20/20 Change Agent

Trying to turn around a giant insurance company is like trying to parallel park a battleship. Just ask Tom Valerio.

From 1993 until this past September, Valerio was the point man on a major push to reinvent CIGNA Property & Casualty, a big-time subsidiary of giant insurer CIGNA Corp. Valerio, 45, a graduate of West Point and a veteran of IBM, was handpicked by CIGNA P&C President Gerald Isom to be the company's designated transformation officer. As senior VP of corporate reengineering, it was up to Valerio to help move an organization of roughly 6,500 people to the brave, new world that Isom had envisioned.

Because he lacked both a staff and a budget, Valerio had to rely most on his ability to focus -- to zoom in on the initiatives that would propel the company toward its goals; to put a wide-angle lens on the big picture; to stay alert to anything that might blindside the effort. Fresh from the front lines of CIGNA's transformation effort, Valerio shared his four-point plan for bringing clarity to change.

Be brutally honest about where you are.

A company will never figure out where it's going, says Valerio, if it doesn't take a cold, hard look at where it's coming from.

By almost every measure, CIGNA P&C was in the basement when Valerio joined it in 1993. Battered by poor underwriting decisions and claims from natural disasters such as hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, that year CIGNA bled $275 million in red ink. Its combined ratio, a critical measure of an insurer's health, had spiked to a staggering 140%: For every dollar in premiums that came in, CIGNA paid out $1.40 in claims and expenses.

The numbers were miserable, but Isom and Valerio suspected that the data didn't tell the whole story. Perhaps they'd learn more if they invited, say, a thousand people into the change process. And so they did.

"We held a brown-paper fair: We took this big, multipurpose room at our Philadelphia headquarters and taped up brown butcher paper all over the walls," says Valerio. "On the paper was a flowchart of our work process. And we invited everyone in the building to put up anonymous Post-it notes telling us which parts of the process were working, which weren't, and why."

Some of what Isom and Valerio saw at the fair was news, and some of it wasn't. But almost all of it was bad. "We had poor relationships with our customers. We had poor relationships with our distribution channel. We didn't have the kind of technology in place that would help people perform. And people were cynical. They had been downsized under the guise of reengineering, and now they were about to be 'reengineered' again. It was not," Valerio concludes, "a pretty picture."

Bring 20-20 foresight to where you want to go.

Any change effort that requires more than a one-page manifesto to articulate its goal is doomed to failure. If the point of the program is complex, people lose focus -- and eventually lose their way.

Isom's vision for CIGNA was so concise, you could write it down on a scrap of paper: to become a top-quartile, specialist property and casualty company. To an outsider, such bloodless words hardly aspire to the kind of oratory that would rally 6,500 employees. But to CIGNA 's underwriters, Isom had laid out a radical proposition.

First, he had explicitly linked the goal to what really matters in business: the bottom line. "People have a natural yearning to be part of something that's profitable," says Valerio. "And Isom had set a goal that would lead us to profitability."

Second, Isom had pledged to take a staggering, monolithic insurer that was getting clobbered in the market and transform it into a high-performing specialist insurer comprising roughly 20 discrete business units. CIGNA P&C would abandon its ruinous strategy of chasing premium revenue in a large number of different markets. From now on, it would only go after premiums from carefully targeted customers in carefully targeted markets, where underwriters knew the risks and CIGNA could make good margins.

Focus relentlessly on the things that move you toward your goal.

"In any change effort," says Valerio, "the real work comes in closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be." In CIGNA's case, that meant defining intermediate performance measures and ensuring that all of its energies were focused on getting to the next milestone.

One of the tools that Valerio used to turn strategy into action was the "balanced scorecard," which identified multiple performance measures for the businesses within CIGNA. And it tracked and billboarded these measures in a very public way.

By booting up an electronic version of the scorecard on their desktop computers, senior leaders could get an instant read on whether their unit was hitting its objectives -- and they could follow every other unit's performance as well. If the scorecard flashed green, the unit was on target; yellow indicated flagging performance; and red warned that the unit was in trouble.