Your Job Is Change

Are customers upset, unhappy, demanding better service? Send them to the customer-relations people: They'll smooth those ruffled feathers (and eliminate the need for change). Is the company engaged in questionable practices that draw the attention of the press? That's a job for the public-relations experts: They can explain away operations that probably ought to be changed. Are discontented employees raising tough questions about how the company treats its own people? Send them to the folks in employee relations: They can make the malcontents quiet down. How about legislators who challenge the company's environmental record? They'll get a call from the government-relations team. And so it goes.

Whenever there's a challenge to the established order, or to the standard way of working, call in the appropriate relations people. These are the "handlers" who can calm down the pushers. Think of them as the heat shields who dampen, deflect, or moderate the demands coming from inside and outside the organization, telling the company that it has to change. In the new economy, heat shields, who think that they're the company's staunchest defenders, become the company's worst enemies -- by protecting it too well from demanding customers, clients, and constituents.

The change insurgent's alternative? If you can't convince the relations people to rethink their operations, use technology to route demands around them. Email, intranets, and extranets can move information across borders, around established bottlenecks, and over chains of command -- so that complaints, suggestions, and alternatives get a hearing inside the company.

That was the approach adopted by Ted Leonsis when he and a friend, Jon Ledecky, became majority owners of the Washington Capitals ice-hockey team. (Leonsis's day job is president of interactive properties at AOL.) One of Leonsis's first moves as team owner was to send a direct message to the hard-core but disaffected fans in the Capitals' ice-hockey community: No more relations people acting as intermediaries. Starting immediately, the fans could email their comments, complaints, and suggestions to him directly.

"I went online to 'chat' with fans between game periods," says Leonsis, 43. "I made my email address known. Then I made a list of 125 things that the fans told me they didn't like. And I asked them, 'If I handle these issues, can you fall in love with the team again?' " The fans said yes, and Leonsis went to work making changes, responding to the feedback and publishing the progress online.

For example, all players now have their own laptops, so they can communicate directly with fans. And the team Web site has been redesigned with chat rooms and message boards to emphasize interactivity. There are low-tech improvements as well: An army of cleaning people shows up between periods at Capitals home games to wash the glass that separates fans from the game. "The fans told me that the glass got all smudged, and they couldn't see the game," Leonsis says. "I told them that we'd take care of it. Now, when the glass cleaners show up, the fans cheer."

4. Conduct heat.

Routing around the heat shields is a defensive tactic -- important as an improvement but insufficient as a strategy. The next step for change insurgents is to learn how to play offense -- and that means figuring out how to conduct heat. The challenge here is to calculate exactly the right temperature and the right location, so that the rising temperature becomes an incentive for the organization to change, rather than an excuse to give up or to bail out.

With practice, change insurgents learn to move complaints, concerns, problems, and competitive threats to the right place in the organization and with the right intensity. Blasting people with a constant cascade of complaints and bad news simply demoralizes them. At the same time, it's essential that people in responsible positions not be able to deny the existence of problems and challenges that the company has to confront.

Here again, change insurgents are using technology as a heat conductor. They forward emails from unhappy customers to the people who can really do something about the complaints. Or they go out into the field and videotape real customers shopping in a store, or using the company's product or service -- and then show the tape back at headquarters. And they don't show it just to one representative from a function; they show it to everyone, because different people will pick up on different things. Or they assign employees to check competitors' Web sites and to analyze what the competition is doing that outperforms their own offerings. Or they post up-to-date data on company sales, earnings, and market price for every employee to see, so that everyone is involved and no one can duck what the market is saying about how they're doing. In every case, the point is the same: Make it impossible for people inside the company to stay comfortable and to plead ignorance.