Bernd Schmitt: How to Make All Your Thoughts Big

I'm reading Big Think Strategy by Bernd H. Schmitt, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Schmitt's subtitle is "how to leverage bold ideas and leave small thinking behind." He claims to have come up with a systematic way for companies to think big thoughts, like the Trojan Horse. The Trojan Horse is perhaps better known in business as a kind of malevolent software attack, but the original concept came from the Trojan Wars, or at least the Greek myths around that war.

The Greeks ended the war by coming up with a clever idea, commonly attributed to Odysseus (though he may have stolen it from one of the Greek gods). Here's how it worked: the Greeks burned their camps and sailed away from Troy, leaving behind only a large wooden horse, to honor the Trojans.

The Trojans pulled the horse inside their city and threw a huge party. But late at night, in a carefully orchestrated maneuver, a few Greeks sequestered in the belly of the horse crept out past the wine-addled Trojans, threw open the gates and signaled the ships to return. The Greeks overthrow Troy and set off paroxysms of poetry (The Trojan Horse story is told briefly in the 4th book of The Odyssey and at somewhat more length in the 2nd book of Vergil's Aeneid).

Schmitt may have solved the Innovator's Dilemma, of which I am reminded every time I drive down the main street of my town, home to the company that pioneered selling soda pop in cans, long ago acquired by a company that followed behind it. I must note, however, that the example of the Trojan Horse is improbable. As Robert Graves notes in The Greek Myths, it's likely a story that evolved from artists' fancy. Troy most likely was sacked using wooden towers covered in horsehide. Even in the poems it's seen as a sign that the gods were involved that the Greeks were not discovered, and what management strategy can really depend on miracles?

But more to the point for modern management, it took Odysseus (or Athena) a decade of siege and the death of Achilles and other heroes to come up with the idea. Schmitt also cites the example of IBM's conversion to services from hardware, which came about after the company had a near-death experience, and the Metropolitan Opera's clever marketing, which has stimulated growth but cannot change the nature of the Met's problem: it is a kind of modern musical museum. Each of these examples was driven by desperation and fraught with peril. Thus, none fill me with confidence that Schmitt can systematize big ideas.

We shall see where he goes in his slim (160 pages) volume.