Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win

That unique sense of mission is what drives Southwest’s business strategy, from the cities it serves to the fares it charges right down to whom it hires and promotes. There is, Spence argues, a direct connection between the economics of Southwest’s operating model, the advertising it aims at its customers (“You are now free to move about the country”), and the messages it sends to its 30,000-plus employees (“You are now free to be your best”). Spence explains the connection this way: “Business strategies change. Market positioning changes. But purpose does not change. Everybody at Southwest is a freedom fighter.”

Obviously, all this talk of freedom is in part an exercise in product marketing and employee morale-boosting. But anybody who’s flown Southwest understands that there’s more to the airline’s performance than low costs and high productivity. There is, in fact, a genuine sense of purpose (and a one-of-a-kind sense of humor) that animates the company. Libby Sartain spent 13 years in the People Department at Southwest, the last 6 in charge of the department as its vice president. (We’ll meet her again in chapter 7, where we explore her new agenda as Chief People Yahoo—the senior HR strategist at one of Silicon Valley’s flagship companies.) Sartain is adamant that the advocacy mission that defined Southwest in the marketplace reflected, and was driven by, an equally palpable sense of purpose in the workplace. “We examined the company at the most detailed level,” Sartain explains, “and asked, ‘From the minute you think of working here to the minute you leave, what makes this experience unique? What is it about our workforce that separates us from the competition?’”

In the workplace, employees took up a battle cry designed to connect the company’s disruptive business strategy to daily life inside the organization: “At Southwest, Freedom Begins with Me.” Sartain and her team went so far as to identify the “Eight Freedoms” that defined the working experience at the airline—from “the freedom to learn and grow” to “the freedom to create financial security” to “the freedom to work hard and have fun” to “the freedom to create and innovate”—and she created a traveling “freedom exposition” to recruit employees to the cause behind the company.

Over time, the Eight Freedoms “got to the very core of what the experience of working at Southwest is about,” Sartain says. “The message was, ‘You’re not just loading a bag in the belly of that plane, you’re not just serving cocktails, you’re not just creating a budget or writing software. You are giving people the freedom to fly. It’s your efficiency and ingenuity that allows us to keep offering low fares and keeps our planes in the sky.’”7 (#ulink_d6c4a4b5-2f93-5cce-ab18-346aa3d6ff1b)

What ideas is your company fighting for? What values does your company stand for? What purpose does your company serve? Those are the questions that Roy Spence seeks to answer for every organization with which he works. “Anybody who’s running a business has to figure out the higher calling of that business, its purpose,” he insists. “Purpose is about the difference you’re trying to make—in the marketplace, in the world. If everybody is selling the same thing, what’s the tie-breaker? It’s purpose.”

There’s no doubt that Spence is a master at using clever language to define and position companies in compelling ways. (He’s in the ad business, after all, and his nickname inside the agency is “Reverend Roy.”) Language, as we’ll explore in chapter 2, counts for a lot when it comes to strategy. How you talk about your company speaks volumes about how you think about your business. And ultimately, how you think about your business determines how well it performs.

“Sure, you could say that Southwest Airlines really wants to get more people to fly,” Spence explains. “Or you can say that the company is in the business of democratizing the skies. Would you rather be in the airline business or the freedom business? Language is what creates the edge—and operating on the edge leads to more creativity in the business.”

GSD&M’s best-known bit of language may well be “Don’t Mess with Texas,” which has become the unofficial slogan of the agency’s famously maverick home state. Remarkably, GSD&M coined the phrase in 1985 as the centerpiece of an anti-litter campaign it devised for the Texas Department of Highways. Over the years, the message was adopted by musicians, good old boys, and politicians and became a rallying cry on a par with “Remember the Alamo.” “We took them out of the litter business and put them in the pride business,” says Spence. “It became a big, macho, Texan kind of deal. That’s an edgier place to play. And that edge is why litter went down so much. We made it anti-Texan to litter.”

Roy Spence is so committed to the power of purpose (his agency defines its business as purpose-based branding) that one of his GSD&M colleagues, Haley Rushing, actually has the title of “Chief Purposologist.” Rushing, who is trained in cultural anthropology, immerses herself in the history, economics, values, and practices of existing and potential clients to unearth the advocacy agenda (or lack thereof) at the heart of their strategy.

