Where is Your Times Square?

Working with customers who are on an expedition to transform their business has a lot of advantages: you’ve got to experience first-hand real challenges and organizational dynamics and bring the best practices coupled with proven tactics to help these ambitious customers on their journey.

“You’ve got to NAIL IT before you SCALE IT”. Stanford Professor Bob Sutton teaches this mantra, which I shared with a manufacturing customer based out of North Europe. When we started the customer engagement with a few Salesforce colleagues back in August’17 all we heard from the customer was “We need to see quick wins”, or “We need to change xyz across all three divisions, because the effect will be truly transformational. We expect you to help us with this change.” We faced impatience and some frustration, because we didn’t deliver quick results. We know that one of the hallmarks of bad scaling in organizational change initiatives is that leaders want to go big before they know what works.

How do you approach such a situation?

You’ve got to start small. And this is the reason we picked up a project with the code name ESCAPE to start with. We did surprise many people by choosing this project. The reason for our decision was simple: the project was relatively small and the scope pretty well defined. Once we nail our methodology and agile approach with project ESCAPE, we can scale to other project and teach the customer “to fish”. This was our “Times Square”.

“What has New York City's Time Square to do with all this?”, you might ask.

Here is a story:

In 2003, West Point graduate and former U.S. Army officer Becky Margiotta began leading an effort to reduce the homelessness problem in New York City's Time Square. Becky and her team spent five years working on the “Street to Home Initiative” in Times Square. Becky spent her days in Times Square coming to deeply understand the needs of the more than 50 chronically homeless people. By getting started and immersing herself in the lives of these individuals, she and her team did the painstaking work of getting all of them into permanent supportive housing. By 2008, the mindset, skills, and methods the team developed enabled them to find homes for 49 of the 50 homeless people living in Times Square. In 2010, the 100,000 Homes Campaign was launched—the plan was to spread what the team had learned in Times Square to other cities. The goal was to find homes for 100,000 Americans experiencing chronic homelessness. The Campaign announced that they reached this goal on June 10, 2014. Source: Stanford’s Prof. Sutton LinkedIn post and Stanford University case study.

These images show how many homeless people were at New York City's Time Square before and after the project Becky Margiotta tirelessly worked on.

What an impactful story!

Becky and her team spent five years working on how to house people who were chronically homeless in Times Square before they developed a "playbook" that (hopefully) would work in other cities across the US. “You’ve got to nail it before you scale it.”

Becky approached the situation differently than many people would have done. She did the painstaking work of finding permanent supportive housing FIRST to accommodate the 50 chronically homeless people in New York’s Times Square. Once in permanent housing, many got back control of their lives and never spent a night on the streets again. Becky didn’t start by saying “Let’s resolve the bigger problem. How can we address the root cause of homelessness in the New York?” She started small, one homeless person at a time.

As leaders and their teams are working under a lot of pressure to deliver results and change their businesses in a sustainable way, it is worthwhile pausing for a moment and asking them the question “Where is your Times Square?”

Screenshot courtesy: “Organizational Drag and How To Reduce It” course material, Prof. Bob Sutton, Stanford Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program