Why Change Doesn't Work
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WHY CHANGE DOESN'T WORK Why Initiatives Go Wrong, And How to Try Again -- and Succeed by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley redline version 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents 2 Acknowledgments 5 Introduction 8 11 PART 1 Life in the Blender What this book is about 14 The High Cost of Change Failures 16 Of Babies and Bathwater 18 Some Discarded Babies 21 Four Approaches 25 ‰ PUMMEL 26 ‰ PAMPER 28 ‰ PUSH 29 ‰ PULL 32 Combining the Four Approaches 34 The Meaning of Meaning 37 Why Change Fails 39 Why We're Hurting, and What We Must Do 45 47 PART 2 The Problem with People Change and the brain 51 Right Brains and Left Brains 54 Human Variation 56 Change and Personality 58 Building the Personality Matrix 61 ‰ ASSESSING INDIVIDUALS 67 72 Part 3 Why Groups Don't Work Assessing the Organization 73 ‰ THE ORGANIZATIONAL PROFILE 74 Change and Unreason 76 Rebalancing the Stress Load 79 Expanding the Change Space 82 Seven Hard Truths 84 87 PART 4 Making Change Hub and Spoke Planning 87 Introducing Change 89 What You Can Do and What You Can't Do 90 The Best Way to Change 93 The Best Time to Change 94 Big Change Versus Little Changes 96 Crossing the Swamp 99 Organizational Shame 101 Igniting Organizational Imagination 104 Overcoming Resistance 110 The Roles of the Changemaker 112 ‰ THE CHANGEMAKER AS PATHMAKER 112 ‰ THE CHANGEMAKER AS INTEGRATOR 113 ‰ THE CHANGEMAKER AS NEGOTIATOR 114 ‰ THE CHANGEMAKER AS GAME PLAYER 116 ‰ THE CHANGEMAKER AS CONFESSOR 117 ‰ THE CHANGEMAKER AS SALES PERSON 117 ‰ THE CHANGEMAKER AS STAGE MANAGER 118 Hiring Good People 119 Organizing for Change 121 Communicating for Change 123 ‰ SELECTIVE PERCEPTION 125 ‰ ORGANIZATION 127 ‰ MUDDLED INTERPRETATION 128 ‰ OTHER CONSIDERATIONS 129 Training Versus Learning 131 Rewarding Change 134 Technology and Change 137 A Change Checklist 140 Rebounding from Failure 142 3 Rebounding from Success 145 147 PART 5 ChangeLand The Results Theme 149 ‰ "EXCELLENCE" 150 ‰ ZERO DEFECTS 152 The Measurement Theme 153 ‰ THE BALDRIGE AWARD 155 ‰ ISO 9000 157 The Reform Theme 159 ‰ EARLY REFORM IDEAS 159 ‰ DOWNSIZING 163 ‰ DEMASSIFICATION 162 ‰ FLATTENING 165 ‰ MELTDOWN 165 ‰ WORKOUT 164 The Integration Theme 167 ‰ REENGINEERING 167 ‰ SPEEDUP 169 ‰ VALUE DISCIPLINES 168 The Improvement Theme 171 ‰ QUALITY 171 ‰ TQM 173 The Direction Theme 174 ‰ LEADERSHIP 177 ‰ MISSION AND VISION 179 The Character Theme 181 ‰ ORGANIZATIONAL MORALITY 183 The Relationship Theme 185 ‰ THEORY Y 185 ‰ ONE MINUTE MANAGING 187 ‰ MANAGEMENT BY WANDERING AROUND 187 ‰ CUSTOMER SATISFACTION 186 ‰ ADVENTURE LEARNING 188 The Culture Theme 192 ‰ THE BOUNDARYLESS CORPORATION 195 ‰ TEAMS 196 The Democracy Theme 201 ‰ EMPOWERMENT 201 ‰ DIVERSITY 205 ‰ OPEN-BOOK MANAGEMENT 207 The Otherness Theme 206 ‰ THINKING 209 ‰ XENOPHILIA 211 ‰ CHAOS 213 215 EPILOG Who Kills Change? A Reading List for the Age of Change 216 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been our odd fate that the books we write experience the phenomena the books are about. The first book we collaborated on, Turf Wars, fell victim to a bloody turf battle when the press that published it was acquired, and all its editors and marketing staff were let go. Our next title, Why Teams Don't Work, was much more fortunate. It was blessed with the best editing and publishing team we could have hoped for. Our editor was the incomparable founder of Pacesetter Books, Andrea Pedolsky. The publishing team included Martha Kemplin, Carol Cushmore, Bernadette Boylan, Pam Wilkison, Lori Schlesinger, Lenore Greenburg, and later, replacing Lori and Lenore, Lisa Schrager and Mel Elberger. No matter who we were dealing with, whether it was editing, design, or promotion, we were always struck by their professionalism, positivism, and involvement. They were always on our side, which is not as common in the publishing world as one might suppose. How great a team was it? In March 1996, Why Teams Don't Work, in our minds an unassuming addition to the literature of teams, was awarded the Financial Times/Booz- Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award for best management book published in the Americas for 1995. Two unknown, unconnected guys from Minnesota were picked over thousands of other business books for the honor. We were beyond gratified; try flabbergasted. So now we write a book about change, and darn if the age of change doesn't trip us up. Peterson's was acquired in late 1995 by International Thomson, which studied the company and liked everything it saw except our division, Pacesetter Books, which it disbanded. So the book now in your hands is the last one our dream team will do together. Andrea we get to take with us, as agent, editor and business partner. The rest of you, farewell and good luck. We wish to thank everyone at Peterson's for