“We don’t create the purpose of an organization,” Spence says. “Our job is to bring it to life and create the language of leadership. In the nineties, we saw that a rising tide lifts all boats. Now we see that a changing tide tests the strength of your anchor. What you stand for is as important as what you sell.”

INNOVATION THROUGH AGITATION—STRATEGY ON THE EDGE

You don’t need to convince Arkadi Kuhlmann of the power of purpose or tell him that the values you stand for are as important as the products you sell. “I love our advocacy position,” he exults. “It differentiates us. Most companies, especially in an industry like banking, are truly boring. If you do things the way everybody else does, why do you think you’re going to do any better?”

In many respects, ING Direct USA is to banks what Southwest is to airlines—an aggressive, low-cost competitor with a brash attitude and a clear point of view. That’s why the company, much like its founder, is feisty, combative, colorful. Its headquarters complex, composed of five beautifully renovated buildings on or near the Christina River in downtown Wilmington, is a blast of color in an otherwise drab, sleepy city. The distinctly American complex also pays homage to the Dutch origins of ING Direct’s parent company. Sales and customer service operate out of a sparkling office tower once owned by Chase Manhattan that’s been renamed the Spaarport (“piggybank” in Dutch). In the lobby of the Spaarport, crackling with energy, is an ING Direct café, an ultramodern coffee shop that offers up cappuccino, sandwiches, CNBC on flat-screen TVs, and free Internet access. Marketing operates out of a onetime railroad office, built in 1904, that’s been renamed the Orangerie. (ING Direct’s flagship product is the “Orange” savings account, and orange colors every aspect of the company’s public presence.) The top executives work in a 19th-century leather tannery renamed the Pakhuis (“warehouse” in Dutch), which was renovated in 2000 and remodeled in 2005 to accommodate the company’s torrid growth.

It’s a point of pride for Kuhlmann that many of the people who work in these buildings have been recruited from outside the banking business. “If you want to renew and re-energize an industry,” he advises, “don’t hire people from that industry. You’ve got to untrain them and then retrain them. I’d rather hire a jazz musician, a dancer, or a captain in the Israeli army. They can learn about banking. It’s much harder for bankers to unlearn their bad habits. They’re trapped by the past. Remember, resurrection has only worked once in history.”

Well, maybe twice. Kuhlmann himself is a three-decade veteran of the banking industry whose career began as a fast-track executive with the ever so proper Royal Bank of Canada. “It’s amazing when I think back to those days,” says Kuhlmann, seated at his no-frills workspace in the company’s open-office setting. “At age thirty-three, I was made vice president of commercial banking. I had a private office with the nicest curtains. I had a private dining room. I had a chauffeur who picked me up at seven-thirty in the morning and a guy who came by my desk at eight-thirty to polish my shoes. I remember what happened after the board meeting where I got named vice president. Someone came out and said, ‘Congratulations on your red hat.’ I asked one of my colleagues, ‘Red hat, what did he mean?’ He said, ‘You know, like the cardinals wear.’ I had true corporate power in the old-fashioned sense. Today I’ve got none of those trappings of power.”

Indeed, Kuhlmann makes it a point to remind his colleagues that ING exists precisely to challenge that style of power. On the sidewalk outside the Pakhuis, for example, is a thick white line painted directly in front of the entrance. The not-so-subtle message: cross that line and you’ve left the sleepy environs of downtown Wilmington (and the financial services establishment) to enter a different kind of place. Employees leaving the Pakhuis see a sign posted right before the exit. It reads, did today really matter?

“We keep increasing the intensity, the passion, the goals,” Kuhlmann says. “We’re doing a billion dollars a month of new deposits right now. I just announced that we are going to step that up to two billion dollars. It’s scaring Davidson the hell out of everybody, but we’ll do it. It’s very hard to be an employee here and not ask yourself, ‘Am I up for this or not?’ It’s not about getting people stressed. It’s about getting them full of conviction.”

Outside its home base, ING Direct is a master of bold publicity stunts and brash PR moves. To increase its visibility in southern California, the bank paid for free fill-ups at Shell stations in Manhattan Beach, Santa Monica, and Burbank. The lines of cars stretched for miles, and motorists waited for hours—the scenes became a fixture on the TV news. In northern California, Kuhlmann, a motorcycle enthusiast, personally led 700 Harley-Davidson owners on a 60-mile “Freedom Ride,” culminating in an ear-splitting concert by the classic rock group Kansas. In Boston, ING Direct paid for all subway lines on the MBTA (known as the “T” among Bostonians) to be free one morning to rush-hour commuters—a high-profile stunt that the company dubbed the “ING Direct Boston T Party.”

