Good Ideas From Bad People: The Innovative Nature Of Blackwater

They never tell you this in B-school, but at the highest levels, sometimes business isn’t about innovation- it’s about being the best copycat.  It’s about Microsoft duplicating Apple’s operating system.  In the negative, it’s about GM and Ford continuing to build monstrous SUVs long after Toyota and Honda began to catch them in sales, and being primed for disaster when oil hit the roof.  Most of us have learned this lesson and readily swipe good ideas from good corporate citizens and industry leaders:  which company was the first to found their own charity?  Now that there’s Ronald McDonald House, Home Depot builds playgrounds in disadvantaged cities, and Nike has tried to take down cancer all by itself, does it matter?  But here’s the thing:  it’s not just the good guys that have good ideas.  As it turns out, you can be accused of muder and still have some great business models.

So, Obviously You Think Blackwater Is Doing Something Right?

There may not be any individual company that’s caught as much public ire in the past five years as Blackwater–after all, even Chevron and Microsoft haven’t directly killed people (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/world/middleeast/08blackwater.html).  Despite that reputation, they’ve expanded from a 30-person firm in Moyock North Carolina in the late 1990s to a worldwide security firm with a permanent presence in three U.S. compounds and nearly 1000 employees in Iraq alone.  That sort of rapid growth always indicates one of two things:  a corporate culture worth imitating, or a business so corrupt and poorly managed that it will collapse under its own weight.  Killers or not, Blackwater might just have something to teach us., this case we’re looking at their use of 100-day projects.

How The 100-Day Projects Decentralizes Your Leadership, And Why That’s Good

Decentralized chains of command are wonderful things if you have the talent in your organization to pull them off–rather than filtering all of the decisions up the chain to the supreme boss, they all get made at the most local level, allowing the supreme boss (and all of the managers) to focus on important policy and leadership tasks instead of micromanaging.  This isn’t so much of an org chard decision as it is a culture that’s created, and it requires seriously empowering subordinates.

At Blackwater, they do that with 100-day projects. An employee sends an email to President Gary Jackson pitching an idea.  If that idea can be saving the company money or be making a profit in one hundred days, he greenlights it, no questions asked.  Why is this good?  For starters, it signals that your company is open to suggestions and willing to adapt–something that employees, or at least the ones you want, will be searching for if they’re serious about staying for a career.  It also ensures that no good idea or talented employee is buried in layers of bureaucracy, or has credit taken for it by a manager rather than the innovator.  Management gets to spend their time on more pressing issues, and the employees will love the newfound freedom to innovate and execute their own plans (or escaping prisoners).

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