Hot causes and cool mobilization

Professor Hayagreeva Rao of the Stanford Graduate School of Business explores how hot causes have fired up activists, either for positive change, or for opposition to perceived threats. The relevance to business has to do with the impact of market rebels on innovation.

	Title:	Market Rebels
	Author:	Hayagreeva Rao
	Pages:	222pages
	Publisher:	Princeton University Press
	Price:	$24.95

Professor Hayagreeva (Huggy) Rao of the Stanford Graduate School of Business is intrigued by the behaviors of managers and the people that managers are exposed to. That is the crux of his research in organizational behavior.

Why have focused on what he calls ‘market rebels’? Maybe because this caste is the cause of innovation, sometimes disruptive. Or maybe because the rebels can also cause havoc – something that managers do not generally like to have on their daily to-do lists.

So professor Rao has created a short book full of examples, a tally of about eleven in all. Some of the examples go back a few decades (e.g. the development of the automobile, against the proper desires of horse and carriage industries), whereas others are fresh ongoing rebellions (e.g. slow food in Italy against the dominance of global snack empires).

Throughout the examples, professor Rao underlies two critical common denominators among the rebellions: hot causes and cool mobilizations.

Hot cause is the detonator
The first element is a hot cause. Rao gives many examples: engineers wanting personal computing power when this was centrally gate-kept by the mainframe wizards; or French deaf associations opposing cochlear ear implants for fear that their culture would disappear; or American beer micro-brewers ganging up against the dominance of no-taste monoliths, and so forth.

All the rebellions had the required detonator: a hot cause. This hot cause attracted activists, who joined in the rebellious cause and built up momentum around it.

Cool mobilization
This outpouring of passion by the activists (or rebels) is what professor Rao calls the cool mobilization phase. Here, Rao distinguishes between the flash contagion that can be seen for incremental innovations, and the multiple exposures of the complex contagion that a radical innovation requires to catch on.

Call to arms
Cool mobilization is not easy to muster. It requires a guerrilla network of advocates who are passionate about the hot cause, and who devote time, energy and sometimes even financial means from their own pockets to convince others. Thus swells the mobilization, on the crest of an ever-increasing number of rebels or activists. Or it dies for lack of rebellious nutrients.

The development is typically slow. Successful examples often rely on the use of private politics and catchy, unorthodox methods. For some rebellions, it may be picket lines or strikes. For others it may be attention-grabbing tactics, for example having a ‘dolphin safe’ label printed on food cans. Yet other rebellions simply plod along, gaining momentum by sheer size of constituency.

A key success factor for cool mobilization lies in the emotional participation of the activists. They feel part of a community that shares ideals. Because the emotional bond is strong, so is the commitment of the rebels. Professor Rao warns that this is no place for online, distant links; face-to-face interactions are key to successful cool mobilizations. The example of the rise of the Slow Food movement in Italy is illustrative: town meetings and sit-in cooking festivals meant that participants could meet, talk, eat and conspire against the fast food empire.

The bell tolls for mainframes
An example will help clarify. Professor Rao suggests the progressive assault of personal computers against the hegemony of mainframe computers, starting back in the 1960s.

For this anti-mainframe rebellion, the hot cause was to have computing power available for personal, private use. Take computing power out of the air-conditioned temple hosting the enormous IBM or DEC mainframes, and put in living rooms and home offices. Replace the high priests in the data room by average Joe’s and Susie’s who could use computers for personal reasons.

The rebellion started in the mid-sixties, when the first hobbyist clubs appeared. The clubs were then followed by dedicated stores (the predecessors to Radio Shack) and newsletters which grew into magazines.

So, lo and behold, after barely a dozen years, personal computing appeared on the scene.

Understand the threat
Although sociological in nature, this book holds important lessons in how market rebels can impact innovation: “Market rebels enable and constrain radical business innovation in markets and, therefore, represent a potential opportunity and threat for organizations.”

For entrepreneurs, finding the next great idea might be as simple as identifying the swelling rebellion underway. For established businesses, it might be best to be on the lookout for rebels that could impede their path.

In the next issue of Casium we will examine how rebellions can create or spread innovation.

Published in April 2010.
Next issue: April 28, 2010