Your Job Is Change

There's another way to raise the temperature inside the company: Make sure that people inside the organization talk to one another and incite one another to change. Hans Bukow, 40, founder, president, and CEO of eWork Exchange, likens that practice to being an old-time telephone operator. "You have to pull the lines out of their normal connection and plug them in somewhere else," he says. "You have to cross the lines deliberately -- from one function to another and from one level to another." To help make connections that otherwise wouldn't happen, Bukow sets up regular lunches for people who wouldn't normally cross paths. For example, says Bukow: "We'll have a vice president of sales take a programmer to lunch."

Do those lunches bring about great new revelations about the business, or produce a newly motivated team? Of course not, Bukow readily admits. But over time, the lunches become part of a company-wide mind-set: People get used to sharing information that they otherwise wouldn't. Ideas, opinions, issues, and challenges move across boundaries. People are more likely to know one another, and, as a result, they're more likely to speak their minds. It's a small but important victory for the change insurgent.

5. Turn the company geeks and salespeople into change allies.

In the new economy, the old biblical prophecy is finally fulfilled: The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. The blockers and the resisters with fancy titles will either change or be changed. And the men and women who have usually labored in obscurity within the organization -- the geeks in the labs or behind the monitors, and the salespeople in the field -- will be recognized for their key contributions as change insurgents.

Why are the geeks and the salespeople critical allies of the change insurgent? And why are they incipient change insurgents themselves? Because they're the people closest to today's sources of change: rapidly morphing technology and relentlessly demanding customers. These are the people who constantly monitor new technological developments -- both inside their own company and within competing companies. And they're the people who constantly talk to your customers. They know more about what's coming in their areas than anyone. They spend time with the problems, opportunities, complaints, and challenges that signal the arrival of a major competitive moment. They can become a squad of powerful truth tellers -- if you can get them to tell you what they know.

The problem is, most geeks and salespeople are trained to try to do the best that they can with what they've got. Throughout their careers, few of them have gotten either the organizational support or the incentives to suggest that their opinions matter. Most have received the message that their time is best spent taking care of business, rather than thinking about ways to change the business. If you can send them a signal that their services as heat conductors are valuable and important, you may be able to enlist them as change insurgents who can keep the heat on inside the business.

One way to send that signal: Model the behavior that you want to see. One of Ray Lane's practices at Oracle was to spend his time in the field actually selling. Of course, the people Lane met with were his counterparts -- top executives at the companies that Oracle was pitching to. Lane's job wasn't to close the deal; he was setting the stage for the sale. He was listening to what key customers had to say and signaling to his own salespeople how important their work was. "One thing that I do religiously," Lane says, "is spend more than half of my time with customers -- being with them, selling to them, listening to them, interacting with them." In fact, during one business quarter, Lane spent just one day in the office. The rest of the time, he was out meeting with customers.

6. Hold change resisters' hands.

Every organization has change resisters -- people who are uncomfortable with change, who are threatened by it, or who would simply rather not have to deal with it. Change resisters pose a question for change insurgents: What's the best way to deal with resisters? According to Nancy Bekavac, 53, president of Scripps College, in Claremont, California, the best approach can be a gentle one. "Sometimes," she says, "you have to reaffirm what's there at the same time that you're changing things."

According to Bekavac, just like many proud, time-honored companies, Scripps is a symbol-rich kind of enterprise. When she became president in 1990, she could see that the college needed to change a great deal to remain competitive as a liberal-arts institution. But she also knew that, as the insurgent, she needed to show various constituencies -- from 21-year-old students to 73-year-old professors to 50-year-old alumnae -- that she understood and respected the history of the college, as well as its traditions.