Your Job Is Change

Rather than working from the top down, the change insurgent works from wherever he is. Many change agents used to depend on title, authority, or official sanction to undertake their change programs. Change insurgency doesn't depend on formal rank; it depends on great ideas, powerful visions, and daring examples. There's no way that the people at the top can know enough about technology, markets, or the potential of people in and around the organization to be the major instigators of change. There's no way that change can be planned as a formal "program." The job of the people with the most formal authority, the "chiefs" -- chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer -- is to create an environment in which change insurgency can flourish.

The 10 Rules of the Change Insurgent

In a time of constant change, one thing hasn't changed: Organizations are still resistant to change. The change agent of the old economy worked in an environment where incremental change was all that was needed -- and all that was tolerated. He counted it a victory if he could move the organization toward better products in a slow and steady fashion. Today, change has changed -- the speed, the pace, the type, the purpose. The balance has shifted. The change insurgent has to keep altering the organization's fundamental form, focusing on its capacity to change constantly.

Here are 10 important rules for the change insurgent.

1. Manage the blood supply.

It's a simple fact of competitive life: Every company constantly needs new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of thinking about its products, its services, and its customers. And that means that every company needs a constant infusion of new blood. In an economy that's all about the intersection of talent and ideas, change insurgents have taken to managing turbulence -- monitoring the flow of new people into a team or a department to produce a creative tension between the old hands who know the ropes and the new hires who are there to disturb the status quo.

Create too much turbulence, and the organization loses the capacity to get things done. Knowledge, skills, and relationships are sacrificed in the name of creative chaos. But create too little turbulence, and people stagnate. They fall into comfortable routines. Or worse, they get head-hunted away to more vibrant organizations, or they give up competing, since they no longer feel like part of the action. Managing the blood supply and monitoring the turbulence are critical skills for keeping an organization vibrant, involved, and alert.

Raymond J. Lane, the former president and COO of Oracle -- and the "behind the scenes guy" who is credited with actually running the company and building it into what it is today -- was a master of this first rule of change insurgency. He left Oracle in July (opinions differ as to why he quit, though the company line is that he'd been planning a change for some time). But while he was there, he finessed the talent transfusion, balancing new blood and old blood almost perfectly. He honed his crew, adding here and taking away there, so that Oracle was able to meet new challenges from the outside even as it stretched and challenged itself internally.

When Lane joined Oracle in 1992, he faced a homegrown management team that had been doing things the same way since the company's founding, 15 years earlier. Growing the company by stretching beyond comfort zones was something that none of the inbred group had ever imagined. "Every day, the people here were running something bigger than they'd ever run before," says Lane, 53. "They knew what it was like to operate as a $1 billion company. We needed people who knew how to operate as a $10 billion company."

Lane moved quickly to bring in new people from old companies -- Booz-Allen & Hamilton, IBM, McKinsey & Co. -- talented operators who could take Oracle to the next step. By the time Lane left Oracle, only one person who reported to him predated him at the company. Harsh? Probably. Necessary? Absolutely. These were moves that Lane had to make as a change insurgent to promote first Oracle's survival, then its growth. "You think that you're doing the right things all the time," Lane says. "But if you don't ask anybody and you don't have any critics, guess what? In this business, you just don't know when you're drinking your own bathwater."

But bringing in new talent is only the first task of a change insurgent. The second task is to make sure that the new blood has a better-than-fair chance to succeed. As Lane explains it, there's a period of time, after someone joins an organization, when the jury's out on whether that person will make it. Existing employees are understandably skeptical, and sometimes even defensive, when a new person joins the team, and they can make the adjustment period easy or hard at their whim. Lane knew that it was important to help new hires gain credibility as fast as possible, so that they'd be able to contribute as fast as possible. His approach? Give new hires projects that they could complete quickly and successfully. Give them something visible on which to prove themselves.