Keith Yamashita Wants to Reinvent Your Company

What do Mercedes-Benz U.S.A., Hewlett-Packard, and the Public Broadcasting Service have in common? When their CEOs, all running powerful brands faced with big-time challenges, needed original advice on how to make radical change for their companies, they called on the same consultant: Keith Yamashita, the 36-year-old cofounder and principal of Stone Yamashita Partners (SYP).

Keith Yamashita may be the most influential consultant you've never heard of. For nearly a decade, his firm's eclectic team of designers, writers, and technologists (plus a poet, a sociologist, an ex-attorney, and not a single MBA) has tackled tough problems for some of the world's most powerful companies. Working from a sun-drenched, brick-walled loft space in San Francisco's warehouse district, this unlikely band of strategists has produced a dazzling array of inventive tools and artifacts, among them short films, off-size books, gargantuan story scrolls, dynamic Web sites, unconventional events, and immersive customer environments. Less visibly -- but with even more-profound effects -- Yamashita and his team have recast the work of strategy as a rich, human-centered, fast-paced, and results-oriented activity.

"Change doesn't have to be a pedantic, regi-mented process," says Yamashita, who ran the launch of Apple's celebrated but ill-fated Newton PDA at age 26 before founding SYP with fellow creative director and designer Robert Stone. "The final deliverable isn't a 120-page PowerPoint deck. The deliverable is a set of easily understood actions -- executed two weeks out, four weeks out, six weeks out, or one year out -- each of which triggers another set of actions. Today more than ever, the job of a leader is to move that chain reaction along in the most inspired way possible."

Nowhere is that chain reaction more evident than at HP, which is undergoing one of the world's most scrutinized transformations. Earlier this year, shareholders approved HP CEO Carly Fiorina's bet-the-company decision to merge with Compaq. But Yamashita and his colleagues had already been working with HP for more than five years. In addition to advising on the firm's Internet strategy (SYP produced a short film, arranged a global roadshow, and created a $20 million executive-briefing center and sales environment), the firm worked with Fiorina on a reinvention and rebranding effort (which included a Comdex keynote, a boxed set of guidebooks that narrate the story behind HP's Invent brand, and a 300-person BrandJam event). More recently, Yamashita's team tackled the internal-communications challenges around the Compaq merger.

Accomplishing such a dizzying range of work comes naturally for SYP, says Debra Dunn, HP's senior vice president of corporate affairs, who served as Fiorina's head of strategy and corporate operations during the company's reinvention process and who has worked with Yamashita on a number of projects across the organization. "The people at SYP don't just craft strategy," says Dunn, "they bring it to life. Not only do they produce tangible outputs, but the experience of having a meeting or an engagement with them actually changes the way you approach your work."

Finding Your North Star
"All meaningful change starts with the right aspiration," insists Yamashita. "Doing strategy is ultimately about engaging human beings to take a leap. The animating question is, What will you become?" That means unearthing what's true to the company's core, or, as Yamashita calls it, the north star: "A powerful north star answers questions like, What are we doing that's different from what everyone else in our industry is doing? Why do we exist? What makes employees passionate about their work? What excites our customers?"

The challenge for executives is to manage the tension between an expansive purpose and the day-to-day shocks of the business environment. "The way to make sense of that dilemma is to initiate a conversation about what's purpose and what's just practice," says Yamashita. That's what Fiorina did from the moment she stepped into the job at HP. Her mantra was, "Preserve the best, reinvent the rest." What's the best at HP? Says Yamashita: "Popularizing technology in a way that's intimate, useful, humane, and high quality."

Make Strategy Visual and Visceral
The centerpiece of effective strategy involves intellectual design: What are the ideas that drive the company? But an often overlooked element of the strategy process involves creating a design for communication: How do leaders make their ideas tangible and compelling?

That's why every artifact or event produced by the SYP team is packed with compelling visual cues and energizing visceral connections.

"Strategy is not something that's done in a box with only a rational hat on," says Stone. "It needs to be visceral, human, and often emotional." Ultimately, agrees Yamashita, "what we're trying to do in our work is engineer epiphanies. We're trying to move people to a place where it makes sense to act."