Bob Knowling's Change Manual

I realized that I couldn't live in fear. Whether or not I change the company, I knew I would change myself. I'd have new skills and capabilities. I'd be a very valuable commodity.

How did that realization change the way you did your job?

What you don't know while you're having that Road-to-Damascus experience is that once you've put your toe in the water, it's not so cold. Then the confidence factor kicks in.

Once I got my freedom, I got bolder. As I got bolder, the more invaluable I became to the chairman and to the company's leaders. In fact, the CEO used to say, "If I'm not hearing from business leaders every week who want you fired because you're in their face, moving them to new levels of leadership, you're not doing your job." It became the new norm in the organization.

That experience happened at Ameritech. What brought you from Ameritech to U S West?

I started here 10 months ago on the heels of a very difficult reengineering process. When I walked in the door, the company was experiencing service performance problems in the marketplace. Many of our customers had to wait over 24 hours for us to repair their service. New service orders and activation took us an unacceptably long time to deliver.

I saw the job as an opportunity to fix a big operating system and change a culture of entitlement. Like a lot of companies that have been subject to government regulation, we didn't understand the competitive marketplace. It's not just this company. The banking, trucking, airline industries -- all the industries that have been deregulated -- have had to go through a major change process.

But it's even more intense in this company. We're positioned at the threshold of the future in every one of our product lines and services. So the question is, How do you take stodgy, old, bureaucratic, entitled companies and make them competitive enterprises?

Making that change is a challenge that even successful companies face as they age and grow. How do you get started?

For me, it begins with changing a culture of entitlement into a culture of accountability. My first week on the job it was immediately apparent that nobody had been accountable for the reengineering effort. Beyond that, no one had been accountable for meeting customer expectations or for adhering to a cost structure. It was acceptable to miss budgets. Service was in the tank, we were overspending our budgets by more than $100 million -- yet people weren't losing their jobs and they still got all or some of their bonuses.

That's very much like Ameritech had been. When people failed, we moved them to human resources or sent them to international. When I got to U S West, I felt like I was walking into the same bad movie.

To get started, I used the change model I'd learned at Ameritech. First, you never announce that you're launching a change agenda. The reason is simple: change agendas have been done to death in these companies. Everybody's completely turned off to change agendas -- they dismiss them immediately as the "program of the month." In my first two days I found out all of the "programs of the month" that they'd had in the last four years. If you come in and announce, "Here's the next change program," you're dead. You've just painted a target on your chest. There's a target there anyway; this just makes it bigger. So you absolutely don't announce a change initiative.

Instead you do several very-high-impact things in the first 30 days that are immediately distinguishable and immediately shake up the organization. From my perspective, U S West was standing on a burning platform. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't see it that way. So I had a 30-day agenda to create a buzz in the organization, to demonstrate that something's very different.

What kinds of things did you use to create that buzz?

For example, service was in the tank. So my second day on the job I initiated a scheduled phone call involving my department heads to review service performance in all 14 states. I scheduled that call for 6 AM It was a literal wake-up call for the organization. It told my department heads, You're going to serve the customer between 8 AM and 5 PM, so the call happens at 6 AM A few days into the job I changed it, because they couldn't have the data at 6 AM So I moved it to noon and took away their lunch hour.

The norm is to bring people into a meeting, talk about things, but nothing ever happens. We're not going to do that. Something has to be different. Having to get your butt up at 6 AM to understand where your business is, that's a watershed event for an organization that's asleep.

A lot of change programs involve changing people. Did you shake up your team?