To be sure, the first order of business for ING Direct is about bread-and-butter substance, not bells-and-whistles stunts—creating financial products that make it easy and financially rewarding for customers to save. But just as big a part of its strategy is identifying products it won’t offer. As aggressive as ING Direct has been in its target markets, it has shown just as much restraint in avoiding potentially lucrative markets that are off-target. ING Direct doesn’t issue credit cards, market auto loans, or even provide traditional checking accounts—lines of business that most bankers would launch in a heartbeat if they were in Kuhlmann’s shoes. But those services encourage customers to spend rather than to save, so they’re not part of the model.* (#ulink_8f63c102-2be9-5829-9972-d0d3787da8b9)

ING Direct has also resisted the temptation to enter online brokerage, an obvious bit of diversification that any self-respecting MBA student would urge the company to embrace. Millions of customers already bank with ING Direct over the Web, so why not let them trade stocks as well? “Because if you are truly committed to helping people change their financial lives, and to doing it step by step, then you should not encourage them to do things that could lead them to lose money,” explains Jim Kelly, the bank’s chief customer service officer, who also oversees marketing, sales, and operations.

That’s instructive: companies that compete on a disruptive point of view are defined as much by the opportunities they choose not to pursue as by the businesses they do enter. Roy Spence remembers the early days of Southwest Airlines, when it faced one of many bare-knuckle challenges to its advocacy mission. In 1981 a start-up called Muse Air, launched by Lamar Muse, a disgruntled cofounder and former CEO of Southwest, mounted an assault on Herb Kelleher and his other onetime colleagues by offering an airline with planes that were sleeker, seats that were roomier, and service that focused on luxury rather than down-home humor. (Industry wags nicknamed Muse’s company Revenge Air.) Southwest was rattled; many executives urged Kelleher to buy his own fleet of new planes, especially when surveys showed that customers, by a huge margin, preferred the Muse aircraft to Southwest’s dowdier planes.8 (#ulink_df9f7866-e237-5d23-930a-9626bba7b9d1)

But Kelleher resisted the temptation—not because he was eager to disappoint customers, but because he was determined to stay true to the airline’s mission. “Everybody was stunned that we didn’t go with this beautiful new plane,” Spence recalls. “But Herb said, ‘If we go with this new plane—and granted, it’s prettier and customers like it better—we’ll have to train our pilots to fly two different kinds of aircraft and train our mechanics to service two different kinds of aircraft. That will increase our costs, which we’ll have to pass on to our customers. We’re not going to do it, because that’s not the purpose of our airline. That’s not how you democratize the skies.’”* (#ulink_5c153ccb-ee40-5619-8637-f47b51d90e04)

In other words, companies that compete on a distinctive set of ideas are comfortable rejecting opportunities and strategies that more traditional players would rush to embrace. ING Direct even rejects customers that it considers out of sync with its advocacy message. A case in point: Kuhlmann himself turned down a $5 million deposit from one high roller who wanted to do business with the bank. It was nothing personal, the CEO insists, but if ING Direct is building an institution that promotes the financial interests of the little guy, then it doesn’t need to (and shouldn’t) cater to power brokers. “Rich Americans are used to platinum cards, special service,” he says. “The last thing we want in this bank is to have rich people making special demands. We treat everybody the same.”

Indeed, ING Direct is one of the few financial institutions that has no deposit minimums for customers but imposes (unofficially) deposit maximums. You want to start a savings account with one dollar? No problem—ING Direct will even deposit an additional $25 as a welcome-to-the-bank gesture. You want to open a savings account with a million dollars? No thanks. “We are about Main Street, not Wall Street,” explains customer service chief Kelly. “Our most important role is to help people who need help the most save money. People who are going to deposit a million dollars—they don’t need a lot of help. And let’s be realistic. That customer is going to want more from us—‘I’ve got a lot of money in your bank, I need this now.’ They’d expect us to do things for them that we just don’t do. I would much rather have a thousand accounts with one thousand dollars each than one million-dollar account. I can touch more people that way.”

