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By Root 1625 0

number-one most looked-up word on its world-renowned dictionary web site was integrity.18 Our new networks of connection allow enormous innovation, but only for those who understand how to send current through these networks and how to make Waves with other people. Frameworks change; paradigms shift. Business, like life, often seems to exist in a bowl full of splinters; movement in one place has a profound effect on dozens of others. Sometimes, tectonic forces bring about new alignments in the world. Sometimes, it is just our ability to see familiar things in a different way that reveals a new world order lurking not far beneath the surface of the one we thought we knew so well. If the world has changed, how we conduct ourselves within it must change, too.

In this part of the book, we have explored the conspiracy of forces that define the parameters of a new framework, a new reality for twenty-first-century business. We’ve looked at the shift from land to capital to information and the old habits like hoarding, dividing and conquering, and command-and-control that have clung to us despite profound change; the trend in business toward horizontal connections that puts us into increasing contact with those of relatively equal stature working in teams around the globe, the ways in which we have been jammed together across time and cultures faster than we have developed frameworks to understand and operate productively with one another, and how information and communications technology trespasses upon and alters how we fill the spaces between us. We’ve talked about the many ramifications of transparency, how it inflates the value of reputation and how it combines with the free flow of information to make reputation more vulnerable to inaccurate or unfair charges. We’ve charted the end of the Just Do It era, with its focus on bottom line results and transactional behaviors, and the limitations of rules to govern human conduct. And we’ve considered the profound way that these changes have shifted our focus from WHAT to HOW.

The picture of the world these forces and dynamics paint reveals a sea change, not a pendulum swing, in how we do what we do, and places unprecedented focus on human conduct as a process full of value. There is no going back. It bears repeating that we will never be less transparent, will never have less information, and will never be less connected than we are today. No matter what our vertical specialty—sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, administration, management, service, and on and on—achievement in the twenty-first century dramatically depends on our ability to thrive in a system of connections more vast, more varied, and more exposed than any before in the history of man. We do not live in glass houses (houses have walls); we live on glass microscope slides, flat as flat can be, visible and exposed to all.

Success now requires new skills and habits, a new lens for seeing, and a new consciousness for relating. In our see-through world, there’s an overabundance of information and it flows too easily for anyone to control it and outfox everyone. You can no longer game the system and expect that no one will find out. You need to stop dancing around people and start leading a dance that everyone can follow. Long-term, sustained success is directly proportional to your ability—as a company or an individual—to make Waves throughout evanescing networks of association, to reach out to others and enlist them in endeavors larger than yourself, and to do so while everyone watches you. In the chapters that follow, we’ll explore HOW.

Part II

HOW WE THINK

He who has a hundred miles to walk

should reckon ninety as half the journey.

—Japanese proverb

INTRODUCTION: THE PARADOX OF JOURNEY

As a law student, I was a teaching fellow in a class taught by Alan Dershowitz, Stephen J. Gould, and Robert Nozick called “Thinking about Thinking” to undergrads at Harvard College. It was a highly conceptual, cross-disciplinary class that combined science, philosophy, and law to confront the big