Your Job Is Change

For four years, Ina Garten worked on nuclear policy at the White House in the Office of Management and Budget. Then one day, enough was enough. "I just couldn't do it anymore," says Garten, 52. "I hated that I worked on something for four years without eeing anything happen." Garten applied her energy and intelligence to a project that's about as far from nuclear policy as she could find: Today, she's the owner of Barefoot Contessa, a specialty-foods store in East Hampton, New York, and author of a popular cookbook called The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 1999). Whenever she wants to try a new merchandising-layout strategy, Garten walks into her store and moves things around -- no hesitation, no deliberation, no focus groups, and no public-opinion polls.

"If I want to move the cheese, I move the cheese!" she says. "I find out quickly enough if the move was right or wrong. And if it was wrong, I change things again." Whether the enterprise is a specialty-foods store or a global retailer, change insurgents share a common attribute: They don't wait for permission. They don't ask for resources. They don't try to build consensus. They make a decision, see how it plays out, and either reinforce it or change it. Change insurgents thrive on decisions: Make an informed choice, implement the decision, read the feedback -- and repeat the cycle. "Here, I can make a decision in the morning, implement it in the afternoon, and know if it was a good decision by the end of the day," Garten says. "When you think about it, that's the kind of environment that encourages change. It's what change should be about. If you get feedback quickly, you're encouraged to make more changes."

At Cadence, Mark Shunk takes this rule to heart. "A few months ago, we realized that the organizational framework that had served us for the prior 9 or 10 months was starting to bind our abilities as we grew," he says. "I woke up one morning and decided that we needed to move our director of operations out of his role and onto a special project. He was leading 35 people at the time, and I thought, 'There are two approaches to this: I can redraw the organizational structure by myself, or the management team can do it together.' I went with the 'we.' And over the course of about three hours, the management team reorganized our entire organization. People were saying things like, 'I can take on this functional role, and I'll take these 5 people and move them over to that organization.' We walked out of the room with everybody thumbs-up on a new organizational structure. We put it into PowerPoint slides and presented it to the rest of the company within 24 hours." The new economy thrives on speed and implementation. The job of the change insurgent is to alter the speed and comfort level of the organization. And the best way to do that is just to do it.

10. When you've got to go, you've got to go.

Change insurgents come to the job with a clear set of understandings -- both about themselves and about the work. They know that by prodding the company outside its comfort zone, they are playing a high-risk, high-reward game. If they succeed, the company thrives, and they earn both personal credit and the chance to stay in the game. If they fail, the company may falter, and they risk losing personal standing. But sometimes, almost perversely, even if they succeed, they end up losing: They expend so much energy in the process that they begin to question the value of the effort, or they burn so many bridges internally that it becomes clear that they're no longer welcome, or effective. Or, sometimes, they leverage their way to a better opportunity either on their own or with an organization that appreciates their approach to change. The final job of the change insurgent is to know when it's time to go.

Nick Gould, 33, is CEO of Catalyst Group Inc., a ew York-based consulting firm that helps other companies bring about change by focusing more on customers and aligning the organization behind that focus. Formally the VP of Internet strategy and business development at Scholastic Inc., Gould joined Catalyst in May 2000. Gould has nothing but good things to say about his time at Scholastic. But ultimately, he found that he could be more helpful to the company -- and more focused on his own mission -- from the outside than he could from the inside.

"If you want to be a successful insurgent, you have to build your own sandbox," he says. "You have to find people to play with who can relate to your mission. And then you have to cluster together -- to foster a sense of mission for your little group -- and try to grow from that core. Sometimes, you can do that from within an organization. Sometimes, there are enough people who want to change with you. But sometimes, you have to build a wall between your group and the rest of the company, until you get big enough and have enough strength to hold your own and to impress the rest of the organization with your work.