The Liberator

Keith Yamashita is about to run a one-hour session with a group of publishing executives at Penguin Group, but you'd never know he was the one in charge. Relaxed and jovial, cuffs flapping open under a sweater, absentmindedly brushing his straight black hair out of his eyes every few minutes, Yamashita looks more like a grad student in architecture than a top consultant to the world's most powerful companies. Even as he begins to speak, his soft, high-pitched voice and soothing tone seem better fitted to the leader of an AA meeting than a strategic thinker who's about to reveal why you--and your company--have hit a brick wall. "The first step is admitting that you're stuck," says Yamashita. "If you can diagnose what's going on, you can move to unstuck."

Simple words, really. Trite, almost. But it is his ability to reduce deep-seated corporate problems to their bare essence--and then fix them--that makes Yamashita, 37, so successful. Before you know it, his regular-guy patter has disarmed the group, making everyone feel free to let loose frustrations and reveal constraints they've kept hidden for years. "It all plays to his advantage--his age, his laid-back style, his appearance, his down-to-earth approach," says Robert Stone, Yamashita's business partner. "He's a great listener and a real-time analytical thinker, not a highfalutin or stuffy consultant."

It's not just about Yamashita's style (though he's got plenty of it). It's the way he and his team at San Francisco consulting firm Stone Yamashita Partners go from talk to action. By engaging people in a nonthreatening way and listening to their cues, Yamashita is able to identify structural and systemic problems in a company or its leaders. Then he rolls up those cuffs and goes to work, approaching the problems through an unorthodox mix of analytics, branding, and design rather than a formula or a template.

No platoon of MBAs. No 6-inch-thick change manual binders. No 100-page PowerPoints. Instead, Yamashita employs a varied toolbox of specialists, linguists, anthropologists, and artists, first to help a company define its purpose--and then to communicate that purpose both inside and out. Unlike many consultancies, SYP then sticks around for months or more to make sure the business actually makes the recommended changes. Among the companies that have tapped into Yamashita's eclectic approach are Gap Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., Herman Miller, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. Although each interaction is different, Stone Yamashita generally starts an engagement at the top, holding a summit with senior execs to figure out how the system works, and where it has gotten bogged down. "When you do that right, it starts a chain reaction," Yamashita says. "After the diagnosis, we often bring in field research conducted by anthropologists and others to help leaders better understand their customers."

Once the problems have been identified, the company uses Stone's background as a designer and Yamashita's as a marketing and branding expert to define a vision--or a solution--and then moves downstream, bringing people on board by hammering the message home with creative, sometimes wacky, training sessions. "Their group, more than any group I've ever seen, pays attention to every word," says Paul Pressler, CEO of Gap, which has been working with the firm for the past 10 months in an effort to redefine Gap's culture and vision. "They get us to think differently and out of our comfort zone." The role of design becomes paramount, as SYP produces a document, a film, or some form of media that expresses the vision.

Ultimately, says Yamashita, it's all about getting unstuck as an individual or an organization. He believes that 85% of all companies and more than half of all people are stuck, a condition that isn't defined by declining market share, falling productivity, or losses on an income statement. Being stuck, says Yamashita, is all about human feelings--not financial measurements. It's about feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, directionless, hopeless, battle-torn, worthless, or alone. Why does that matter? "The most successful leaders understand they must win the hearts and minds of employees in a way that is true, authentic, and real," he says. "If you get those human components right, the performance of the system can work. Without them, you're nowhere."

For some obvious reasons, Disney and Kodak are stuck, says Yamashita. For a less obvious reason, so is one of his own clients, eBay. "[It] has to think about how to deliver on the second chapter of [its] history," he says. "EBay is making money hand over fist, but the leadership there has to decide what the company's destiny will be."