Your Job Is Change- The 10 Rules of the Change Insurgent Part II

6. Hold change resisters’ hands.

Every organization has change resisters — people who are uncomfortable with change, who are
threatened by it, or who would simply rather not have to deal with it. Change resisters pose a
question for change insurgents: What’s the best way to deal with resisters? According to Nancy
Bekavac, 53, president of Scripps College, in Claremont, California, the best approach can be a
gentle one. "Sometimes," she says, "you have to reaffirm what’s there at the same time that you’re
changing things."

According to Bekavac, just like many proud, time-honored companies, Scripps is a symbol-rich kind
of enterprise. When she became president in 1990, she could see that the college needed to
change a great deal to remain competitive as a liberal-arts institution. But she also knew that, as
the insurgent, she needed to show various constituencies — from 21-year-old students to
73-year-old professors to 50-year-old alumnae — that she understood and respected the history
of the college, as well as its traditions.

"One of the first things that we did when I came to Scripps was start a matriculation ceremony,"
Bekavac says. "We opened these great wooden doors on the east end of the library. The
first-year students walk in through the doors and sign a book, writing down their hometown and
their year. And when they graduate, we have another ceremony in which they walk out through
those same doors. Think of it as just one handle for dealing with change. Yes, we’re going to be
different from now on. For example, we’re going to have computers everywhere. But we’re still
going to have our ceremonies. We’re still going to sign in at the library with a pen on handmade
paper. The biggest job that I had at Scripps was convincing people that change doesn’t mean
loss."

The point, says Bekavac, is to show people that you value them — and that you value what
brought the organization to this point. After that, you show people that change is constant.
Providing context, as much as content, is the job of the change insurgent. Russ Pillar, 35, president
and CEO of the CBS Internet Group, offers a different angle on this rule. "For a lot of people," he
says, "facing corporate change is like getting an email that’s written all in capital letters: It’s difficult
to read, because nothing is differentiated. When you come into a situation that requires dramatic
change, there always seems to be so much to do. But if you boil it down, you realize that there are
only two or three very important things to do."

In other words, as a change insurgent, it’s important to pick your battles and to set the right pace.
Don’t try to change everything at once. If you have the luxury of time, setting a pace that lets even
change resisters find a way to fit in can produce an organization that continues to function well,
even as you introduce a new mind-set and a fresh way of working. Once resisters discover that
change isn’t nearly as threatening as they had feared, you can quicken the pace. Sometimes, a
gentle hand is the way to go.

Except, of course, when the situation requires firmer measures ( in which case, see rule 7 ).

7. Use tough love.

There are times when you can nurse the change resisters along. There are times when you can
convince them that change is inevitable. And there are times when you simply have to lay down
the law: The game is changing, and they can either play within the new rules or play somewhere
else.

John Urban, 58, IT support manager at Cenex Harvest States Cooperatives, one of the nation’s
largest farmer-owned agricultural co-ops, got tough in 1990 when the company switched over to
a new computer system. "We were getting a lot of push back from our dispatchers," he says.
"There was this sense that if enough of them balked, we wouldn’t change the system. And we
had to say, ‘Look, if you won’t do this, we’ll find people who will.’ We had to be that blunt." Urban
says that the company sent a memo to all of the terminal personnel, making it absolutely clear what
the new technology required. The company also set up a series of meetings between terminal
personnel, tech people, and managers who were working on the new system. The message got
through: Out of 55 people, only one employee failed to make the switch.

The most hard-core resisters are often found at the most successful companies — because prior
successes give them an excuse for resisting, even in the face of mounting evidence that change
is required. For important people doing important work in important companies, gentle suggestions
to join the change insurgents won’t ever be enough. Under such circumstances, you have to be
prepared to fight power with power.

"You’re either blessed with assets or cursed with them," says Jake Winebaum, 41, cofounder of
eCompanies LLC and former chairman of Disney’s Buena Vista Internet Group. At Disney,
Winebaum was in charge of bringing the company — some 30 divisions, including ABC News and
ESPN — onto the Internet. But it’s hard to get successful people at a traditional company to embrace
the Internet, because it means taking a chance — and risking showing a lack of familiarity with or
competence at the new technology game. Change resisters at Disney protested that they simply
didn’t see the need for the sudden transition. What they meant, Winebaum says, is that they were
afraid of the technology, afraid to venture into an arena where they couldn’t be in control, and
afraid of a situation in which their leadership would be questioned. Small wonder that they were
change resisters.

