How - Dov Seidman [24]
Jerry Maguire tells the story of a man fighting back against the dehumanizing forces of the era. Upon its release, it became one of the top-grossing films of all time because it struck a chord in people tired of cutting corners.2 We were in the Just Do It decade. The world was accelerating rapidly, and “Just Do It,” the advertising slogan of sport shoe maker Nike, captured the self-centered zeitgeist of the decade. The market was booming, and a huge new investor class experienced the particular easy-money thrill typical of speculative bubbles. Many leapt in as fast as they could, afraid the train would pass them by. Millions of people gambled in the market, and millions more saw their 401(k) accounts and retirement savings boom. People took chances, buoyed by the security that increasing prosperity brings. Everyone seemed to be in it for number one.
With the seemingly limitless possibilities of the dot-com era, the spirit of the age infected business. Managers, to answer the short-term demands of an increasingly insistent capital market, looked for short-cuts and easy solutions, managing for the here and now in ways that often neglected long-term goals. The habits and tendencies of the industrial age—efficiency, speed, and a focus on the bottom line—became all-consuming priorities. The message to subordinates was clear: Just get it done. Managers didn’t care how. As long as it fell within the limits of legality, Just Do It. Often, they ignored the methods employed. In the same way that the era of industrial capitalism rewarded and encouraged certain habits of mind, like hoarding, the 1990s seemed to call forth other qualities. In the 1990s, you got ahead by developing habits of ingenuity and cleverness, ways to dance around obstacles in fast-changing times. The winners danced elegantly; everyone else just danced as fast as they could. Business, in general, focused on managing initiatives and tasks and became obsessed with Gantt and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) charts. Its approach to people was the same. The watchword of the day was performance, and human resources departments everywhere got focused on performance management. It became important to always answer the phone on the third ring, to always have a smile on your face, and to always perform any number of prescribed behaviors that managers felt would get them closer to their goals.
Along the way, however, we lost the value of leadership. You manage things; you lead people. And we felt it. Just Do It was no longer enough. As Jerry Maguire seemed to show us, by the end of the decade people started to care about how you did it—how you treated people and how you achieved your goals. The winds of public opinion shifted, and, importantly for business, the shift started to affect the bottom line. As early as 1997, a global public awareness campaign buffeted Just Do It Nike by exposing the substandard factory conditions at its manufacturing facilities around the world.3 Information about the HOWs of business became increasingly easy to obtain and share. Change was in the air, but its scent was often overpowered by the heady rush of the times. It was not until the turn of the century that the natural cycles of boom and bust began