Your Job Is Change

"You get resentment until the particular person you've brought in achieves success," Lane says. For Lane, this principle is not strictly business -- it's also personal. When he joined Oracle, some of the existing staff took bets on how long he would last. But he was stepping into a situation that he knew how to handle, and, for the most part, the people there gave him the room and the support to do his job. Growth was flat in Oracle's U.S. business when Lane started. But by his third quarter with the company, it had turned a profit. Revenues had grown by about 20%. Stock had gone up 18 points. And Lane was an accepted, respected member of the team. "As soon as you perform, you're fine," he says. "All of a sudden, people were saying, 'Oh, he's real,' and I was in."

2. Find, hire, and promote people who make you -- and the organization -- uncomfortable.

If the job of change insurgents is to move their company out of its comfort zone, it's the duty of change insurgents to hire people who make them uncomfortable. Bringing in new blood isn't good enough -- not if the new people all come from the same place and have the same attitudes. Then all you're doing is substituting one prevailing mind-set for another. Instead, change insurgents surf across different talent pools, picking the best people from different companies, backgrounds, disciplines, and generations.

The goal is to add a destabilizing element -- people who will disturb the status quo and question routine practices. So if you're running a consulting firm that always taps MBAs, try bringing in a class peppered with liberal-arts majors, Webmasters, or foreign-policy experts. If every top-management meeting could adjourn without a discussion -- since everyone already knows everyone else's opinion, and the outcome is a foregone conclusion -- introduce some unexpected points of view. Ask your newest hires to make a presentation, and reward them for asking fresh questions. The hard truth: Most companies today are political backwaters, where yes-men and corporate kiss-ups are still the ones who get recognized and promoted. The first message of change insurgents: Those days are over. Change today means that companies need shit disturbers, not ass kissers.

"Sometimes I yearn for just one staff meeting where everyone agrees with what I have to say," says Mark Shunk, 43, president and CEO of Cadence Network Inc., a Cincinnati-based, new-economy player that helps companies control operating costs by providing Web-enabled information on such expenses as energy and solid-waste management. "I just want one meeting where I don't get quite so much push back." But Shunk knows that if everyone agreed, the company wouldn't be nearly as dynamic: It's the self-appointed "pushers" who keep Cadence improving. "Jim Christopher, our chief technology officer, is probably our biggest pusher," Shunk says. "But that's why we hired him. Jim spent his first week with us auditing what we had been doing -- not in an 'explain to me what you've done' kind of way but in a 'help me understand what we need to do' kind of way. Then he was able to assess whether he thought we were doing what we needed to do, and he could propose changes. His view is always on the future, and that's what we need."

What can keep a company from bringing in a pusher -- the kind of talent who will take an organization outside its comfort zone? According to an executive who until recently was a division leader at a large retailer, one "blocker" that can screen out pushers is the human-resources department. "HR employees are so melded to the old guard that they don't adjust to the new rule book," she says. "In my case, the HR people were so locked in with the old guard that they just perpetuated the past, and that became a sticking point. I remember trying to hire Webmasters and information architects. We were creating new positions in the company, and we had found one person who was extraordinarily talented. But the HR people couldn't get over the fact that someone like that would have to be paid more than a middle manager. I explained why these people were so valuable, and the HR people told me, 'Well, first we need to do a compensation study, and then we'll get back to you -- in a year.' A year! Certain company functions are bound by so many old rules that they get bogged down, and then they can't help you scale the change team."

3. Undermine or subvert "relations" people.

This leads to the next rule for change insurgents: Don't let the relations people determine the pace of change in the company. In the old economy, where stability and predictability were the orders of the day, people with "relations" in their titles proliferated. Their jobs were about one thing: preventing change -- eliminating disturbances and muting turbulence.