The Liberator

Which is to say, being stuck isn't necessarily all bad. "You could be stuck because you are incredibly ambitious and you're trying something new and have hit a roadblock. You could also be plain old stuck because of inertia." Most people, he says, don't even know they're stuck. "You can go through any organization and find capable people who seem like they're performing well. If you dig deeper, they'll confess that they don't know what they're doing. They feel directionless."

Because Stone Yamashita has remained deliberately small, few organizations have the opportunity to work directly with the group to get unstuck. Yet bringing this philosophy to a broader audience is one reason why Yamashita and Yale School of Management professor (and Yamashita's freshman dorm mate) Sandra Spataro have collaborated on a new book, Unstuck (Portfolio, April 2004). This is not your typical consultant opus, full of multisyllabic phraseology and complicated hieroglyphics meant to suggest deep intellect. It is small in size and economical in words. It's a tool, not a treatise, illustrated with bold fonts and graphics and written plainly enough to appeal to nonbusiness folks, like Spataro's mom or Yamashita's masseur. ("I gave the book to my massage therapist in San Francisco, and he realized he was stuck," says Yamashita. "He quit and moved to run his own business in Monterey. It was a bummer for me.")

A systems thinker, Yamashita views every organization's problems through the lens of a system in balance. Purpose is at the center of a universe orbited by five components: strategy, culture, people and interaction, metrics and rewards, and structure and process. A company gets stuck when one component is off-kilter, or when the process and the system are misaligned. "There is no voodoo to how to get unstuck," says Yamashita. "It's about taking actions every day in a sensible way with a little bit of creativity and invention."

If, for example, your team is stuck because an "enemy" is trying to defeat the team's idea or approach, here's what Yamashita advises: Make a list of the people who stand against you and then 1) befriend them, 2) convince them, 3) get into a true dialogue that can improve your idea, 4) invite them in, and 5) have them headhunted into a different company. All of this may sound a bit oversimplistic, and sometimes it is, but it's also dead-on.

In part, Yamashita's approach comes from his experience as both an insider and an outsider, born to a third-generation Japanese-American father who helped design control panels for the Apollo space program and a Chinese-American mother who was a professor. At an early age, he felt stuck himself. One of only two Asian kids in his Tustin, California, junior high, Yamashita had a hard time fitting in until his mother convinced him that the only way to improve his lot was to take charge of it by running for school president. He won. "That really shaped my belief that you don't have to accept the conditions you've been given," he says. "I both fit in and was completely separate at the same time, which is what my company is about."

Leadership came naturally to Yamashita, who was president of his class at Stanford and graduated with a BA in quantitative economics and a master's in organizational behavior in 1988. So, too, did chutzpah. He turned down several job offers, announcing he wanted to work only for Apple, although it wasn't recruiting. He snared an informational interview and charged in, announcing, naively, "I'm here for a job. I'm fascinated by Apple. Tell me what you have available." The woman replied politely that there were no entry-level positions. Yamashita, stunned, said that couldn't be true. Pressed, she admitted that there was a writing job in education marketing, but it required 8 to 10 years' experience. "That sounds perfect!" an ebullient Yamashita exclaimed. "I know how to write. If you hire me and it doesn't work out, we're no worse off." Yep, he sweet-talked his way into the job.

Yet by the time he arrived, the job had morphed into a speechwriting position for the new CEO, John Sculley. At the ripe old age of 21, Yamashita found himself offering Sculley his (unsolicited) opinions on corporate strategy. "So I start asking questions," he remembers sheepishly. "What is the state of the enterprise business? What is our licensing strategy?" Yamashita caught hell for putting the boss on the spot, but learned something else. "CEOs are people too and they don't have all the answers," he says. Steve Jobs then recruited Yamashita to come to Next Computing as a speechwriter and marketer. There he learned the difference between having a creative vision and the right motivation behind it. "The company lacked a purpose, partly because it was founded out of spite and vengeance."