STRATEGY 9

Synergize and Reach Scale

Synergy is the highest activity of life; it creates new untapped alternatives; it values and exploits the mental, emotional, and psychological differences between people.

—Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Creating Synergy

WHEN PEOPLE and organizations work together harmoniously, they can achieve incredible outcomes. This is synergy. Synergy can galvanize change.

We first learned about the concept of synergy when we both read Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “To Synergize” is Covey’s final habit leading from dependence to independence to interdependence. He writes:

Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots will comingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better together than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more than the total of the weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more. … The very way a man and woman bring a child into the world is synergistic.

Figure 9–1. The path to greatness (Strategy 9).

Clearly, synergy can happen naturally. As we discussed in Strategy 4, when two people just seem to “click” and work together so well it is almost effortless, or when two organizations have such complimentary values, needs, and objectives that they just seem to “fit” together perfectly, synergy has taken place. Synergy manifests the natural harmony that can exist between people and between organizations.

Synergy is also a product of creativity. It is more art than science. Unleashing the power of synergy suspends logic about the possibilities of what can be accomplished. Synergy moves us beyond our comfort zone into the growth zone of Strategy 2. It means fully embracing the characteristics of the entrepreneurial mindset from Strategies 7 and 8. It removes any limitations of our individual and collective imagination.

According to Covey, “The essence of synergy is to value differences—to respect them, to build on strengths, to compensate for our weakness.” Strategy 1 explores how our identity helps to define who we are in relationship to society. Understanding and embracing our identity enables us to appreciate what makes us distinct. Strategies 2, 4, and 5 teach us the value of diverse exposure, meaningful relationships with different people, and the wisdom we can seek from others. Strategy 3 encourages us to develop our strengths and turn our weaknesses into assets. Strategy 6 stresses the importance of team cohesion and team diversity.

Synergy brings together all of these strategies and directs us to truly value differences and leverage diversity. Valuing diversity means forming partnerships that cross multiple lines of difference, including ethnicity, gender, geography, and nationality, and fostering an environment that honors and celebrates differences. Leveraging diversity means tapping into each person’s and each organization’s strengths, perspectives, and assets, to bring out the very best in every stakeholder represented at the table. It requires open and honest communication and meaningful dialogue to understand the varying perspectives of those we endeavor to work with.

Cooperation and collaboration are among the final underpinnings of synergy. Strategy 6 impresses the need to look beyond our individual agendas toward a more collective agenda, and the need to combine an identity-driven agenda with an issue-driven agenda. Both of these points speak to the need for genuine cooperation and true collaborations—relationships and partnerships that are mutually respectful and mutually beneficial, but are also guided by a shared vision for what greater good can be served by working together versus working apart.

“The challenge is to apply the principles of creative cooperation, which we learn from nature, in our social interactions,” according to Covey. In the context of redefining the game, we interpret Covey’s statement as having two meanings. First, we must apply the principles of synergy and collaborative action—creativity, communication, cooperation, collaboration, diversity, and differences—to the way we work together as people and as organizations to solve the problems being faced by our communities. Second, while synergy can occur naturally, that doesn’t mean it necessarily does occur naturally. We must sometimes be painstakingly deliberate in our efforts to foster synergy.

These deliberate efforts can take the form of:

Brainstorming sessions to encourage creativity

Training classes to foster effective communication

Leadership retreats to promote cooperation

Strategic partnerships, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions to govern collaboration

Facilitated dialogues to help people value differences and leverage diversity

Ultimately, using these kinds of deliberate efforts, or processes, can lead to effective, collaborative action.

When synergy occurs, it can translate into very powerful results. Sweeping legislation can get passed. Businesses can voluntarily merge or be acquired to create enterprises that can more effectively compete. Educational systems and social service systems can undergo much-needed reform. Community-based programs can be implemented on a widespread basis to families.

There is tremendous fragmentation and unnecessary competition among people and organizations seeking to facilitate change. There are people working individually. There are educational and faith-based organizations working independently. There are businesses pursuing the same goals working in silos. Such isolated actions are either unproductive or counterproductive. Synergy is the antidote.

