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Edward De Bono

The word “guru” is one of the most overused in the English language. From PR to plumbing, it seems to be applied to anyone with a big enough mouth and a modicum of achievement to back it up.

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Sharp Operators

Tuesday, 29 August 2006

Summer special: Seattle. Vitali Vitaliev finds out what makes the place tick.

Where better could somebody wanting to discover America's entrepreneurial spirit visit than Seattle, the city which has spawned such giants as Microsoft, Boeing, Starbucks and Amazon?

Soviet writers Ilf and Petrov, who visited the USA in 1935-36, were truly astonished by the business culture of 1930s America: “The American sits in his office with his coat off and works. He works quietly, unobtrusively, without making any fuss. He is never late anywhere. He has only one telephone...” they observed in their book.
The last detail is telling: it was customary for any Soviet functionary of importance to have several telephones on his desk. The hierarchy was simple – the more telephones, the more important the bureaucrat. The quality of the American businessman that impressed them most of all, however, was his “ability to keep his word, to keep it firmly, accurately, to burst, but keep his word...”.
“Should an American say in the course of a conversation, even incidentally, ‘I’ll do that’, it is not necessary to remind him of anything at all in the future. Everything will be done,” they noted with fascination and concluded: “This is the most important thing which our Soviet business people must learn from American business people.”
One cannot miss the sad irony of this statement: honesty and integrity had no place in the Soviet society, which stood on lies, hypocrisy and fear; where the very word “businessman” had a negative connotation and was synonymous with “crook”. For the most part, Ilf and Petrov’s impressions of the American business world resulted from their visits to such giants of industry as the factories of General Electric in Schenectady, NY and the automobile plants of Henry Ford in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit.
Some 70 years later, I opted to go to Seattle, the city known as one of the main engine rooms of our computer age. With Jeff Wright, a leading Seattle property developer, we climbed up a steep service ladder to the very top of the Space Needle and found ourselves on a small landing, well above the public viewing area. By doing so, we didn’t break any rules, for Jeff Wright was the owner of the Space Needle and the chairman of its board of directors.
Originally owned by Jeff’s father, Howard S. Wright, the 605 ft-high tower played a role in the US-Russian space race and was officially opened by President Kennedy in April 1962 – shortly after the Russians unveiled their own Space Obelisk in Moscow. It became the main symbol of Seattle, the monument to its unfading entrepreneurial spirit.
“I remember my dad bringing me up here, when I was three and the Needle was still under construction,” Jeff reminisced. “He then held me by the ankles and let me peep down ...”
I tried to visualise toddler Jeff dangling in the air 600 feet above the ground. The image was enough to make me dizzy.
“What’s your favourite thing about Seattle?” I asked him looking down at this as yet unknown city, sprawled underneath me like a hastily compiled giant jigsaw puzzle. “It is a home town. People are honest, friendly and outgoing, and the weather allows people to spend a lot of time out of doors which helps them to come up with new ideas and inventions...”
Jeff had a point. My press kit contained a long list of Seattle inventions which included the gas station, monorail, water skis, chainsaw, hydroplane, colour television, electric guitar, heart defibrillator, MS-DOS, sexless oysters and ... “aeroplane hijack for money”. Take these innovations away and the world would become a duller, if somewhat quieter, place (although oysters would probably disagree).

