Change

"I wrote him a direct letter," Karl says, "telling him what my project could be, and saying that if the project didn't fulfill his needs, I'd like to stop and spend time on something of more value to him, the company, and me."

His new sponsor was surprised -- and equally candid. "He replied to me, 'You are right. You have caught my feeling about the project correctly,'" Karl says. Within days, he abandoned the project and designed a new one dealing with the Internet that his sponsor enthusiastically supported. "If I hadn't asked," says Karl, "he never would have stopped me. I would have done a project that no one cared about, and my whole change agent year would have been a waste."

3. There is information in opposition.

Like a law of corporate physics, people in organizations have an instinctive reaction to the news that someone is going to "change them": resistance.

"Just because someone resists you doesn't mean you're right and they're wrong," says Maletz. "There's often information in resistance. People get so involved in their change efforts, when they encounter resistance they immediately make the other people the problem."

David Clarke, 35, who heads the information technology team at W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of GORE-TEX and other high-tech products and services for the electronics, medical, and fabric industries, can attest to the notion that listening to resistance can produce smarter change. Given the task of introducing a new manufacturing system in one of the company's East Coast facilities, Clarke faced skepticism from the engineers and manufacturing associates on the plant floor. "It's human nature to resist change," Clarke says, "but they also had a sincere desire not to mess up things that were working."

Clarke's response: listen to the opposition. "Each of those people had a body of knowledge about how the equipment worked and how to produce the best products they could," says Clarke. "Their concerns weren't unfounded. We ran a lot of simulations and built a lot of prototypes. We rejected many ideas that would have hurt the product. What helped us turn the corner was having good discussions about the opportunity to make the product even better. As we went through it, we achieved more buy in. It snowballed."

It's a lesson that Knut Aasrud, one of the SNI change agents, learned during his training program. "Everything is data," he says. "When someone is negative, if you listen carefully you can hear what's really going on. If you can find out why there is resistance, you can learn a lot about your project and about your chances for success." You may even end up with a better project.

4. The informal network is as powerful as the formal chain of command. And you get to design your informal network.

Conventional wisdom says that you need the CEO's support to "fly cover" for you when you're making change. That's true -- as far as it goes. But protection from the boss helps you get started; it doesn't help you get things done. Every company has the official organization chart -- and then there's the way things really work. It's the informal network that's the change agent's source of influence. Once you begin to appreciate how critical that invisible, informal network really is, you can begin to design your own -- keeping an eye open at conferences and company gatherings for people who share your commitment to change, exchanging business cards and email addresses, and taking advantage of every opportunity to enlist new allies whose help you can count on -- and who can count on you.

Gore's Clarke understands this principle implicitly -- because Gore has no formal management hierarchy, no bosses, no managers, no reports. "Networks are very important, especially for building credibility," he says. "We have leaders, but they're not appointed. You're a leader by having followers. People have to be able to trust you, and networking becomes the way you build that trust. Once you have it, you can initiate change. There are no top-down edicts here. It's all informal, based on building your network."

At SNI, one key point of the change agent program is to build an informal, self-organizing network within the stodgy, hierarchical company. By peppering change agents throughout the operation, Schulmeyer expects to short-circuit -- and shortcut --the slow-moving chain of command. Schulmeyer's support for the change agents is well-known; but when it comes to getting things done, they have to rely on each other.

When Knut Aasrud, manager of SNI's software group in Norway, heard from a large engineering customer who wanted to extend the use of some software from Norway to Australia, he simply called Gerald Huang, who covers Australia for SNI. "He said, 'Thanks for the lead! I'm off to see them,'" Aasrud says.

It took one phone call to solve a transoceanic problem. Aasrud says that if he'd gone through formal channels in the Australian division, chances are the customer would never have gotten help. So how did he know to call Huang? The two met during the year they spent together in the SNI change agent program. From that experience, they not only knew each other -- they also knew they could count on each other. That's the kind of power the informal network has to get things done.