Reaching Scale and Expanding Scope

At this point in the book, you should know that we are advocates of making significant and meaningful impact in whatever we are doing. In Strategy 6, we are explicit about how important creating and establishing organizations is to making an impact. From here on out, we take a distinctly organizational view toward increasing social and economic impact.

To make a difference in business, education, or in communities, we know that figuring out ways to increase wealth, social change, or both are critical to achieve the broadest or deepest impact. We call this process “reaching scale and expanding scope,” and they are key concepts (defined below) for building wealth and addressing the social issues in the African-American community.

When we talk about making a broad or deep impact, we mean making an impact that is about scale, scope, and time.

SCALE

People often say, “If I can touch the life of at least one person, my efforts will not have been in vain.” And we completely agree. But what if those same efforts could reach hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people? That is the underlying thinking for reaching scale. It is not necessarily about working harder; it is about working smarter, especially with things that you know work.

For businesses, this means starting small, learning all you can from opening the first office or first store, and then adding multiple stores or offices in different places. It also means creating products or conducting your service on a larger scale so that you can reduce your unit cost and utilize the new efficiencies to the benefit of the business. This is known as economies of scale, and many large corporations use this strategy in their operations.

For social-change makers, reaching scale has an additional meaning. Reaching scale also means taking a proven model for change (e.g., strategies, tactics, programs, policies, and approaches) to other locations that could benefit from the effective solution you have come up with. Reaching scale is about moving from “each one, reach one” to “each one, reach one hundred” (or one thousand or one million).

If something works, it should be scaled up. For social-change makers, this is not a cookie-cutter process. Often, these models for change have to be adapted to the local circumstances. There are many stories of organizations with proven business models in a community trying to move that model to another place and failing. To reach scale, you have to really think about what it is about your model that is exportable to other places. It is more about extracting “best practices” or “promising practices” than replication.

SCOPE

A parallel way of thinking about a broad or deep impact is the idea of expanding scope. When a business provides more services to the same customers that is an expansion of scope. When social entrepreneurs expand the service to a local community instead of moving to a different community, this is an example of expanding the scope of impact. To expand scope is to move from offering A, to offering A + B, to offering A + B + C.

Expanding scope means that you desire to change people’s lives in a broader, wider-reaching way or a deeper, targeted way. This approach has its advantages. Each time you interact with a customer, client, or community you learn about their needs. That knowledge can be translated into providing better products or services. Rather than trying to find, or relying upon, other customers or communities to achieve additional goals, the expanding scope approach seeks to work with the same people in ways that deliver a wider range of value. This should involve using some of the same resources to provide service A that you are using to provide service B. In doing so, there are economies of scope to be gained that will benefit your business or organization. It may also lead to further diversification of your revenue.

To gain the broadest impact, reaching scale and expanding scope must be completed over a long period of time. For this strategy to be successful, institutions must be built that can endeavor to carry out the work of scale and scope in perpetuity.

Profiles of Synergy, Scale, and Scope

The Sustainable South Bronx. After college, Majora Carter didn’t want to return to her South Bronx neighborhood of New York City, but she didn’t believe she had much of a choice. Around this time she learned that pollution from trucks, debris, and other environmental contaminants was making the community sick. In response to these alarming trends, she founded the Sustainable South Bronx (SSBX), a community organization dedicated to environmental justice solutions through innovative, economically sustainable projects that are informed by community needs.

Under Carter’s leadership, SSBX significantly expanded the scope of its work and deepened its impact in the neighborhood by influencing and changing attitudes of the community about environmental issues, getting changes incorporated into the city’s plans, and instituting green-collar job initiatives (before that was fashionable). SSBX has been instrumental in connecting community voices with private philanthropy, corporations, government, and industry. Carter, who has since moved on to form the Majora Carter Group, LLC, told us in an interview, “So what I really wanted to do was not only start an organization to advocate against these kinds of really egregious and discriminatory policies that were being impacted against poor communities and poor communities of color, but I also wanted to respond to communities when they talked about what their dreams were for a healthy, sustainable community.”

