Longer-readers will know of my great admiration for changing the game, which I’ve characterized as the only consistently successful strategy.
The good news: we can see it playing out in real-time.
The United Auto Workers new president, Shawn Fain, has led a campaign that feature’s a powerful example of the value of a novel strategy that changes the game. And not to be too on-the-nose, but he’s even called it just that. “They thought they figured out the so-called rules of the game,” Fain said, “so we changed the rules.”
The same-old-same-old strategy in auto strikes was to pick one company, a target, and go as hard and as big as possible to get that target to capitulate. Then, if successful, move on to the next target with a big threat of the same.
But Fain’s UAW playbook has been to take on all (three) of the big US auto manufacturers at the same time, with smaller targeted strikes and one-off and small batches of plants at a time, in an effort to control and ratchet up the pressure over time.
At the beginning of October there was a big negotiation scheduled between Ford and the UAW, at Ford HQ, around an enormous conference table for dozens of negotiators on both sides.
When Fain learned Ford didn’t have an offer to put on the table for this negotiation, he responded, “You just lost Kentucky truck,” and within hours one of Ford’s key manufacturing facilities in Louisville, Kentucky, stopped production.
That’s strategy in action. And the fruits are clear: by the end of October, the UAW took deals on favorable terms from all three of the big US auto manufacturers.