Seattle is now home to some of the world’s best-known and most successful companies: Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon.com, United Parcels, Costco and Starbucks – to name a few. The secret of the city’s prosperity lies in its relatively short history (it was founded in 1851), dominated by the Gold Rush. When gold was discovered in Klondike Valley in 1896, Seattle, as the gateway to Alaska, became the place where adventurers would stock up on food and equipment before going north. All sorts of businesses flourished. A special “publicity committee” was formed to spread the stories of Klondike’s unspeakable wealth all over the world.
“In all the years of the Gold Rush, the diggers discovered $10 million worth of gold. In the meantime, the merchants of Seattle made $20 million without ever setting foot on Alaskan soil. The real Klondike therefore was in Seattle.”
This amazing ability to make money out of thin air has become a distinguishing feature of Seattle’s business community since then. A cup of steaming espresso is a new consumerist idol of America, where only several years ago people outside New York were likely to confuse “espresso” with “Esperanto”, without having the slightest idea of what either meant. This coffee revolution was masterminded by one Seattle-based company – Starbucks.
“Starbucks Support Center” proclaimed a huge sign above the entrance to the company’s headquarters in Utah Avenue where I turned up one morning agonising over not wearing a suit (I simply didn’t have one in my luggage). I shouldn’t have worried: the only person inside who was wearing a suit was Mr. Howard Schultz, the chief executive and founder of Starbucks, and that was only because he had a business meeting with some Japanese visitors
later in the day. Mr. Schultz did not have an office of his own but kept walking around the building all day long. This reminded me of Ilf and Petrov’s meeting with Henry Ford, who, as they wrote “did not lock himself in, but was constantly on the go through the plant”.
“Mr. Ford circulates,” his employees used to say. Well, I saw Mr. Schultz “circulating” around the office Henry-Ford-like, his suit and tie standing out among T-shirts and cardigans like a birch tree in a forest of conifers. The office itself was a curious hybrid of an exhibition hall (paintings on the walls, lots of flowers), a coffee shop (everyone seemed to be drinking coffee all the time) and a nursery (little kids were running among desks).
“Why do you call yourselves Support Center?” I asked Dave Olsen, Starbuck’s Senior Vice-President (he was sporting a beige polo shirt, by the way). “It means that we executives are not the most important people in the company. Our most important people are out there, with our customers.” Sipping his espresso, he proceeded to tell me that, for the first time in American history, Starbucks offered medical benefits, profit shares
and share options to its part-time staff; that their success was due to the concept of “the third place” between work and home which they had developed. “Coffee is a democratic drink, and we have created another resource for the Americans to lead their lives...”
Dave volunteered to see me off to the lift. “You know, my ex-wife hated the informality of this building,” he said as we shook hands. “Whoever his ex-wife was, she wasn’t a coffee drinker,” I thought on my way down.
Ilf and Petrov had little problem arranging a meeting with Henry Ford in 1935. My in-advance request for an interview with Bill Gates, the Henry Ford of computer-age America, was denied by Microsoft for the simple reason that “to see Bill is as hard as getting an audience with the Pope”. I said that I actually had an audience with the Pope in 1991, but it didn’t help: the founder of Microsoft was obviously busier (if not holier) than the Pontiff. And although the gates to Gates were firmly shut for me, I was invited to visit Microsoft’s Main Campus (that was what they called it!) in Redmond – about 30 miles east of Seattle.
“Where are the people?” I asked Mark Thomas, Microsoft’s PR manager, who met me inside the compound, which indeed looked like a modern university campus in the middle of summer holidays. Or like a holiday resort in off-peak season. On that ordinary working afternoon, the grounds of the world’s most successful company were deserted, if one were to discount the occasional joggers and a group of youngsters playing volleyball on a green lawn behind a fountain.
“They can be anywhere,” he shrugged. “At home, at a library, or on a beach. We don’t have office hours and move around freely, as long as we can tap into our computers and carry out all the tasks. We are successful because we have rejected a starched-shirt office environment.”
Like the rest of the Campus, the corridors of Microsoft buildings were semi-deserted, and it was almost a surprise to find David Pritchard, the company’s HR director and one of Bill Gates’s closest mates, bent over his desk, overhung with photos of rock stars. “Why are you in the office in the middle of a working day, and not on the beach like everyone else?” I asked him sternly. “I am having fun here,” he said seriously. “It is great fun tracking down and employing the world’s smartest people, the people who are smarter than I am...”

Sitting in one of the permanently empty Microsoft cafeterias over a can of “complimentary” Coke (all soft drinks are free inside Microsoft), I pondered about what I had seen in Seattle. American business culture has certainly evolved since the time of Ilf and Petrov: telephones, offices and (sadly) unquestioning adherence to one’s promises were no longer
sacrosanct. On the other hand, one truly American phenomenon, spotted by the Russian writers in 1935, was evidently on the rise.
“In American life there is a phenomenon which should interest us no less than a new machine model,” they noted in their book. That phenomenon is democracy in intercourse between people... The outward forms of such a democratism are splendid. They help a lot in work, deliver a blow to bureaucratism, and enhance human dignity.”
In our hectic and often dehumanising computer epoch, “democracy in intercourse between people” and respect for “human dignity” have become more important than ever before. It is these two factors that stand behind the great success stories of both Microsoft and Starbucks.
The volleyball players were still jumping on the lawn when I was leaving the Microsoft Campus. None of them looked hippyish or nerdish – the image many wrongly associate with Microsoft employees (or “Microsofties” as they call them in Seattle). They all had young open faces and neat hair-cuts. A bunch of smart guys playing a serious team game, they were – quite literally – falling over themselves to get it right.