To pull it off, Miller had to win the financial and technical support of SNI's various divisions. "At the beginning I encountered a large degree of uninterest," Miller says with understatement. Hardware, support, and sales simply weren't prepared to back the idea with the equipment, services, and money that Miller needed.
But he began to make progress when he changed. "I was trying to convince people that the way I looked at the project was the way they should look at it," Miller say. He became persuasive when he asked himself, "What are the people who hear this going to think? How can this idea benefit them?"
Today Miller's showroom often gets two sets of customer visits per day. And Miller's "uninterested" internal partners eagerly keep their sections of the display up to date.
"Change is what I do," says Gore's David Clarke. "It's what excites me. I try to make a difference. I believe change and growth are linked. I've never seen anybody grow without making changes."
It's true that most change efforts fail. And that most change agents feel squeezed, pushed, and pulled almost daily as they do their work of moving their team, their group, their company out of its comfort zone. And it's still the case that change agents who can master the skills make themselves the most valuable of all employees.
"Companies know intuitively that one of the scarcest resources today is the person who can help them through this period of turbulent change," says Maletz. If that career promise doesn't convince you, consider the alternative: You're not a change agent. You settle in as a process manager -- and after you've learned the process, your learning stops. After 10 years on the job, you don't have 10 years of experience -- you've got 1 year of experience repeated 10 times. And that person coming to see you is a change agent, who's going to try to teach you how to start learning all over again -- so your career won't be over.
In the end, that's the 11th Law of Change: change -- or die.
Charles Fishman (cnfish@mindspring.com) is a journalist based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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