You Can't Do It All By Yourself

We tend to think that extraordinary people simply do extraordinary things. Like the Great Man Theory in history, we often put way too much stock into one person's ability to accomplish amazing things.

 The Great Man Theory posits that for better or worse, people like Napoleon, Hitler, George Washington, Ghandi, Mandela etc... are single-handedly responsible for groundbreaking shifts in history. The theory puts little stock into context and the people around these "great men".

  



Too often, we see this same type of thinking in our businesses. In this analogy, the "great men" are businesses, or at least their top executives. In other words, there is an unwillingness to listen to the groundswell. Just as we saw with the GM example in chapter of 11 of Groundswell (2011), where the top executives didn't want to engage stakeholders through blogging, many executives invest little to no energy in listening to others. 

The truth is, people don't just accomplish things without any help. There is always a context, there are always contributions from others in one way or another. 

Not everybody is the best at everything like the President here. Most people in leadership positions can use a little help.

The groundswell offers said help for free. As Li & Bernoff show us, the groundswell can act as a company's personal adviser. The obvious way to do this is to take a similar approach to Salesforce.com and Dell. Salesforce and Dell allowed customers and stakeholders to freely share their feedback, criticisms, and suggestions online. Naturally, both Salesforce and Dell, like most other companies that listen to the groundswell, received countless good ideas about how to improve. Many of those ideas were implemented. No matter how smart or creative you are, no one is a match for the brainstorming power of the internet.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, showed us a great example of implementing ideas from the groundswell to improve his company. One Twitter user complained that he had trouble charging his car because people who were always leaving their cars parked at charging stations while they did other things, even though their cars are already fully charged.



Musk replied to the tweet, acknowledging that this was a problem. Within less than a week, Tesla

imposed a fee that charges drivers who leave their cars idle after they're done charging. 

The groundswell doesn't stop there either. Like we saw with Best Buy's Blue Shirt Nation, there is so much to gain from listening to your employees. Sure, as stakeholders, customers are very likely to have key insights on how best to improve a product or service. Employees though, work within a company everyday. Nobody is more involved with a company than those who work in it. So wouldn't they know the most about it?

Let's take Mark Zuckerberg for example. If anybody would act as proof for the Great Man Theory, it would be him, right? Self-made, took a simple idea and turned it into an internet empire from his college dorm room. He's barely 30 and he's already a billionaire. One Great Man changing the course of history right?

The actual story isn't so simple. We're all aware of how successful Facebook has been, but less of us are aware of what their culture is like. Turns out, over 99% of Facebook employees have a positive view of their CEO. There's a reason for that incredibly high number. 

A Facebook employee commenting on the website Quora recently said, “After I joined Facebook in 2010, I worked on a secret project, ‘graph search.’ Within a couple months, I attended two Zuck reviews to discuss the project.” The fact that the CEO of one of the world’s most dynamic and fastest growing companies is meeting with entry-level employees says a lot about the way Zuckerberg does business.

Zuckerberg has broken down traditional hierarchies at Facebook. His reasoning is that any of his employees could potentially have the next big idea. He trusts that they have a lot to contribute, and that trust almost always translates into results. 

Sure, Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished an incredible amount on his own, but the reason Facebook has been so successful is because its CEO is open to getting help. Zuckerberg has tapped the groundswell within his own organization, and it's paid dividends. 



The moral of the story is that people don't simply accomplish things on their own. No matter how impress any one person may be, that person always can use some help. In the digital age, this is more true than ever. Help is everywhere. It has never been easier to find. All we need to do is ask.