Change Agent - Issue 28

My first job was cleaning the grease off the hot-dog roaster at the carousel snack bar, near my home in Buffalo. Actually, it wasn't a roaster. It was more a series of nails that rotated under a lightbulb. I also had to make the coffee and scrub the place clean every night. it very quickly became obvious to me that I didn't have much of a future in food service.

I didn't have to make many decisions in my job. And the manager of the store didn't exactly look to me to initiate change. In fact, she didn't want anyone to initiate change. (My suggestion that we branch out into frozen yogurt fell on deaf ears, as did my plea that it would be a lot cheaper to boil hot dogs on demand than to keep them on the rack under the lightbulb all day.)

Any change, any innovation, any risk at all would lead to some sort of terrible outcome for her, she believed.

After I set a record by breaking three coffee carafes in one shift, my food-service career was over. I was out on the street, unemployed at the tender age of 16. But from that first job, I learned a lot -- and those lessons keep getting reinforced.

Just about every day, I go to a meeting where I meet my boss from the snack bar. Okay, it's not really her. But it's someone just like her: a corporate middle-person who's desperately trying to reconcile the status quo with a passionate desire to survive. My boss didn't want to jeopardize her job. She viewed every day and every interaction not as an opportunity but as a threat -- a threat not to the company but to her own well-being. If she had a mantra, it was "Don't blow it."

In her business, she faced two choices: to die by the guillotine, a horrible but quick death, or to perish slowly on the rack -- which is just as painful a way to go, if not more so, and guaranteed to leave you every bit as dead. But in her nightmares, only one of those two options loomed large -- the guillotine.

I have to admit it. I have the same dream.

Have you ever spent a night worrying about what your boss (or your stockbroker or a big customer) is going to say to you at that meeting the next morning? Have you ever worried about some impending moment of doom? That's fear of the guillotine.

But almost no one worries about the rack. We don't quake in our boots about a layoff that's going to happen two years from now if we don't migrate our systems before our competition does. We're not afraid of stagnating and dying slowly. No, we're more afraid of sudden death, even though the guillotine is probably a far better way to die.

Recently, at the invitation of the president of a company, I visited its operation in Chicago. This company is a household name, a financial-services giant. And its people know that the Internet represents a huge threat to their future.

When I get there, people are so earnest. They've all done their homework. They all take notes and ask questions. At first, it seems as if they're doing everything right to prepare for the future. They've got an Internet task force, and it reports directly to the president. It's a high-profile gig: Lots of senior people are on this team, and virtually every department in the company has a representative on it.

The team is busy hiring consultants, building prototypes, creating business models, and generally working hard to get the company in shape for the next century.

I give my talk, and team members invite me to sit in on a presentation by the company's top marketing person. We sit down in a huge conference room, with a fantastic view of the lake, a silver tea set on a sideboard, and custom-printed yellow pads placed in front of everyone.

After the presentation -- which sounds all too much like state-of-the-art Internet strategy circa 1996 -- they ask me what I think.

I look around, and that's when I realize that every single person in the room is waiting for me to say the same thing. They want to hear, "Hey, you guys are totally prepared for the Net. Don't worry about it." They want to hear, "Hey, this Web thing isn't a threat to your business model. You don't need to change a thing." They want to be told that everything will be fine.

And the really sad and amazing thing is that they don't care if I'm wrong. The idea that their company could end up like Waldenbooks or CBS or Sears or any other big, dumb company is just fine -- as long as they don't have to change now.

What was going on here? I had just met a group of smart, aggressive, well-compensated people, who control billions of dollars in assets and one of the best brand names in the world. Yet they knew they were going to fail, and they couldn't do a thing about it. They had all bought into a system in which it's just fine to fail on the big stuff -- as long as little failures don't happen now.

Let's be honest.

Nobody likes change.