Interlude - Index of

Vision | 165
tion in a way that a normal—dull—business plan would not.
Many groups in the company have since written their own
future histories, focusing on their own part of the business. We
even developed a simulation or “business game,” like Monopoly
on steroids, based on the Future History, to help teach managers
what we are trying to accomplish.
••
In the interviews, I learned to get people into a “future history
mood” by talking about the past. It is hard to get people
to think more than a year in the future, but looking back many
years prepares you to look forward many years. Don’t just
extrapolate today’s concerns; try to spot emerging trends that
could trigger a new era. By definition, an era is marked by such
radical change that success requires new strategies: if the issues
aren’t radically different, then it isn’t a new era.
I divide NetApp’s history into four eras: start-up, hypergrowth,
crash-and-recover, and enterprise-customer. In our
start-up era, we invented and developed a product, raised money,
found customers, hired a new CEO, became profitable, and went
public. The big issue was to define NetApp: what our products
should be, which customers to go after, and how to reach them.
In the hypergrowth era that followed, after the IPO, we understood
our products and customers, and the big challenge was to
drive fast growth without breaking our company or our culture.
The transition from one era to another can be difficult
to spot because most eras have roots that go deep into earlier
ones. We had issues with fast growth even in the start-up
era, but they weren’t so dangerous until we got larger. The
roots of the enterprise-customer era went all the way back to