In those kinds of situations, says Winebaum, you have to rely on the highest authority that you can
muster to back your agenda as a change insurgent. "If you’re an insurgent, you have to strike very
high in an organization, or you’ll fail," Winebaum says. At Disney, the fact that he reported directly
to CEO Michael Eisner — and that he had Eisner’s ear and his support — was a critical factor in
Winebaum’s success. He was able to take his message to people in various divisions knowing that
if he took a tough stand on change, Eisner would back him up.

8. New times demand new measures.

Perhaps the toughest job of the change insurgent is to change the way that the organization keeps
score. It is, after all, a simple truth of business that what gets measured is what gets done. That
simple truth can become the death knell of every change insurgent — if the same old metrics
continue to serve as the company’s measure of success. It’s hard enough to create an
environment for constant change; it’s even harder to make the case that change is necessary and
is in fact working, when all of the traditional indicators continue to determine the way that the
company keeps score.

When it comes to dealing with the challenge of measurement, every smart change insurgent has to
learn to play a double game. First, you have to learn how to play their game, the way that they play
it. As survivors of the dotcom shakeout are rapidly learning, it’s not enough to insist that the new
economy change the laws of economics: You still have to be able to appreciate and play by the old
rules if you want to stay in the game. Consequently, change insurgents learn to speak the
language of finance and venture capital — if only to make sure that they are equipped to argue the
case for change in the language of the change resisters.

The second game that you have to learn is your own game. Here, change insurgents master the
art of coming up with new metrics and measures — performance indicators that reflect a new
mind-set about the important new rules of the game. Are you looking to create a new sense of
urgency in the organization? Try focusing on metrics that highlight speed: the time that it takes to
bring a new product or service to market, the time that it takes to replenish or to restock the
shelves with your product, the time that it takes to fill a customer order. Perhaps your change
agenda focuses on the customer experience. Try creating metrics for every contact that a
customer has with the company: the percentage of orders that are handled perfectly; the
percentage of orders that, if flawed the first time, are corrected perfectly; the percentage of
customers who rate their experience as good or excellent. Or perhaps the change agenda is all
about your company’s performance in the talent wars. Again, new metrics can buttress your
argument that there are other measures besides return on investment or return on equity that the
company needs to pay attention to — for example, offers accepted by new recruits, employee
retention among new recruits, new recruits headhunted away from key competitors, and so on.

The issue came up recently at a big high-tech company, where a group of software developers
asked me to brainstorm with them: How could they convince the company’s chief financial officer
that he was about to make a mistake because he was using the wrong metric? He thought that it
would be cheaper to buy a particular piece of software off-the-shelf from another company than it
would be to produce it in-house. In terms of immediate outlays, he was right. But the in-house
developers saw in the decision a larger question: whether to make an investment in their
experience. And they felt that making that investment was critical to the company’s ability to
innovate in the future. "If we don’t build our own version, we’re out of the race, and that means
that we’re dead in three to five years," they told me.

So the developers and I designed a new metric that they, as change insurgents, could use with
the CFO — one that identified critical paths of innovation for the company and then measured the
value of human-capital investments in those paths. The new metric didn’t substitute entirely for the
CFO’s own "make or buy" calculation. But it did add a new dimension to it. The best part: It changed
the debate inside the company. In the end, the engineers lost part of the battle but won the war.
While the company bought some of the software from outside vendors, it is now focusing on
building capacity in critical paths — and is continuously reevaluating what those paths are.

As a change insurgent, not only do you have to come up with your own agenda for change; you
also have to create a compelling scorecard to demonstrate your performance, and, ultimately, the
way that your performance contributes to the company’s overall success. Being able to speak two
languages with two sets of measures — theirs and yours — is the first step toward changing the
way that the game is both played and scored.

