The Art of Smart

Ariede Geus

Visiting Fellow
London Business School
London, England

The best learning takes place through play. I am not talking about playing with Nerf balls and hula hoops. Rather, I'm talking about playing with representations of reality. This approach to learning is not new, but it's underused in the management world.

Think about it: In product development, whenever the stakes are high -- for instance, when human life is at risk -- learning is done and decisions are made through play. Airplanes are never built, cars are never made, oil platforms are never constructed without first building and playing with models. And through that prototyping process, people learn how to do things.

Play is the best way to learn, because the learners do not fear the consequences of their thoughts and actions. In the end, they know that they are only playing with a representation of reality and not with reality itself. But that is the exact opposite of the way we managers normally make decisions. Instead, we sit around trying to construct reality itself while weighing the consequences. Fear of the consequences -- or fear of one another -- dominates the process. The result: reduced imagination and increased stagnation.

Arie de Geus worked at Royal Dutch/Shell for more than 30 years. He served as coordinator for Group Planning and in several other capacities. He is the author of "The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment" (Harvard Business School Press, 1997).

W.S. "Ozzie" Osborne

General Manager
IBM Speech Systems
West Palm Beach, Florida

I've been at IBM for more than three decades. I was taught to believe that product development consisted of four ironclad, sequential steps: design, develop, test, and then enter the marketplace. That process had been deeply ingrained in me. But, obviously, the Internet has changed everything. Now you develop a product quickly, take it to market for customer testing and evaluation, and then get customer feedback to continue with development. That's a huge shift.

In 1997, I took over the speech group, which was doing things much faster than I was. I had just come from the hardware side of IBM, and my programming days had long since passed. But what allowed me to adjust to a new way of operating was trust -- in my team and in my gut. When it comes to any learning process, trust is one of the most critical ingredients.

Ozzie Osborne (ozzie@us.ibm.com) directs R&D, finance, marketing, and sales and strategy for IBM's human-interface technologies. He was an integral member of the team that developed the PC/AT and the PC LAN.

Jeffrey B. Swartz

President and CEO
Timberland Co.
Stratham, New Hampshire

People have enormous emotional and practical investments in what once worked. It's risky to admit that the processes that you've worked so hard to perfect may no longer be valid. But the most relevant thing about yesterday is not what you did, but how you did it. Long ago, I stopped trying to predict tomorrow's problems or the forces that may compel us to do things differently in the future. Instead, I've realized that success relies solely on our ability to learn.

As a leader, one of the biggest things I've learned is that I don't always have to be right. I used to feel that the only way to justify my egregious salary was to tell people what to do. I don't let myself do that anymore. Instead, I leave people alone and trust that they'll come up with a suitable solution -- and, in turn, that process perpetuates a learning environment.

For instance, we've been trying to create a day-care program at Timberland. Several years ago, I commissioned outside people to design a program. They came back with a model that no one wanted. But at a company rally recently, a woman asked me what I was going to do about day care. I told her that I was not going to do anything about it. My kids are getting older, and they don't need day care. The place went silent. But then I said that if she needs day care and if it's relevant for the company, then she should let me know what she wants to do about it.

So what did she do? She organized a group that polled other employees, researched the cost of a day-care program, and identified where the funding would come from. Then she held a meeting to present the group's case to me. When I asked her why she had invited me to the meeting, she said, "To applaud." That meeting was spectacular! The group still has some issues to work out before the program is implemented, but the way the group tackled the problem was amazing. All I did was to move out of the way.

Jeffrey B. Swartz (corpcomm@timberland.com) has grown Timberland from a $156 million company to an $862 million global footwear and apparel company. Operating under the belief that a company can do well and do good, Swartz has also developed a social-enterprise department in the company and has created a program in which all employees receive 40 hours of paid leave to perform community service.