Unit of One Anniversary Handbook

As we discover bugs and fix them in subsequent revisions, we go back to our pioneers and upgrade their machines for free. The effect is a sustained dialogue that benefits both sides. For pioneers, it guarantees they will have a pleasurable experience. For us, it allows our engineers to track what people actually do with the things we build.

And it creates positive energy from the sheer pleasure of having made a difference in the lives of real people.

Michael Hammer
President, Hammer and Company
Cambridge, Massachusetts
mhammer@hammerandco.com

The single most important thing you can do to help your company thrive in the modern era of tough customers, intense competition, and relentless change is this: Help every single person in the company understand the business in the same big-picture terms that the CEO does. Everyone needs to understand the economics of the company and its industry, its strategy and cost structure, its processes, products, and competitors.

You can do that step by step. Start by developing a process map of the company's business that shows how value is created and where costs are incurred. Make sure everyone knows who the customers are and what they need. Share an appreciation of industry themes and the company's strategic direction.

People need this understanding, not for academic reasons, but because it will lead to changed behaviors -- to the kinds of customer-focused, team-oriented, results-seeking, and self-starting behaviors that are the ultimate source of modern business success.

Len Schlesinger
Professor, Harvard Business School
Cambridge, Massachusetts
lschlesinger@hbs.edu

People leading others through the process of change should always beware the trap of rationality. Just because something is "right" analytically doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. The harder you push to implement a "right" solution that people don't believe in, the more likely it will become the wrong solution. Think through your company's politics and culture and culture before you move forward.

Thomas Kasten
Vice President, Levi Strauss & Co.
San Francisco, California

When it comes to leading change, Pogo was right: "We've met the enemy and he is us." I'm talking about the deeply held beliefs and strong emotional ties that act as filters on the real world and prevent us from seeing new opportunities and possibilities.

Change agents often see the filters in other people but fail to recognize their own. Those of us in the business of transformation have to be particularly sensitive to our own defense mechanisms. When people resist what we consider an obviously compelling plan, we need to read between the lines and "discuss the undiscussable."

Sure, we have to paint a persuasive picture of the future. But we also have to hone our listening skills and be as open to new ways of thinking as we want our colleagues to be.

Watts Wacker
Resident Futurist
SRI International
Wesport, Connecticut
watts_wacker@qm.sri.com

To change your company's future, change how people think about the future. We recently organized a project for a major packaged-goods company. This company wanted to develop a new plan for its household-cleaner business. I said, "rather than do a 5-year plan, why don't we do a 500-year plan? Let's get a diverse group of people together and ask ourselves how this business -- and the world -- will be different in the year 2500."

It was a pretty remarkable group: a cultural anthropologist; the person who runs the alternative-medicine initiative for the U.S. government; the marketing director of a major interior-design magazine; a professor of creativity from the Harvard Business School. These folks generated a collection of ideas that filtered down into the company's ranks and changed people's perspective. We didn't create a 500-year plan, but did create a disturbance.

Larry Keeley
President, Doblin Group
Chicago, Illinois
lkeeley@doblin.com

All you have to do is squint at any major industry today and you can see how much it has been transformed by the Net. Not just the Internet, but Nets of physical distribution, sales and promotion, communication, and more.

Banking has become a decentralized network of digital investment management and commerce; medicine has evolved into an endless web or referrals, treatment, and payments.

But few of us truly understand how Nets amplify and distort our everyday lives. We learn differently today. We also work, play, and shop differently.

If you want to develop breakthrough products and services, you're going to need to devote substantial material and intellectual resources to understanding how Nets are reshaping their company or industry.