9. Just do it.

For four years, Ina Garten worked on nuclear policy at the White House in the Office of
Management and Budget. Then one day, enough was enough. "I just couldn’t do it anymore," says
Garten, 52. "I hated that I worked on something for four years without seeing anything happen."
Garten applied her energy and intelligence to a project that’s about as far from nuclear policy as
she could find: Today, she’s the owner of Barefoot Contessa, a specialty-foods store in East
Hampton, New York, and author of a popular cookbook called The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook (
Clarkson Potter, 1999 ). Whenever she wants to try a new merchandising-layout strategy, Garten
walks into her store and moves things around — no hesitation, no deliberation, no focus groups,
and no public-opinion polls.

"If I want to move the cheese, I move the cheese!" she says. "I find out quickly enough if the move
was right or wrong. And if it was wrong, I change things again." Whether the enterprise is a
specialty-foods store or a global retailer, change insurgents share a common attribute: They don’t
wait for permission. They don’t ask for resources. They don’t try to build consensus. They make a
decision, see how it plays out, and either reinforce it or change it. Change insurgents thrive on
decisions: Make an informed choice, implement the decision, read the feedback — and repeat the
cycle. "Here, I can make a decision in the morning, implement it in the afternoon, and know if it was
a good decision by the end of the day," Garten says. "When you think about it, that’s the kind of
environment that encourages change. It’s what change should be about. If you get feedback
quickly, you’re encouraged to make more changes."

At Cadence, Mark Shunk takes this rule to heart. "A few months ago, we realized that the
organizational framework that had served us for the prior 9 or 10 months was starting to bind our
abilities as we grew," he says. "I woke up one morning and decided that we needed to move our
director of operations out of his role and onto a special project. He was leading 35 people at the
time, and I thought, ‘There are two approaches to this: I can redraw the organizational structure by
myself, or the management team can do it together.’ I went with the ‘we.’ And over the course of
about three hours, the management team reorganized our entire organization. People were saying
things like, ‘I can take on this functional role, and I’ll take these 5 people and move them over to that
organization.’ We walked out of the room with everybody thumbs-up on a new organizational
structure. We put it into PowerPoint slides and presented it to the rest of the company within 24
hours." The new economy thrives on speed and implementation. The job of the change insurgent is
to alter the speed and comfort level of the organization. And the best way to do that is just to do it.

10. When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.

Change insurgents come to the job with a clear set of understandings — both about themselves
and about the work. They know that by prodding the company outside its comfort zone, they are
playing a high-risk, high-reward game. If they succeed, the company thrives, and they earn both
personal credit and the chance to stay in the game. If they fail, the company may falter, and they
risk losing personal standing. But sometimes, almost perversely, even if they succeed, they end up
losing: They expend so much energy in the process that they begin to question the value of the
effort, or they burn so many bridges internally that it becomes clear that they’re no longer
welcome, or effective. Or, sometimes, they leverage their way to a better opportunity either on
their own or with an organization that appreciates their approach to change. The final job of the
change insurgent is to know when it’s time to go.

Nick Gould, 33, is CEO of Catalyst Group Inc., a New York-based consulting firm that helps other
companies bring about change by focusing more on customers and aligning the organization
behind that focus. Formally the VP of Internet strategy and business development at Scholastic
Inc., Gould joined Catalyst in May 2000. Gould has nothing but good things to say about his time at
Scholastic. But ultimately, he found that he could be more helpful to the company — and more
focused on his own mission — from the outside than he could from the inside.

"If you want to be a successful insurgent, you have to build your own sandbox," he says. "You
have to find people to play with who can relate to your mission. And then you have to cluster
together — to foster a sense of mission for your little group — and try to grow from that core.
Sometimes, you can do that from within an organization. Sometimes, there are enough people who
want to change with you. But sometimes, you have to build a wall between your group and the
rest of the company, until you get big enough and have enough strength to hold your own and to
impress the rest of the organization with your work.

"At Scholastic, I realized eventually that the best way for me to create that dynamic was to be
outside the organization," Gould continues. "That way, I wasn’t bound by existing rules or politics. I
really believe in what the company is trying to accomplish. But I could contribute more effectively —
and I could have more fun — working as a consultant to the company, rather than as an employee
of the company." Gould was lucky, but — like most change insurgents — he also made his own
luck.

