Change

Stop for one minute and look around. What do you see? Every corporate giant says it wants to change. Few can do it. Every young company starts as a natural force for change. Few can sustain it. Every organization has people who think they want to be agents of change. Few can survive it. Look at each new chapter in the unfolding business revolution of the last 10 years, from Michael Milken's financial engineering to Michael Hammer's organizational reengineering, from corporate restructuring to acquisition fever, from intrapreneuring to startup mania. One dynamic links the all: change.

It's not that the business environment is changing. Change is the business environment. And it's not that every company is undergoing change. Change has overtaken every company. Creating change, managing it, mastering it, and surviving it is the agenda for anyone in business who aims to make a difference.

Even change has changed. The idea of "change programs" is discredited, mocked as "flavor-of-the-month" corporate faddism or dismissed as BOHICA -- bend over here it comes again. "If you come in and announce, 'Here's the next change program,' you're dead," says U S West's Bob Knowling, a seasoned change agent. "You've just painted a target on your chest."

Today the idea of a change program sounds hopelessly artificial, the organizational equivalent of a computer add-on, an off-the-shelf peripheral that gets plugged into the company as an upgrade. Instead of an external program, change today is intrinsic to business, an integral expression of how any successful business operates. It has escaped from the narrow confines of human resources -- or any other department or function -- and become an issue of personal responsibility.

You can find people who make change today throughout the organization. They are individual agents, leveraging their energy, experience, talent, commitment, and connections to make things happen. They are change agents -- but only as a way of working, not as a discrete job. They have real jobs, real work -- and driving change is built into how they do their jobs. Creating change is a skill. But getting things done and moving the business is the passion. Says one corporate change agent, "The real challenge of change is not just to come up with a brilliant idea -- it's to implement it. The successful change agent can say, This idea is alive in the company."

We looked for an example of a large, powerful company in the grips of change and found computer giant Siemens Nixdorf (SNI) -- an extreme example made more instructive by its extreme dimensions. Born of the combination of old, established, slightly stodgy Siemens, and young, entrepreneurial, slightly reckless Nixdorf, SNI emerged five short years ago with almost everything going against it -- despite, or because of, its heritage. The merger brought together two gifted but deeply troubled companies: SNI looked like a merger of IBM and Apple would have in 1990. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, the DM15 billion company found itself competing in one of the fastest changing global industries, operating out of a slow-to-adapt European market, and carrying the baggage as Germany's national champion.

Enter Gerhard Schulmeyer, SNI's CEO, schooled in the United States where he ran ABB's operation and learned first-hand the lessons of fast-paced change. Within months after taking over the leadership of the company, Schulmeyer launched Europe's most ambitious corporate overhaul, a cultural transformation to remake SNI and establish Schulmeyer as the Jack Welch of Europe. Schulmeyer recruited Mark Maletz, a veteran change agent with experience at Xerox, American Airlines, and Citicorp, to invent a school for change, training a cadre of change agents who could, like a virus, infect the host company. But these were not to be recruits from the "soft side" -- human resource professionals looking for a new assignment. Instead, Schulmeyer drafted the young and the restless within SNI, hard-charging businesspeople from the field who cared about the company's future, who could be trained in the art of change and then injected back into the stiff, slow-moving, hierarchical SNI culture -- with the promise that they'd make a difference.

It's an approach that's worked for other large companies, some in Europe, such as Royal Dutch/Shell, some in the United States, such as General Electric and Ameritech. In SNI's case, the company has moved from a DM2 billion loss on DM12 billion in revenue 1994 to a DM50 million profit on DM 14 billion in revenue in 1996. Just as important, the "change virus" strategy both offers broad lessons in change and underscores the personal stake required to make change happen. From the experiences of Maletz and the SNI change agents as well as dozens of others skilled at making change happen, we've compiled a handbook -- 10 Laws of Change that you can use to gauge your development as a change agent in an era of total change.