World Wide Technology. David Steward found tremendous synergy with a friend, James Kavanaugh, when he brought him in as a partner in World Wide Technology. In fact, Steward gave Kavanaugh a 15 percent stake in the company on just a handshake. WWT is primarily a reseller of information technology products from large equipment manufacturers. Over the years they have reached scale and expanded scope by establishing more than twenty-five strategic partnerships, with companies like Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, HP, Sun Microsystems, Novell, Lexmark, Symantec, VMware, and Sony Electronics, to resell, install, and service their computers, servers, routers, switches, storage devices, and software. The company’s relationship with networking gear maker Cisco represents about one-third of its $2.6 billion in annual revenue. “My first job and my biggest job that I have here today, is to serve the people of this organization and serve them well. If I serve them well, guess what? There’s going to be a culture of us serving one another, and that spreads out to the relationships of the partners we work with,” Steward said. “They know that we’re going to put their best interests—and serve them—first, and so they’ll want us involved in their deals.” Today, WWT sits atop the Black Enterprise B.E. 100s list as the largest Black-owned business in the world and continues to have a broad economic impact.

Amnesty International. When Benjamin Jealous joined Amnesty International in 2003 as director of the Human Rights Program to take on the issue of racial profiling, he faced a stack of challenges. Because the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were from the Middle East, racial profiling was spreading beyond the larger minority communities in the United States to affect Arabs, Muslims, Persians, and others. The breadth of the problem required that he use different tactics. Fortunately Jealous, who had studied political science at Columbia University and attended internationally diverse Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, was comfortable working in such a context.

“We had to figure out how to talk in a way that was capable of convincing the powers that be that what we were suggesting also just made good sense toward making the country safer,” said Jealous, who in 2008 was named president and CEO of the NAACP. “When you’re a Black American, both in the American context and in the British context, everybody’s expecting you to come in talking solely about your group and only be capable of being an expert on the impact on Black people. So the fact that I was willing to listen, engage, and pay attention to the problem as it related to Muslims, as it related to Arabs, as it related to Persians, as it related to Native Americans, as it related to Southeast Asians … that empowered me to be successful in what could have been a very hostile context.”

Jealous built a synergistic coalition of organizations representing different minority groups, ethnicities, and religions, including Blacks, Hispanics, Arabs, Muslims, Native Americans, and Asians, that reached scale to include more than 100 groups nationwide. After holding six national public hearings and doing more than a year of research, Amnesty released its report, “Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, National Security, and Human Rights in the United States.” Following the report, also in 2004, the U.S. House of Representatives proposed the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA). This bill was introduced in Congress, but hasn’t passed. Regardless, Amnesty’s work has already had a broad impact by significantly raising awareness of the issue.

Harpo Productions. In 1984, before Oprah Winfrey was a household name, she tapped Jeff Jacobs, an entertainment lawyer, to renegotiate her contract with AM Chicago, a local morning program that she was hired to host about a year earlier. Jacobs convinced her to start her own company, and in 1986 they created Harpo Productions Inc. He then brokered a deal that gave Oprah the right to syndicate The Oprah Winfrey Show, bringing it to a national audience and creating a multimillion-dollar enterprise that has reached scale and spawned movies, a magazine, other popular daytime shows, radio programs, and the Oprah Winfrey Network, which collectively represent a significant and broad economic impact. In commenting on her synergy with Jacobs, Oprah told Fortune magazine in 2002 that he is “a piranha—and that’s a good thing for me to have.” Like the relationship between David Steward and James Kavanaugh at World Wide Technology, Oprah showed that she valued Jacobs’ contribution to her success—first giving him a 5 percent stake in Harpo Productions and then later boosting his stake to 10 percent.

Harlem Children’s Zone. For decades many of the same problems that Majora Carter witnessed growing up in the South Bronx plagued neighboring Harlem, where Geoffrey Canada came to work at the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families. Canada, who is also from the South Bronx, studied education at Harvard. He worked at Rheedlen in the late 1990s, but grew frustrated that its afterschool programs for promoting antiviolence and truancy prevention weren’t doing enough to decrease the low graduation rates, criminal activity, and youth unemployment that afflicted the community. So Canada decided to design a program to fill the gaps and transformed Rheedlen into what is known today as the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ).

