Finally, customers began to come for "the jazz." Far more attractive even than the beaches was the relationship that began to form between customers and programmers. Because PRT/Barbados boasted an unusually skilled workforce in a setting that made unusually good collaboration the norm, customers got their problems solved. Because customers' expectations were exceeded and the collaboration was personally enjoyable, they began bringing their "higher-on-the-food-chain" work. And since getting that more-stimulating work from more personally engaged and appreciative customers made the engineers feel more professionally fulfilled, they grew more eager still to stay on the island and take pleasure from the collaboration. In short: Barbados's benefits to programmers and customers alike became interdependent and mutually reinforcing. The whole arrangement turned out better than Mellinger had expected. He knew that if programmers were there, customers would want to come. He hadn't realized that if customers wanted to come, programmers would want to be there. Now everybody involved got to do the business that's most rewarding, and the unhappily adversarial tide of the software-design process had been reversed. "You know what?" says an executive from J.P. Morgan. "This work stuff can be fun."
So Mellinger's thesis has been proved--and then some. Aiming to create a place programmers would come to, he also ended up getting customers to actually build it. Whereas PRT Group's growth before it opened the island facility had been stellar enough, landing it on the 1995 Inc. 500 after the company had reached $14 million in sales in six years, now its Barbados operation alone has gone from nothing to $19 million, in just two years' time. But the island is more important to the company than even those numbers suggest. It was the showpiece of the road show that preceded PRT's November initial public offering. It's what hooks PRT's customers even if the work will be done elsewhere. It's what differentiates PRT. It's what an antiheroic organization--Mellinger's organization--can do.
Which brings us, of course, back to Mellinger himself and to the obvious question all the achievements raise. How, exactly, did he do it?
The answer is, He didn't.
When we're visited by an idea--any idea, not just one calling for the invention of a country--what most of us do next is ask the question "How?" How can I (or we) get this thing done? We begin assessing what it would take to turn the idea into something real. We refer to the informal stage of that process as thinking and to the formal stage as planning. Individually and organizationally, we spend lots of time thinking about and making business plans for new things--we spend a lot more time on that, in fact, than we do actually creating anything new. Often we get overwhelmed. (All those details to handle! All that know-how required!) And we conclude, not unreasonably, that our idea can't be done.
Mellinger uses a different approach to create new things. When he was visited in his backyard by the idea of inventing a country, it never occurred to him to wonder, "How could I do that?" The fact is, he never wonders that. Instead, he begins with the presumption that he himself can't do anything--not on his own, at any rate, and not as well as someone else can. It never occurs to Mellinger, even for a moment, that he might be the person to execute the plans, or the projects, that arise in the course of business. He simply assumes, always, that there's a better option.
Walk it through. Ask the questions.
Instead of asking, "How can I do that?" Mellinger asks, "Who can do that?" "Who knows how to do that?" "Who can help me get that done?"
And asking who, not how, it turns out, changes everything.
Characteristic #1 of the antiheroic organization: You are liberated to imagine. Since you don't assume you're the one who's going to have to do things--or even that you're the one who has to know how to do things--you're not limited to considering seriously only the things you know you can do. Start thinking who, and the results are exponentially reinforcing: once you find you can make things happen that you couldn't dream of doing yourself, you believe you can do anything.
Think there's anything Mellinger believes PRT can't do? Think anybody at PRT believes there's anything PRT can't do? This is an organization that thinks it's capable of whatever it wants. After all, it has proof.
THE ANTIHERO'S MANIFESTO
No other story better illustrates the who-not-how approach to getting great and important things done than the one about how Mellinger got advice on starting PRT. Not advice about his business plan, because he didn't have one. He was three years out of college and jobless. About all he had was $12,000 in borrowed funds, a passion for starting a business, and the notion that his new venture should involve selling something technology-related to large companies. Rather than wasting time on questions such as what to sell (how the hell would he know? He couldn't write a line of code, and he had never set foot in a large company in his life), he asked, "Who?" Who could help figure this out? He decided he should talk to people who might know something about what large companies actually needed. So, seated at his parents' breakfast table in August 1989, he started phoning the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to ask their advice about what he could sell them.
