Bob Knowling's Change Manual

The first time I really paid attention to Bob Knowling, he was working late into the night, using all of his persuasive powers to overthrow the work I was doing to help transform Ameritech, the telecommunications giant based in Chicago. Twelve hours later, he was standing in front of the whole executive group saying that he'd been wrong.

That's when I knew he was courageous.

Over the next six months, he played a consistently constructive role in the Ameritech transformation effort -- until he was assigned to set up and run the Ameritech Institute. And he resisted that. After a few months on the job, he built the internal change team that reported to the CEO and blossomed as a remarkable change agent.

That's when I knew he was gifted.

Over the next 18 months I saw him engage 30,000 Ameritech employees in community service, shift millions of dollars of Ameritech Foundation money into high-leverage community activities, practice his change skills in revitalizing the Chicago YMCA, and bring his passion to Detroit's Focus: HOPE, the country's largest inner-city manufacturing training center.

That's when I knew he was committed.

I saw him in South Africa, six weeks before Nelson Mandela's election, addressing an audience of blacks and whites -- some of whom had never attended a formal talk given by a black man -- describing the fundamental tenets of change.

That's when I knew he was farsighted.

I heard him describe his upbringing to MBA students at the University of Michigan -- how he was the middle child of a family of 13; how none of the first 6 made it past ninth grade; how he was the first in his family to make it through college -- and how every one of his last 6 brothers and sisters followed him into the ranks of professional employment.

That's when I knew he was for real.

He joined US West in February, 1996 as vice president, network operations. His new job is to lead more than 20,000 employees in a large-scale change effort to improve service to U S West's more than 25 million customers. Bob Knowling is a change agent's change agent, a man who's learned to align all the elements of his character so that, no matter what the setting, he leads change.

When did you finally see yourself as a full-fledged change agent?

My Road to Damascus experience was the day I woke up and realized that I had freedom: instead of worrying about my job, I only worried about never compromising my change agenda. That realization unleashes the real power of the change agent.

This goes back to 1994, when Ameritech Corp. decided to create a pool of fully dedicated internal change agents. I was selected to lead the Ameritech Institute and I was not a happy camper. I'm an operating guy. I wanted to go to the front lines. Intellectually I understood the importance of the job. But man, my heart was in the field.

In the new organization we were creating, nobody had a job. We created the institute first. Then the leadership team, with our help, picked the presidents of the units, and then the officers of those units. It was a reemployment process. I've been an athlete all my life. My new assignment as a change agent was like the owner of the Bulls telling Michael Jordan to pick the team and design the plays, and then saying, By the way, you don't get to play.

Meanwhile at the institute I was trying to invent a model that nobody in the world of phone companies is familiar with. We benchmarked GE's Crotonville center, we looked at other best practice-change models. But it was difficult because we didn't know what we didn't know. What did it mean to be an internal consultant to the business heads? None of us could understand the authority that we'd have to drive change in the organization. We were going to put system changes in place to deal with the hearts and minds of people, while also working on real strategic issues? Yes, that sounded fun.

But it wasn't happening. We weren't being bold. We were still operating like bureaucrats. It was as if we'd been neutered. We had all of this room to play in, we had all this air cover from the chairman, but the only bold initiatives were coming from external consultants and they were getting frustrated with our change team.

Finally, one of the consultants asked me, "What are you afraid of?" I'll never forget that conversation. I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You have great instincts, but when the chairman does something dumb, you look the other way. When a business unit leader has an operating style that is totally different from the change model, you won't call him on the carpet. Do you want a job so bad that you're willing to accept what you know is wrong?"

Man, that was heavy to wear. He finally said, "You're not free." It took some time for all that to soak in. Then I decided, "What's the worst thing that could happen to me? I could lose my job. But if I lose my job because I've developed into a world-class change agent, there ought to be about a dozen companies out there ready to pick me up."