The HCZ team put together a program that connects education, health, and youth development issues and that appreciates the complexity of the urban environment. Its comprehensive “cradle to college” philosophy includes programming for parents and babies, preschoolers, and older students. “We had to create a pipeline that started at birth, that ensured our children came into the world healthy and happy, and [that] stayed with these children through every developmental stage of their life until they graduated, and then into college, and then we would stay with this group of children through college,” Canada said.

HCZ’s strategy for scaling up its efforts was written in the organization’s ten-year business plan. In 1997, the agency began a network of programs for a twenty-four-block area—the Harlem Children’s Zone Project. In that same year it spread to an almost 100-block area serving 7,400 children and more than 4,100 adults. In 2009, President Obama announced that HCZ would be used as the model for a national program to create programs in twenty “Promise Neighborhoods” and allocated $10 million toward the planning of the initiative through the U.S. Department of Education, along with an appropriation of up to $65 million for “Choice Neighborhoods,” a related effort through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This could lead to an expansion of HCZ’s approach to communities throughout the United States. In this regard, Geoffrey Canada’s efforts could result in both a deep impact (across Harlem) and a broad impact (across the country) at the same time.

It is clear from these profiles, and others found throughout this book, that redefining the game can happen at multiple levels. Majora Carter, Geoffrey Canada, and Angela Glover Blackwell (mentioned in the previous chapter) redefined the game at the community level, helping organize residents in New York. In earlier chapters we discussed Gabriella Morris at Prudential and Don Thompson at McDonald’s, who are working at the organizational level to redefine how corporate resources can have an impact beyond the company. David Steward, who sits at the helm of a multibillion-dollar business enterprise, and multibillionaire Oprah Winfrey have redefined the fields of information technology and media, respectively, at the industry level. In fact, Oprah’s influence extends throughout the globe. Benjamin Jealous, in his role at Amnesty International and now as president of the NAACP, and President Barack Obama, in his position as U.S. Senator and now President of the United States of America, are working at the societal level to redefine how our country addresses issues related to health care, education, and economic development. Without all of their efforts to redefine the game in some manner, social change would not have been possible.

The Critical Importance of Synergy
and Scale to African Americans

Why are synergy and scale of such critical importance to the African-American community? It is simple. We have many great programs and initiatives, but some are not coordinated with one another and others are not large enough to make a lasting impact. How do we deal with this as a community? We have to systematically increase the scale and the scope of our efforts. This is perhaps best understood from the historical perspective that informs our thinking.

ADDRESSING SOCIETAL ISSUES: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

When some people try to compare the African-American experience to the experience of immigrant groups, we worry that they are not comparing apples to apples.

There are two major ways that the experiences differ. First, African Americans were brought here as slaves. And even when slavery was over, our skin color meant we were easily identifiable for various discriminatory practices, namely, Jim Crow laws. This kind of discrimination was prevalent and well documented by historians.

But the second and perhaps more significant way in which the immigrant experience is different from the African-American experience is numerical. At the end of the Civil War, the population of people of African descent in America was more than 4.5 million. Approximately 10 percent of this population (450,000) had their freedom before the Emancipation Proclamation. Many among that 10 percent were educated and had businesses, families, and influence.

In comparison, during the 1890s and early part of the twentieth century, several immigrant groups—Germans, Italians, Russian, and Polish immigrants—came to America in large numbers. But their numbers were relatively small in comparison to the African-American population. In 1880, less than 2 million German immigrants and 1.85 million Irish immigrants entered America. The African-American population in 1880 was already more than 6.5 million. Why is that important? Because when you think about the economic development of ethnic groups, you have to consider what access that ethnic group has to the resources that enable social mobility. By “social mobility” we mean having the ability to change your family’s social status over time. In this context, we are referring to moving out of poverty into the middle class.

