Campaigning for change

Most organizations must change if they're to stay alive. Change is tough to accomplish, but it's not impossible and can be systematized. The author, who has been involved in change initiatives at scores of companies, believes that the success of such programs has more to do with execution than with conceptualization. The successful change programs he observed had one thing in common: They employed three distinct but linked campaigns--political, marketing, and military. The author cites examples from such companies as Hewlett-Packard, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Saturn to illustrate how effective such campaigns can be. A political campaign creates a coalition strong enough to support and guide the initiative. Sometimes, coalitions arise from changes to a company's formal structure. But they may come out of the informal structure, or they could stem from a temporary counterstructure. A marketing campaign must go beyond simply publicizing the initiative's benefits. It focuses on listening to ideas that bubble up from the field as well as on working with lead customers to design the initiative. A clearly articulated theme for the transformation program must also be developed. A military campaign deploys executives' scarce resources of attention and time. Successful executives secure their supply lines by, for instance, piggybacking onto initiatives that have already captured people's interests or already exist as bootleg projects. These managers also set up pilot projects that turn into beachheads because the projects expose them to the difficult dynamics they will ultimately face. Successful executives launch all three campaigns simultaneously. The three always feed on one another, and if any one campaign is not properly implemented, the change initiative is bound to fail.