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of
WHAT. As this metric grows, any company can become a "leading"
company. But it is the ability to inspire, to maintain clarity of WHY,
that gives only a few people and organizations the ability to lead.
The moment at which the clarity of WHY starts to go fuzzy is the
split. At this point organizations may be loud, but they are no longer
clear.
When organizations are small, WHAT they do and WHY they do
it are in close parallel. Born out of the personality of the founder it is
relatively easy for early employees to "get it." Clarity of WHY
understood because the source of passion is near—in fact it
physically comes to work every day. In most small businesses all the
employees are all crammed into the same room and socialize
together. Simply being around a charismatic founder allows that
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209
feeling of being a part of something special to flourish. Although
they may be some efficiencies to be gained, for small businesses that
at perfectly comfortable staying small, the need to articulate the
WHY is not as important. For organizations that want to pass the
School Bus Test, to become billion-dollar organizations or work at a
scale large enough to shift markets or society, the need to manage
through the split is paramount.
The School Bus Test is a simple metaphor. If a founder or leader
of an organization were to be hit by a school bus, would the orga-
nization continue to thrive at the same pace without them at the
helm? So many organizations are built on the force of a single per-
sonality that their departure can cause significant disruption. The
question isn't if it happens—all founders eventually leave or die—
it's just a question of when and how prepared the organization is for
the inevitable departure. The challenge isn't to cling to the leader; it's
to find effective ways to keep the founding vision alive forever.
To pass the School Bus Test, for an organization to continue to
inspire and lead beyond the lifetime of its founder, the founder's
WHY must be extracted and integrated into the culture of the
company. What's more, a strong succession plan should aim to find
a leader inspired by the founding cause and ready to lead it into the
next generation. Future leaders and employees alike must be in-
spired by something bigger than the force of personality of the
founder and must see beyond profit and shareholder value alone.
Microsoft has experienced a split, but is not so far down the line
that it can't be put back on track. There was a time not too long ago
that people at Microsoft showed up at work every day to change the
world. And they did. What Microsoft achieved, putting a PC on
every desk, dramatically changed the way we live. But then their
WHY went fuzzy. Few people at the company today are instructed
to do everything they can to help people be more productive so that
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210
they can achieve their greatest potential. Instead, Microsoft became
just a software company.
If you visit Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington,
you will find that although their WHY has gone fuzzy, it is not lost.
That sense of a cause, that desire to change the world again, is still
there, but it has become unfocused, wrapped up in HOW and
WHAT they do. Microsoft has a remarkable opportunity to clarify
their WHY and regain the inspiration that took them to where they
are today. If they do not, if all they do is manage the WHAT and
continue to ignore the WHY, they will end up looking like America
Online, a company so far past the split that their WHY is indeed
lost. There is barely a hint of the original WHY left anymore.
America Online used to inspire. Like Google today, it was the
hot company to work for. People clamored to move to Virginia to
work for this amazing company that was changing the rules of
business. And it was true that, like all inspiring companies, AOL set
in motion changes that profoundly altered how we do almost ev-
erything. They inspired a nation to get online. Their cause was clear
and their decisions were governed by their WHY. Their goal was to
get more people online, even if their decisions in pursuit of that goal
wreaked havoc on their business in the short term. With their WHY
in focus, AOL pulled ahead of their competition by deciding to
change from hourly pricing for Internet access to unlimited monthly
pricing, a decision that created so much traffic it shut down their
servers. Given the impact, the decision was neither practical nor
rational, but it was the right choice to help bring their cause to life.
That their systems shut down with the additional traffic only
pushed them to work harder to cope with it, to ensure that America
could, in fact, get and stay online.
In those days, having an AOL e-mail address was a point of
pride—a sign of being one of those who was a part of the Internet
revolution. These days, still having an AOL e-mail address is a sym-
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211
bol of having been left behind. That the meaning of something as
simple as
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