The most undeniable truth of the new economy is that there is a surplus of exciting, challenging,
and worthwhile work to be done — and a deficit of change insurgents to do it. If you’re a smart,
hardworking, talented change insurgent, and your company can’t change, won’t change, or
doesn’t even recognize the need to change, you may simply be in the wrong place — at the right
time. Look for a company that genuinely appreciates the need for constant change and challenge.
Or launch your own company — and find other change insurgents who will run with you.

Business is constantly changing. Competition is constantly changing. Technology is constantly
changing. Face it: There’s no better time to be a change insurgent.

Robert B. Reich ( [email protected] ) is an author, a professor, a former labor secretary, and a
change insurgent. His new book, The Future of Success ( Alfred A. Knopf ), will be out in
January.

Sidebar: How to Detect Change Resisters: It’s in Their
Talk

It’s as much a law of work as it is a law of physics: For every action, there’s an equal and
opposite reaction. Change insurgents are bound to evoke their opposite: change resisters. How
can you tell who’s a change resister and who’s not? Listen to what people say.

1."That seems risky." Of course it’s risky. The question is whether the risk is worth it,
given the chance that it might work — and also the inherent risk of not changing.

2."Let’s go back to the basics." What basics? Mass production? Command-and-control
organizations? The idea that "basics" exist is usually wrong, because the world has
changed profoundly since the time when there was one right way to do everything.

3."It worked before." Past success is the enemy of change — especially when it’s
offered as a safe alternative to blazing a new trail.

4."We’re fine just the way we are." Maybe — but it’s unlikely that you’ll stay fine unless
you change. Success breeds complacency.

5."There’s no threat." There’s always a threat, there are always dangers — and if they’re
not "out there," they’re "in here": Internal threats are often the most destructive.

6."That’s not in our core competence." Too bad. You’d better learn. Any organization
that lets itself be bound by its old competencies is building its own coffin.

7."The numbers don’t work." Old models are often irrelevant to the new economy. Pay
attention to cash flow, but don’t let the "green eyeshades" prevent change from
happening.

8."It’s a slippery slope. Once we start down that road, there’s no stopping place."
The real message: I’m not in control anymore! That part is true: Customers are in control.
Old-fashioned control freaks are not in control. Anything that’s not working can be ended
immediately. What can’t be stopped are successes.

9."There will be unforeseen consequences." Naturally there will be, because the new
economy is nothing but unforeseen consequences — which is why constant change is
necessary.

Sidebar: You Can Be a Change Insurgent

In the lexicon of job titles of the future, being a "change insurgent" is something that anyone can
claim. In fact, "change insurgent" is the kind of title that you can add to your existing title, like an
abbreviation for an honorary degree: "vice president, marketing, CI." Here’s how you can qualify.

You don’t have to be at the top of the organization.

In the old economy, leadership was another way of saying "formal authority." In the new economy,
power comes from knowledge and creativity — which means that change insurgents can, and
should, be anywhere.

Power lies with people who know the technology.

People closest to the technology ( programmers, designers, engineers ) are in the best position to
discover what the technology is capable of doing — what can be tweaked or altered to get a
different result. Geeks are also most likely to be in the "gossip circle" about what’s cooking
elsewhere. The job of every change insurgent is to bring that information to bear on the company’s
operations.

Power lies with people who know the market.

People closest to the customers are in the best position to know what the customers want.
They’re in the best position to gauge competitors — and to detect the next competitor. And they’re
also most likely to pick up hints from companies in other industries that are dealing with the same
customers.

Change insurgency can be a team sport.

The most effective change insurgents aren’t loners, mavericks, or revolutionaries. They work the
system. They enlist others. They sell their ideas upward and outward, and they grab good ideas
from others.

The best managers foster change insurgency throughout their organization.

People in positions of responsibility know that high-performing organizations are rife with change
insurgents. So they reward people for their ability to sell their ideas. The more someone is imitated,
the higher that person’s value. Good managers also reward insurgents for finding good ideas and
spreading them. Great organizations create a culture of insurgency.

by Robert B. Reich-
from Fast Company issue 39, page 140

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/39/jobischange.html