change - Barbara Waugh

Waugh reported her misgivings to Birnbaum. In response, he challenged her to lead the effort. She accepted -- but insisted that she and Birnbaum begin by asking questions rather than proposing answers. Using a worldwide employee survey, she canvassed for answers to basic questions: What does it mean to be "the best" research lab: having the most Nobel laureates? filing the most patents? What will it take to become the world's best lab: more people? different people? new priorities? better marketing?

The inquiry generated 800 single-spaced pages of feedback and identified three primary challenges. Programs: HP Labs simply had too many projects and too few priorities. People: The organization didn't remove poor performers quickly enough, and rank-and-file researchers didn't have the freedom they needed to do their jobs well. Processes: The "information infrastructure" was inadequate. HP Labs researchers, for example, lacked certain much-needed technology-creation tools.

The feedback, says Waugh, was "800 pages of frustrations, dreams, and insights." But how could she capture and communicate what she'd learned? How could she share this powerful critique with senior management? The last thing she wanted was to preach through PowerPoint. So instead of creating bullet-point slides, she drew on her experience with street theater and created a "play" about HP Labs. She worked passages from the surveys into dialogue and then recruited executives to act as staff members, and junior people to act as executives. The troupe performed for 30 senior managers. "At the end of the play, the managers were very quiet," Waugh remembers. "Then they started clapping. It was exciting. They really got it. They finally understood."

The ultimate challenge, of course, was to move HP Labs toward the future. Here Waugh embraced two guiding principles. First, it would be up to the people of HP Labs to move the organization forward; she couldn't do the job for them. Second, deep-seated change could occur only as a result of incremental improvement: If you want to make a big difference, then you need to help people achieve little victories. "The notion of a 'change agent' is problematic," Waugh says. "You don't manage change. You help to create the conditions for it. You help people to do what they already want to do."

Her model for change prizes pragmatism over promises -- small wins within an existing system over total, start-from-scratch transformation. Waugh arrived at this model by learning from the mistakes that she saw during her years as a political activist. She became "horrified and fascinated," she recalls, by a phenomenon that she saw over and over again: Radical groups kept subverting themselves -- instead of subverting the systems that they were trying to change. "We would betray and sabotage each other in ways that were much worse than anything our enemy could ever do to us," she says. Why? Because the activists who belonged to those groups pursued goals -- eradicating sexism in theological education, to name one example that is dear to Waugh's heart -- without creating a means to measure progress. As a result, activists spent their energies on measuring one another's commitment to the cause rather than on what was supposed to be getting done.

That's why Waugh and WBIRL have spent the past five years cultivating more than 100 small, achievable, grassroots initiatives, all designed to make measurable improvements inside HP Labs. Employees devise initiatives and, if those initiatives are deemed worthwhile by Waugh and by people in senior management, the staffers are provided with cash assistance, the use of Waugh's network -- and the chance to bend her ear. "Most people don't really need money," she says. "What they need is someone to listen. And listening is an active thing. You can have five meetings where you listen to people, really listen to them describe their dreams, and then go home feeling that you haven't done anything. In fact, they've done it all, but you're exhausted."

Waugh tends to listen most closely to colleagues who are asking concrete answers to simple questions. Five years ago, for example, two engineers asked, "Why don't people talk to each other more, even at the coffee pots?" In response, they decided to lead Friday-afternoon "chalk talks" -- informal discussions of whatever technological issues happened to be on people's minds. The talks drew between 50 and 150 people, and spawned various spin-off groups. Chandrakant Patel, 38, one of the researchers who started the chalk talks, had a special interest in heat transfer (the heat that is dissipated when a computer is running). He pulled together six other people from around the company who had an interest in that topic, and soon they were hosting a two-day conference for 65 people. Now there's an annual "thermal symposium," hosted by various HP divisions. Patel has even converted a storage room into his own "thermal-sciences lab."