their confidence and support over the years, especially publishers Casey and Peter Heggener, and Carol Hupping, who stepped in at the eleventh hour with her excellent editing and authorial hand-holding skills. Harvey wishes to thank the many people he was worked with in his consulting that provided war stories and other ideas in this book, particularly David Rawles, vice president at GTE Directories, and Lynde Sorensen, director of employee development at Toro. Mike wishes to thank The Masters Forum, a Minnesota executive education group that he was worked with for several years. Mike helps writes the training materials for these sessions, which keep him up-to-speed on emerging management ideas, which in turn inform projects like this book. Thanks to Jim Ericson, Tom Miller, and Katie Boyle of the Masters Forum for their confidence and support. Thanks also to fellow ink-stained wretches James Thornton and Gerald de Jaager for their editorial help down the stretch. Books have a way of getting a whole lot better during the hours just before deadline, usually because of the generosity and interest of talented friends like Jim and Jerry. Thanks to our friends on Ivory Tower, a Minneapolis BBS hosted by the inestimable Topper (Dave Marquette). 7 Our friends there were always generous with their ideas, tips, encouragement and good humor. Special acknowledgment is due George Osner and Jeff Shepherd, editor and maintainer, respectively, of the Internet's Serial Quotations Mailing List. Every day George and other contributors send out a sheet of fascinating quotations fished from the ocean of world literature. If there is a quote in this book without a proper footnote, we probably obtained it from this excellent source. Finally, to our families, from parents and our spouses all the way down to our little ones and their animals, our deepest thanks for your patience with the changes we put you all through. x INTRODUCTION Think about your own job experiences, and the changes you have been asked to make in the past few years -- TQM, reengineering, restructuring, etc. We're guessing some of these initiatives were modestly successful, a few were total flops, and the rest fell into some vague, plus-minus pile in- between. None quite measured up to expectations, though -- right? Ambitious undertakings nearly always lead to some degree of disappointment. This fact seems to leave you with three options: ƒ lower your expectations ƒ or dig in your feet and stop changing altogether; ƒ or find better ways to change. You can lower your expectations without our help. As for the end of change, it may sound like a relief to you now, but if it ever happens to you, you won't like it. So this book is about the last way. } ~ } We live in a period of such rapid organizational change that even the bad old days are starting to look good. It's not just happening to companies whose job is change, the innovators like 3M and Motorola and Hewlett-Packard, who somehow come up with a fresh raft of new product ideas every spring. Plain-vanilla companies that have offered the same product or service for 50 years are caught in the same buzz-saw, because they are expected to change the processes by which they produce the same-old, same-old. 9 No organization and no industry are exempt. From funeral homes to filling stations to one-person home businesses to huge multinationals with corporate campuses in four continents, all feel the pressure to get with the rhythm and march to the drum. Why is this happening? Why this sudden explosion of fads, ideas, trends and initiatives? We are obsessed with how to do things better, faster, cheaper, more democratically. Benchmarking, continuous improvement, downsizing, mergers and restructurings, reengineering, reinvention, visioning -- the list of initiatives is stupefyingly long, and many organizations are doing five or six simultaneously. "Time is a river you cannot step into twice." HERACITUS "I am quite tired of the Thames. Flow, flow, flow, always the same." WM. DOUGLAS, DUKE OF QUEENSBURY1 People and organizations are torn down the middle about this change. On the one hand, we acknowledge that change is a primary reason for existing: learning, growth, progress toward long-term goals. On the other hand, there is something in our nature that resists changes imposed upon us, even when we know the ideas are good ones. At some peculiar level, we prefer busy- ness to true business; the "good old ways" to continuous improvement. We hate change because no matter which of three classic responses we make to it, it wins. If we don't embrace it, it 1 Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Little, Brown, 1985 overtakes us and hurts like hell. If we do try to embrace it, it still knocks us for a loop. If we try to anticipate it, and be ready when it appears -- well, it doesn't make any difference, we still wind up on our keesters.