Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation

FIVEThird—Make (and Break) Connections

“I was always independent,even when I had partners.”

–Samuel Goldwyn

WHEN YOU RETHINK YOUR company and study it using the “what” as your unit of analysis, you can see that, at its core, it is a tightly woven fabric of connections—emotional, financial, technical—that cut across organizational boundaries. Pull on one thread and many others might move. The clerk in accounting is related to the chief dispatcher who went to school with the director of advertising. A glitch in production or a spurt in sales can send shock waves from one end of the company to the other, from design to delivery, and it might well affect the bottom line.

So before you act upon your knowledge of which “whats” are high in value ...