important than “to do” lists.
