It worked. His new shoelace withstood tremendous stresses before breaking. However, because it lacked sharp corners, it tended to slip and unravel, so you frequently had to stop what you were doing to tie your laces again. Charlie maintained that this was a feature, a design advantage, as it gave most people some exercise they sorely needed.

But now, Charlie faced a bigger problem. He wanted his rowing crew to win races. Even if they couldn't beat the 3-minute, 21-second record for 1,000 meters, he wanted to come close. Charlie saw this as a management problem, so he ignored all the jokes he kept hearing about the runner who soared past the world 3-minute record for a mile because he knew a shortcut.

He planned to work his crew relentlessly until they were ready to compete. He hired a manager to time practice races. Unfortunately, his team came nowhere near a fast race. They'd row an 8-minute kilometer, sometimes a 7-minute kilometer, but never close to the 4 minutes or so that he hoped for. So he bought a new stopwatch.

That didn't help, so he hired a new manager to time the practice races. That improved matters a bit, but not enough. There must be something wrong with his strategy, Charlie began to suspect. He had his team members put in more practice hours; he put them on special diets; he tried unorthodox strokes-these didn't help either. Nothing worked.

Finally, in desperation, he hired some management consultants. They decided to observe the strategies and tactics of winning teams. They learned a lot. In time, they brought back a report.

It seems that, in all the other teams, they had eight men pulling oars and one man steering and managing-instead of the other way around.

Charlie knew just what to do. He reorganized the management structure and developed an incentive plan. For every 10 seconds of improvement, he would issue rewards. The rower would win prizes-a handsome ball-point pen, a T-shirt, a plaque, a genuine-plastic briefcase. The managers would get cash.