It is an undeniably upside-down strategy for building a bank—placing a premium on customers with less money to deposit than on those with more money to deposit. But it’s a strategy with a clear economic rationale—executing a low-overhead, low-cost, low-margin, high-volume business model. It’s true to the value system that has shaped ING Direct’s identity in the marketplace. It’s a strategy that makes a statement—a point of view that resonates with customers and employees, that changes the conversation about the future of financial services, and that attracts more than its fair share of attention from the media and other commentators.

“Re-creating an industry is about creating a story around customers, around employees, around products,” Kuhlmann says. “Banking is about money, and money is about who you are, how you think about your future, looking out for the ones you love. We are trying to make savings cool. We’re creating a story that carries a sense of mission, a story that shifts people to a new point of view.”

For example, Kuhlmann and his team love to think of themselves as advocates for their customers. But just as Kuhlmann turned down that $5 million deposit, there’s little tolerance for customers who don’t fit the model—whether those customers are Joe Millionaire or Joe Six-Pack. Every year the company “fires” more than 3,500 customers who, one way or another, don’t play by the bank’s rules. Maybe they made too many calls to customer service, maybe they asked for too many exceptions to the bank’s carefully designed procedures, maybe they made big transfers for short periods of time to skim off some interest. Whatever the infraction, ING Direct doesn’t hesitate to close the account and automatically transfer the customer’s funds to its backup bank. (“Our china shop is too fragile for us to let bulls run around,” quips Kelly.)

Firing thousands of customers every year is a controversial business practice, CEO Kuhlmann concedes, which is why he believes it’s good business. “It’s good because it agitates everybody,” he says. “It agitates the marketplace. It agitates the customers who don’t belong. But we want to sort them out. The customers who are right for you, they love you. They become evangelists. The customers who you close out, they hate you. But you know what they do when they hate you? They tell everybody about you—and that’s good. It creates dialogue. There’s nothing like differentiation.”

WHY ME TOO WONT DOSTRATEGY AS ORIGINALITY

There is an undeniable populist strain to the organizations we’ve encountered thus far. For 35 years, Southwest Airlines has pursued a flight plan to recast the economics of travel and “democratize the skies.” For more than five years, ING Direct has banked on a critique of the worst practices in financial services and vowed to “lead Americans back to savings.” GSD&M’s Roy Spence, an unapologetic Texas progressive, urges clients not just to sell products but to express the “higher calling” of their business.* (#ulink_153efe72-a14e-5060-aeec-42f704349df8)

But disruptive points of view come in all shapes, sizes, and sentiments. Advocacy is about strategic clarity, not the business world’s version of political correctness. The make-or-break issue isn’t fighting for the little guy. It’s fighting the competitive establishment with insights that challenge its me-too mind-set.

In their no-nonsense competitive manifesto Hardball: Are You Playing toPlay or Playing to Win? strategy experts George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer urge executives to stop pussyfooting around with “softball” issues such as corporate governance and stakeholder management and to focus on what matters most in business—“us [ing] every legitimate resource and strategy available to them to gain advantage over their competitors.” Stalk and Lachenauer celebrate tough-as-nails companies that “focus relentlessly on competitive advantage” and “unleash massive and overwhelming force” against vulnerable rivals.9 (#ulink_21bd2214-a0b9-54a7-a40f-def653ec0b4a)

We admire hard-charging companies too. But we’re convinced, based on the cast of fiercely competitive mavericks we’ve come to know, that the most effective way to play hardball is to build an agenda for growth around a strategic curveball—to prosper as a company by championing fresh ideas about the future of your business. Originality has become the litmus test of strategy.

Nowhere is the power of strategic originality more evident than at the West Coast headquarters of HBO, the powerhouse (and super-profitable) cable network that is the most original force in the numbingly me-too world of mass entertainment. HBO headquarters is anything but a place of populist pretense. The building, near the beach in Santa Monica, is a potent mix of Hollywood power and a laid-back California lifestyle. The eager valet attendants and the phalanx of headset-wearing receptionists provide visitors with a tingle of celebrity. In the cavernous lobby, young actor-writer types fidget on boldly patterned furniture. Gleaming white walls, green glass, and splashes of hot pink give the space a futuristic feel—in sharp contrast to the beige-toned inner sanctum with its views of palm trees, tennis courts, and lush green lawn.

