Keith Yamashita Wants to Reinvent Your Company

Consider its work with Mercedes-Benz. SYP joined forces with Kaleidoscope Productions in New York to help then-CEO Mike Jackson elicit support among dealers for a plan to reinvent the customer experience. Yamashita says that Jackson "guaranteed resistance" -- and SYP went to work, writing and producing a short film that reflected a progressive vision of the customer experience. SYP aired the film in an amphitheater at a sales conference in Hawaii. When the curtain rose, the characters from the video appeared onstage to lead the dealers through an interactive play that took place on a set called "Dealership of the Future." After the experience, an overwhelming majority of the dealers signed up for Jackson's plan.

Think Fast, Act Faster
"Change is a chain reaction, but you have to be deliberate about where you start," says Yamashita. "You can't fix everything at once. The trick is to find the minimum number of leverage points that can make a dramatic impact."

Once you settle on the hot buttons, he continues, "the most important thing is just to get stuff rolling." Within days of establishing a guiding vision, Yamashita usually has a half-dozen strategic initiatives in the works.

Finally, if the work of change seems too daunting or the pace of change too slow, Yamashita suggests a surefire (albeit high-risk) ignition tactic: "Hold your company hostage," he says. "Declare your vision in a public way. It's human nature to procrastinate. And without any kind of enforcement, your strategies will remain exactly that -- strategies with no action. Avoid the problem by committing to a timeline. The good news is that it's also human nature to perform -- especially when you have a big audience."

Sidebar:

10 Ways to Reinvent Your Company

Here's a crash course from Keith Yamashita, cofounder and principal of Stone Yamashita Partners, on the art and science (mostly art) of creating strategy and unleashing change.

1. Outlaw PowerPoint. Write down your vision as a story -- with a beginning, middle, and end -- to clarify what must change first.
2. Don't rely on words alone. Bring your thinking to life: Create an exhibit, use diagrams, prototype ideas.
3. Make strategy an everyday act. The creation and re-creation of strategy shouldn't be a process that you undertake only when budgets are due.
4. Argue forcefully against your most dearly held hypotheses. Only then will you know if they stand up to scrutiny.
5. Make decisions, right or wrong. There's nothing worse than waffling.
6. Take over the TV station. Airtime is everything. Reinforce your messages in everything that you do. Use every ad, press release, store, package, and event to tell your story.
7. Embrace thine enemy. Make a list of the people who could legitimately stop your big idea from taking root. Befriend them. Convince them. Make it their responsibility to improve on your vision.
8. Don't hold meetings longer than two hours. (Otherwise they're workshops, which require more planning.) And don't walk out of a meeting without assigning a name to every item that needs follow-up.
9. Startle people. Break out of your comfort zone, and do something unexpected. Run an offbeat ad. Institute casual-dress Tuesdays.
10. Don't throw anything out. Don't kill ideas that won't work right now. Someday soon, the world might be ready for them.

Polly LaBarre (plabarre@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor based in New York. Learn more about Stone Yamashita Partners on the Web (www.stoneyamashita.com).