Change

At Gore, says David Clarke, change agents think about their work in terms of polarities. "Take insider and outsider," Clarke says. "There are advantages and disadvantages to both. It's not an 'either-or' situation, but it's also not 'both-and.' No matter how hard I try, I can't do both at once. So my approach is to play the role of insider until that doesn't work any more. Then I play the outsider role for all its advantages, until it doesn't work. I can flop back and forth between the roles, taking advantage of each."

According to Clarke, the idea of polarities extends from the individual change agent to a change agenda for the company -- a way of keeping a healthy tension alive in the business. "When you can get a computer systems group talking about the polarity between ease of use and security, for instance, you tend to cut down on the religious wars," says Clarke. "You can get people to agree, 'Right now let's put a premium on security. When that starts to feel wrong, let's put the emphasis on ease of use.' The whole company can live between the polarities."

8. No change agent ever succeeded by dying for his company.

"I want you to remember," says General George S. Patton at the opening of the film Patton, "that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country."

He could have been talking about change agents. "I learned a long time ago," says Bob Knowling, "that a change agent has got to learn to stay alive. A dead change agent doesn't do anybody any good." In fact, Knowling says, most change agents who do end up dead are "kamikaze pilots" bent on self-destruction.

Maletz agrees. "There's a tendency for change agents to see themselves as pioneers, headed off alone into the frontier," he says. "And what happens to pioneers alone on the frontier? They get shot."

In almost every instance, it comes down to judgment: What's worth fighting for? What's the difference between a skirmish and the war? Maletz cautions that the times when a change agent should go down in a heroic blaze of glory over a matter of principle are very rare.

"Change agents sometimes chose their battles poorly," he says. "They're busy celebrating successes when the war is at risk. Or they're in the trenches fighting for something that looks important, but in the larger sense isn't all that significant."

Only on matters of ethics does Maletz draw the line. When a change agent's personal word and integrity are on the line, a principled stand is the only option. "If you made a set of personal commitments that no one would be laid off due to your initiative, and management decides to go ahead with layoffs, then it's okay to get shot," Maletz says. "It has to be that important to you personally to make a stand."

Maletz faced just such a dilemma at Xerox, early in his career. Having launched a pivotal change effort at Xerox's United Kingdom subsidiary, Maletz faced a direct order from a high-ranking executive to shut down the program. Maletz refused, and found himself in the middle of a formal disciplinary hearing for "insubordination." Maletz had three choices: back down, be fired, or quit. He decided to make it a matter of principle. "I wanted the system to wrestle with the issue of what was more important -- some bureaucratic regulation or a key project for reshaping the company."

The company chose the regulation; Maletz left the company -- and took his change team with him.

9. You can't change the company without changing yourself.

In any change effort, the first person to change is you. It happens for two reasons. First, once you begin to work as a change agent, you're automatically subject to a higher level of scrutiny and a tougher standard of judgment -- from those both above and below you. As Bob Knowling found at Ameritech, once he embraced his role as a change agent, the CEO not only came to rely on him more, but also demand more from him. "I honestly think the CEO was tougher on me and my team than he was on the business leaders," says Knowling. "I took his wrath more than anyone else. He also never wavered in his belief in us and his support for us." At the same time, Knowling's new visibility made people watch him even more closely to make sure he measured up.

Second, to do the job means developing skills and techniques that immediately change how you work. In the course of implementing his project at SNI, Mark Miller, an American with degrees in math and computer science, became his own most important change project. His task involved creating a marketing area where all SNI's financial services were on display, using real computer terminals and ATMs, so banks, financial institutions, and brokerages could experience what SNI had to offer. A simple enough marketing strategy, but one unheard of within SNI's disparate parts.