Changing change management

Gettler, Leon. ‘Changing Change Management’. Acuity 2.3 (2015): 48.

Five tips from management guru Tom Peters on how to make change management programmes work by Leon Gettler

TOM PETERS , one of the world’s most influential management thinkers, burst on to the scene 33 years ago with the publication of In Search of Excellence, an analysis of what sets successful companies apart.

He wrote this business book with fellow McKinsey consultant Bob Waterman and it became the model for other business writers. Originally it was self-published. More than 25,000 copies were sold directly to consumers until Warner bought it and sold 10 million more.

The book launched Peters on the path to becoming a global, jet-setting guru. The man The Economist called the “uber-guru” took to the world’s lecture circuits, his manic rants flowing through rooms like a river of electricity as he urged businesses to annihilate hierarchy and bureaucracy, to blow up organisations and drive innovation, to foster uniqueness and celebrate chaos.

Peters was one of the first to take to the blogosphere, in 1999. His Twitter output is prolific, added to his relentless calendar of speeches and client engagements, At 72, he shows no sign of slowing down.

Peters is scathing about the 70% failure rate of change management programmes. As he says, permanence is the last refuge of those with shrivelled imaginations so change has to be brilliantly managed.

He has five tips to make change management programmes work.

1. “You have to want the change to occur so much, and excuse my American vernacular, that you are willing to take almost an infinite amount of shit along the way because change programmes, if they are significant, are rocky.The notion of a CEO or a person running a 500-person division ordering a change process, getting someone to develop a new system, implementing the system and have all go well with great profitability, the odds of that are as close to zero as can possibly be.”
2. “Idiots fight enemies, geniuses build alliances. People running change programmes including CEOs need to spend 90% of their time with allies and 10% of their time with enemies. You don’t convert enemies with a radical change programme until you’ve got a lot of evidence underway, so ‘ally developing’ is the key period. You have to recruit them, you have to spend an incredible amount of time with them, you have to respect their input to the point that the change you’re trying to process might not look like what you began with, but it’s all about allies.”
3. “Don’t let them nail you for the little crap. Save your energy for the important stuff and don’t allow yourself to be written off for silly trivial reasons.”
4. “Start prototypes as fast as you can. The programme you implement will only vaguely look like the one you propose. You’ve got to learn stuff fast along the way. Forget planning and start acting. Just keep accumulating the wins and the losses. If you’re in a staff job like CIO or CFO, let the line people do the selling, not you. The guy you want in front of the chief executive officer, you want the guy who runs the distribution centre who has implemented your program and done a fantastic job with it. The more you stand on the back row and the more they get the full credit, the faster the changes will occur.”
5. “It all gets back to tenacity. There are resilient people in the world and there are those who aren’t so resilient. Churchill did once say the ability to succeed is the ability to go from screw up to screw up without loss of nerve. Churchill had 60 years of problems and four good years. We remember him for four good years, as we should.”

WORLD BUSINESS FORUM

Tom Peters is speaking at the World Business Forum, sponsored by Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, in Sydney 27-28 May 2015. wbfsydney.com

LEON GETTLER is an independent journalist, author and public speaker.