Actions speak louder than words. An old popular saying; popular because it's true. Rather than just making speeches before retreating back to the corner office, provide some demonstration by doing dramatic, attention getting, and meaningful actions. When the warrior clan is swarming your halls, nothing gets your message across faster than a hands-on, do-it-now counterattack.
In Paradyne’s thrust to become an independent company via a divestiture from AT&T, the creation of a new identity (name, logo, graphic, and visual presentation) had become a hot topic. A highly publicized plan of action included supplier, employee, and customer focus groups, an outside graphics consultant, naming contests with prizes for employees, and just about every other worthless float you could stuff into that parade.
Wow! The culture of “accomplish nothing with the maximum possible use of resources over the maximum possible timeframe” had struck again.
The project was highly symbolic and therefore the perfect target for creating an atmosphere for change. I announced that we’d have our new identity in two days. We then gave an employee a small graphics software program and asked her to create a couple renditions of the name Paradyne.
On the second day, I randomly asked several folks in the hallway for their feedback. One version stood out. Within three calendar days and about three management minutes the project was complete. The new identity was simply the name Paradyne with a certain font style and a small distinguishing mark. For years Paradyne employees talked about the “big change”; all said that one event clearly told them that the environment was radically changed. Wake up time!
The effects were very, very positive. No longer did bureaucratic approaches remove individuals from the responsibility radar. Most of the tribe was now paying attention!!
More drastic problems sometimes require more drastic solutions. In the case of Northern Ordinance, business practices were somewhere between 10 to 40 to 200 years out of date. With 4,000 employees under a single forty-acre roof, a fleet of 700 bicycles (yes, bicycles) pedaled parts, drawings and work orders from one section to the other. One of the systems being manufactured had over a million different part numbers and five million parts, the process being held together by bailing wire and band-aids. Major changes in operating practices across the board--schedule length, schedule adherence, and costs as required results via a Materials Resource Program (MRP)--were mandatory to survive. Over the years dozens of operational band-aids had been applied to the system and resistance to change was a forty-year-old, ten-foot-thick concrete wall. Inserting a change in operating practices without capturing everyone’s attention in a way they could accept, would cause this factory to implode.
Bicycles on a manufacturing floor might seem so far out of date to be irrelevant. However every business has it’s “bicycles”; they just take on another form, and may be less easy to recognize. It was intuitively clear that driving change by implementing a new materials requirements planning (MRP) system, even though many executives would choose that path, would fail. We would need a small department just to log in all the complaints, problems, general whining and sabotage. So instead I decided on an approach that would get everyone’s clear attention; one that they could all understand, and hopefully buy into. On a Friday afternoon I turned to the head of manufacturing and said, “Bill, on Monday we’re taking every single bicycle out of the factory and selling them.”
Bill was a good-hearted Norwegian with very white skin and hair; but he turned even whiter. White on white! He finally stammered that the union would say the cash was going into the corporate coffers, so to counter that we gave the proceeds to United Way.
As the employees trudged in from the parking lot on Monday (bicycle withdrawal day), they passed the 700 bicycles lined up with silent auction tags. On Tuesday, MRP implementation took off. United Way received $35,000 and combined with many other major changes, Northern Ordnance’s for-sure bankruptcy future changed to a long, profitable life.
Barriers to change take different shapes and forms; you have to recognize them and adjust accordingly. Action-based decisions are the key. They are the charge after the trumpet. Sweep everyone up in a positive crisis by moving forward quickly and plunge into victory.
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