The calm of the executive suite is ruffled only slightly by the daily turmoil of show business. In one corner office, Nancy Lesser, HBO’s high-powered publicist, is finalizing seating arrangements with the producers of the Golden Globes award show for a delegation of celebrities, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, and Mark Wahlberg, who are flying in to attend the gala. (HBO’s programs and stars were nominated for 20 Golden Globes in 2005, more than twice as many as any other network.) Meanwhile, in another corner office, Chris Albrecht, HBO’s chairman and CEO, is finishing a call, headset on, eyes focused intently on the middle distance: “Fifty million?” he asks. “Sixty million? Okay, if it has to be sixty million, it’s sixty million.” Click.

Wrangling for prime seats at an awards show or haggling over big-budget productions comes with the territory in Hollywood. But almost everything else about HBO breaks the mold. Indeed, the company announces its maverick status right at the door. A giant LED display marks the entrance to the lobby. The words on the screen, which run in a continuous loop, may be the most disruptive message in recent television history: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.”

Television—has there ever been an industry that’s so glamorous and so desperate for fresh thinking? This is a business where strategy is based almost entirely on mimicry. Think back to June 1994, when NBC’s Today show unveiled its new-look broadcast from a glass-walled studio in Rockefeller Center. Within a year or two, virtually every morning show had a windowed studio somewhere in New York City. A decade later, when Donald Trump attracted big ratings for NBC with The Apprentice, rival networks raced to sign their own billionaires, from Internet bad boy Mark Cuban (ABC) to British magnate Richard Branson (Fox). And so it goes in the vast wasteland: Survivor begets Big Brother, which begets I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! Or The Osbournes begets The Simple Life, which begets Growing Up Gotti. All of which beget a sense of resignation among viewers and an air of desperation among TV executives: how does anyone win when everyone is playing the same game?

And then there’s HBO. There’s no denying the network’s glittering financial performance over the past decade. With a subscriber base of nearly 28 million households, HBO dwarfs any and all of its pay-cable rivals. Its parent, Time Warner, doesn’t break out detailed financial results for the unit, but Wall Street analysts report the company’s average earnings growth at 20 percent per year since 1995, and estimated profits of $1.1 billion in 2004 (more than any other network, cable or broadcast) on roughly $3.5 billion in revenue. HBO alone has an estimated market value of some $20 billion.

What has truly distinguished HBO is not its profitability but its programming. As anyone within reach of a TV clicker knows, the network shaped the pop-culture conversation of the early 21st century with a trio of hits: Sex and the City (an antic mix of sex, shoes, restaurants, and relationships that ran from 1998 to 2004), The Sopranos (David Chase’s unstintingly original series about an angst-ridden New Jersey mob boss debuted in 1999), and Six Feet Under (the darkly comic chronicles of a dysfunctional family of undertakers from Oscar-winning screenwriter Alan Ball that ran from 2001 to 2005). The “3S’s,” in HBO parlance, drew prime time–sized audiences to a network that reaches only one-quarter of all TV households, planted fear in the hearts of broadcast executives, and won universal acclaim from critics. At the 2004 Emmys, the highpoint of HBO’s hold on pop culture, it received an unprecedented 124 nominations and won 32 awards.

Even with the retirement of two of the three S’s, HBO’s lineup has remained without peer in its invention, emotion, and overall excellence. In addition to its new-generation weekly series (including Entourage and Big Love), HBO has produced a stream of miniseries, made-for-TV movies, and theatrical releases. The network’s $120 million miniseries Band of Brothers (produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg) premiered on September 9, 2001, and drew a total audience of nearly 59 million people in the weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The network has committed more than $300 million to two more mega-projects: Tom Hanks’s series about John Adams and a Pacific war series from Band of Brothers producers Spielberg and Hanks. Meanwhile, HBO’s much-acclaimed documentary group, run since 1979 by Sheila Nevins, has won 15 Oscars, 81 Emmys, and 25 Peabody Awards.* (#ulink_dc99ad1e-11ba-5eb3-b990-48ed1f59aa4f)

HBO’s track record isn’t just a matter of commissioning smarter scripts or landing better actors than its rivals. It’s rooted in a distinctive point of view about how to create value in the entertainment business—the strangely disruptive proposition that quality and originality, not mediocrity and mimicry, drive long-term prosperity. With HBO, what you see on the screen reflects what the company stands for in the marketplace—ideas that reset the expectations of the viewing audience and set the network apart from decades of conventional wisdom in New York and Hollywood.10 (#ulink_a530410a-104c-5f5a-b8b0-93148464f4df)

Technically speaking, of course, HBO and the networks are not competitors. HBO sells itself to viewers; the networks sell their viewers to advertisers. But broadcast networks, pay channels, and basic cable are all clamoring for attention in an increasingly cluttered, competitive, and fragmented entertainment marketplace. In a business where originality is often viewed as a risk rather than an asset, HBO’s ability to connect with a big audience, elevate its expectations, and keep pushing cultural boundaries is more than a breakthrough for the network. It changes the game for everyone.