For example, education is an important vehicle for social mobility because it opens up opportunities for better jobs and economic standing. But if you don’t have access to it because of poverty, poor schools, or discrimination, social mobility is very difficult. So, if you want to impact an entire community, you have to figure out what the key mechanisms of social mobility are and how your community is going to gain or create access to them.

The Jewish community of the late 1800s and early 1900s faced significant discrimination and harassment, and many of the new immigrants were impoverished. Their strategy was for the well-established members of the Jewish community to create a parallel set of institutions that would assist new Jewish immigrants and their children. Stanley Lieberson, in a book entitled A Piece of the Pie: Blacks & White Immigrants Since 1880 (University of California Press, 1980), documents that within a few generations, the vast majority of Jewish immigrant families were doing well. Italian, German, and Polish immigrants followed this same pattern. Some of these organizations, church auxiliaries, and social clubs (among them, Knights of Columbus and the Polish American Club) remain to this day.

But this is where the numbers are very important. As noted previously, in 1865, there were 4.5 million Africans in America, 4 million of which were former slaves and living in poverty. They had varying levels of skills and talents (human capital). The social question of that day was: How do you address the social issues and economic development of these 4 million people representing almost 90 percent of the African-American community? We know that some fraction of these former slaves went on to take full advantage of the opportunities of being free, but most were illiterate and had limited opportunities to succeed beyond the kind of work they did as slaves.

One way to look at the challenges of the African-American community during this period is that no other ethnic group had to train, educate, and absorb as many people as the African-American community post-slavery. Within twenty years of the end of the Civil War, new laws were being established to further constrain opportunities for social mobility. From 1877 until 1965, there were laws on the books of many states that prohibited the access of African Americans to the most important vehicles of social mobility—education, homeownership, political power, and capital.

During this period, W.E.B. DuBois and others promoted the idea of “The Talented Tenth,” referring to the 10 percent of the African-American population that would organize to help the other 90 percent. His idea that only the college educated will be the leaders of social change has proved not to be accurate. It would have taken more than 10 percent to put together the kinds of institutions needed to help the rest of the African-American community. By 1920, there were 10 million African Americans and the issues in the community were becoming more pronounced.

We argue that a significant part of the challenge of transforming the African-American community is fundamentally a challenge of proportions. If the number of people doing “well” in our community was equal to the number of people “not doing well,” it would simply be a matter of each person taking responsibility for one other person and mentoring that person toward good citizenship, education, and wealth building. But, in actuality, the combined number of Black people in poverty or near poverty, who attend poorly performing schools, who live in crumbling neighborhoods, and whose movements are monitored by the state (in jail or probation or paroled) is larger than the number in college, in entrepreneurship, in homeownership, or without a criminal record. We are not here to debate all of the reasons for this (there are many), but the situation is what it is.

To redefine the game and reshape America, we must create systems that address our social and economic concerns in scalable ways. We must organize ourselves. We must be willing to take on the fight. Since the proportion of people who want to and can do this difficult work is small, we have to work smarter to get to more people and affect more lives. And that means understanding the concepts of synergy and scale, and revisiting the idea of institution building.

INSTITUTION BUILDING REVISITED

As we discussed in Strategy 8, institutions are organizations that stand the test of time. They will exist long after we have left this world and, in doing so, will continue to uphold their governing ideas of mission, vision, and values over time. Institutions can make sure that the social change you are advocating takes place for years to come.

In essence, Strategy 7 challenged today’s intrapreneurs to urge their institutions to be more responsive to the needs of African Americans. Why? Because by changing their institutions for the better, the changes they’ve made become lasting changes. But remember that our definition of institution doesn’t just apply to businesses. It equally applies to community, educational, philanthropic, and faith-based organizations, too. Strategy 8 essentially challenged African-American entrepreneurs to work together strategically to build institutions for a profit and for a purpose. Why? Because by creating institutions, the positive effort of the institution leads to lasting change. Scale and scope are the mechanisms that empower people to build institutions in ways that create lasting change.

In fact, effecting lasting change and leaving a positive legacy are the essence of our final chapter: Strategy 10: Give Back Generously.