Green Water Strategy: The New Paradigm in Modern Business

First There Was the CSC One dreary Monday morning I arrived at work and found a Dilbert cartoon clipped from that morning’s paper and taped to my office door. As I stood and read it, I saw the handwritten abbreviation “CSC” and a roughly drawn rain cloud added to the third frame of the cartoon. I quickly read the captions, and chuckling at the humor, I knew immediately who had left the comic on my door. It was my friend and colleague Tom Frank. I also knew both what the CSC inscription meant and why he had made the connection with the cartoon. It was as though Scott Adams had been in yesterday’s meeting. At the time, Tom and I had known each other for nearly a quarter of a century, working together at two different companies for fifteen of those years. We shared a sense of frustration with many aspects of corporate life. We also shared a sense of humor and over the years developed a number of somewhat silly yet oddly telling theories for the logic-defying corporate shenanigans we continually encountered. One such theoretical explanation we referred to as the CSC – The Cosmic Stupidity Cloud. This theory explained how management made decisions using faulty assumptions, without the bother of recognizing obvious facts or worrying about reaching rational conclusions based on those facts. Sometimes it seemed as if the Cosmic Stupidity Cloud caused those under its influence to ignore all facts as extraneous. We had observed that individuals as well as groups exhibited the effects of the CSC, the presence of which was either a signal of impending failure or a guarantee of that failure. Either way, doom was just around the corner. This malevolent cloud seemed to muddle the minds of managers and team members alike, encouraging them to make choices that were utterly incomprehensible. The cartoon that morning depicted a classic case of the Cosmic Stupidity Cloud influencing Dilbert’s world as the “pointy-haired boss” once again sent the company ship on a collision course with a hurricane. Standing there in front of my office door studying that cartoon was the moment the idea of Green Water Strategy was born. Also at that moment, our personal CSC lifted and we saw that over the years we had developed many management theories, unwritten rules and hidden concepts to account for the decisions and actions taken that invariably sent an organization in the wrong direction. Tom and I America, it is time to document what we have learned and to codify it had created the CSC to explain the mysterious behavior of otherwise intelligent people. We immediately knew it was imperative that we communicate our discoveries to others.

D. Wayne Willard was born a hillbilly in a small southern Missouri town before the invention of the cell phone. He brought this non-technical background to the business world after a stint in the Blue Water Navy, a failed career as a rock star, and an attempt at being a forest ranger before he finally found work as a software engineer and project manager. With degrees in Wildlife Biology and Computer Science, he brings twenty-six years of corporate exposure and ten years of government experience along with his formal education to bear on the topics in this book.

T. Barrington Frank arrived in the world as an Ohio Buckeye but was dragged by his parents to Southern California where he dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. Suffering from the sting of rejection by the major leagues, he instead unleashed his creative energies working for several companies as an insurance underwriter, and as a software developer and manager. With a BA in History and years of painful corporate experience, he provides a unique view of the appearance and growth of Green Water Strategy as observed over four decades of change.

Having worked so many years in Corporate America, both authors have both extensive experience and formal training in various aspects of both technical and personnel management.