“The name of the game [at the broadcast networks] is whatever gets the largest number of people to watch,” says Alan Ball, a self-described refugee from the network TV “gulag” and the creator of Six Feet Under. “What is that? It’s a car wreck. It’s Fear Factor. It’s getting Playboy playmates to eat sheep’s eyeballs. They’re proud of that! ‘Look at the numbers we got! Supermodels puked on each other and people tuned in!’”

Talk to HBO executives about how they evaluate programming and they almost never mention target demographics or overnight ratings. (And they have never raved about sheep’s eyeballs.) “We ask ourselves, ‘Is it different? Is it distinctive? Is it good?’” explains Chris Albrecht, who left the network in 2007, after a 22-year run. “Ultimately, we ask ourselves, ‘Is it about something?’ By ‘about something’ I mean not just the subject, or the arena, or the location, but really about something that is deeply relevant to the human experience. The Sopranos isn’t about a mob boss on Prozac. It’s about a man searching for the meaning of his life. Six FeetUnder isn’t about a family of undertakers so much as it is about a group of people who have to deal with their feelings about death in order to get on with their own lives. The next question is, ‘Is it the very best realization of that idea? Is it true to itself?’”

The truth about HBO is that it took years to hone its competitive strategy and programming formula—and honing the strategy required making an explicit decision to reject the business assumptions and performance metrics that guide traditional TV executives. The network, which began life in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1972 as a pay channel that featured boxing, theatrical films, and stand-up comedy, had experimented with a touch of original programming from early on. Some of it was truly memorable, like Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau’s campaign mockumentary Tanner ’88. Some of it was downright horrible: the first “original program” on HBO was actually a polka festival special.

The strategic inflection point came in 1995. After a decade of holding different leadership posts at HBO, Chris Albrecht became president of original programming while Jeff Bewkes took over as HBO’s boss. (Bewkes is now president and COO of Time Warner Inc. Albrecht has run HBO since mid-2002.) At that time, HBO’s original programming was confined to two half-hour comedies, Dream On and The LarrySanders Show, which the network touted as “the best hour of comedy on television.” (Company insiders joked that they should have called it “the only hour on HBO.”)

Albrecht and Bewkes convened the network’s executive committee and key original programming executives. The question before the group: are we who we say we are? The answer came back: not really. “The words we always used to talk about ourselves were ‘different,’ ‘worth paying for,’ ‘better,’” says Albrecht. “In that meeting, we came to the conclusion that we weren’t quite there yet, but that it was a great thing to strive for. The only way to move forward and win is to take chances and to be distinctive.”

At HBO, “distinctive” had meant “not on network TV.” At the 1995 meeting, says Bewkes, the leadership team chose to “jump fully off this cliff.” It was a big leap. The unit didn’t have hoards of cash to invest in programming, and there was no way to measure return on investment for any particular show. “It was a real mess,” he recalls. “But we just said, ‘Forget about it—let’s just do good stuff and we’ll solve it later.’ We decided to take the high road.” As it turns out, taking that road led to a decade of artistic creativity and financial prosperity unlike anything in television history.

Of course, even the high road has its share of potholes and detours. Success on the scale of HBO invariably gives rise to recrimination, imitation, and pressures for duplication—obstacles that confront successful mavericks in any industry.* (#ulink_c857987d-a9d2-5496-a94f-f7084ea1b58e) During our final visit to HBO’s West Coast headquarters, you could sense the pop-culture conversation shifting. Critics who couldn’t stop celebrating HBO were beginning to castigate the network: Is there life after Six Feet Under? What’s the offspring to Sex and the City?

Albrecht and his colleagues openly acknowledge the perils of success, and that is why they have been engaged in an ongoing strategic conversation to define the future—a future that remains rooted in the network’s core mission (“It’s not TV. It’s HBO”) while moving it in new directions. They are determined to reproduce their business results without repeating themselves in the marketplace.