Interlude - Index of

164 | Grown-Up Company
to refine the history’s three key conclusions. The first conclusion
was that we must grow in order to survive. Even at a billion
dollars in revenue, we were small and vulnerable compared
with competitors like EMC, HP, and IBM. Second,
we must learn how to become a long-term strategic supplier
to large companies for their enterprise data center requirements.
After the dot-com collapse, that’s where the money
was. And third, we must target the SAN market because that’s
what many enterprise customers wanted. Through the group
effort of developing the Future History, Dan’s staff agreed
that these were our most critical goals; looking back, we were
right. It’s no coincidence that Chapters Seven and Eight of
this book were on enterprise customers and SAN—goals two
and three.
Next we used the Future History as a foundation for our
annual Senior Leader’s Meeting, an offsite with our top hundred
people, and finally we decided to send the paper to every
employee in the company. The decision to share it so openly
was controversial. Some felt that the risk of competitors getting
a copy was too great. Dan and I concluded that—while
there was some risk—there was an even greater risk in trying
to execute a strategy without telling our own employees what
it was. It is astounding how many companies do attempt that.
Trust is a two-way street. If the management team, as part of
our culture, wants the employees to trust us, then we ought to
trust them.
I don’t know how to measure the effect of the Future History.
On the one hand, you could argue that it was simply a
normal business planning process cloaked in a science fiction
device. On the other hand, I think it caught people’s imagina-