It's Lonely on the Edge

I'd been in the job for six weeks when I was asked to give a talk about the Internet to a couple hundred managers at the company. I didn't know where we were going at that point, but I had some ideas about what makes the Internet a unique opportunity. I studied religion and anthropology in college, and I think that, fundamentally, humans are a tribal species. We're clannish; it's in our nature. We have a fundamental desire to be connected, and the Internet is the most powerful medium yet to allow people to do that.

I've given lots of talks in my life, but this was the biggest failure -- bar none. People were looking at me with mouths agape. My colleagues didn't want a philosopher talking about tribalism, language, and the search for meaning. They wanted someone who could say, "This is where we're going, and this is how we're going to get there."

For a lot of people, the Internet is the sum of their fears -- particularly in a business that's organized into silos. In our company, the Internet is a proxy for change. People are looking for me to be the change agent. But I have none of the leverage. I can't just go up to colleagues and say, You've got to do this, this, and this. I have to go out and convince them that it's the right thing to do.

One of the first conclusions that I came to was this: In order for our e-commerce strategy to succeed, it has to be a normal part of the day. It won't work if the Internet is regarded as something separate. One way that I demonstrated this was by creating and deploying a pretty vibrant intranet system, with no additional head count. Now when our intranet goes down, you can hear the screams. In just one year, the intranet has pretty much replaced paper altogether.

So I said, We want to do the same thing for our clients -- something that's mission-critical, something that replaces paper. The result is a Web site that's a lot like a visit to your broker (but your broker has the ability to own some of the real estate on the page and to publish stuff for clients). For a fund that traditionally goes through the broker system, this is highly controversial; at first, the brokers felt threatened. I figured that I would divide and conquer. I broke the project down into five or six pieces and started building consensus around each one. But once we got consensus on one piece and moved on to the next, we forgot how to put all of the pieces back together.

I had to start over. I tried to make people comfortable by saying, "I'm not here to destroy your business. It's just the opposite." In the end, what worked was literally taking people's suggestions and turning them into screen shots. You can get to "yes" a whole lot faster if you can show people how their input is taking practical shape.

That's my one piece of advice: Draw pictures that take people where they want to go. Make the idea as tangible as possible. I had to take management out 18 months and say, "Here's what the Web site will look like in a year and a half." Once people could see it and touch it, they could understand it. My CEO said, "I like it, and you don't have 18 months to build it -- you have 6 months."

Is the world going to change for us tomorrow?"

Steve Messinger
messins@vankampen.com
Senior VP, and director of e-commerce and strategic planning
Van Kampen Investments Inc.
Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois

In four years as a management consultant, Steve Messinger (pictured below) saw his share of strategic upheavals. But nothing prepared him for the magnitude of the change that he faced when he joined Van Kampen Investments Inc., in the summer of 1998. A year after Messinger, now 38, took the job, Merrill Lynch stunned the industry with its announcement that it would be shifting to a fee-based pricing model and that, ultimately, brokers would no longer be paid commissions. For a firm like Van Kampen, Merrill's announcement signaled a dramatic shift in the rules of the market. Messinger used the fear generated by Merrill's move as a catalyst inside Van Kampen -- though he still had to win the cooperation of different divisions to bring the company online.

A year ago, I really believed that the Web was going to have a revolutionary impact on the mutual-fund industry. Now I believe that the impact will be more evolutionary. I'm not as worried as I used to be about how a company like Van Kampen (which relies on brokers to sell funds) will get shaken up by having customers buy funds directly over the Net.

So far, the rates of adoption for that kind of business have been negligible.

But when Merrill Lynch announced in June 1999 that it would offer a pure online option for customers, charging them a flat fee for each trade, I thought, "Oh my gosh. Is the world going to change for us tomorrow? Do we need to fundamentally rethink our business model?" I had a team of 17 people and was responsible for all Web marketing, development, content, and operations. I also managed a 5-person strategic-planning department. But this announcement was so big that I sat down and wrote a memo to senior management that asked, "What does this mean for us, not six months out but over the next two or three years?"