EPIC Change

How to Lead Change in the Global Age

Timothy R. Clark

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780470182550
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118039366
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

"More than ever, leaders are expected to be the change agents of their organizations. Yet CEO turnover continues to rise and organizations continue to struggle in their efforts to confront the fearsome adaptive challenges of the global age. Epic Change is a path-breaking contribution to the study of leadership and organizational change. Based on a landmark study of 53 cases of large-scale organizational change in business, healthcare, government, education, and the non-profit sector, acclaimed thought leader and researcher, Dr. Timothy R. Clark unveils the "Power Curve of Change" framework and EPIC system for change management (Evaluate, Prepare, Implement, Consolidate) for leaders who are charged to lead high-stakes change initiatives in their organizations. Epic Change presents a strategic-level road map, along with tactical level tools, for the every-day needs of leaders who must respond to all types of adaptive challenge to remain competitive. It represents a comprehensive, research-based program for leaders who want to develop the indispensable competency of leading change in a permanently and profoundly different age.

Change rarely fails for lack of strategy—Clark shows that only the discretionary efforts of people can make change happen—and this requires leadership and energy management. The Epic Change approach has been successfully field-tested with leaders at all levels and in organizations around the world. This important resource provides leaders new research-based tools to increase and sustain the energy of any change effort."

PART ONE

OVERVIEW

Several years ago I left the dreamy spires of Oxford to return to the United States and look for a teaching position. It was my career plan to settle down into an academic post somewhere. But that was not to be. I ultimately found myself on a very different path; I took a job with a large manufacturing organization and stayed for eight years.

During that time, I became a plant manager rather than a tenured professor. Instead of walking the halls of academe in khakis and loafers, I found myself in fire-retardant greens and steel-toed boots with metatarsal shields. When I made the theory-to-practice transition and traded the ivory tower for the shop floor, I could not have imagined the journey ahead. In the end, the company I worked for succumbed to the competitive pressures of international rivals. We shuttered the operations, declared bankruptcy, and liquidated the assets. The crushing reality of our demise appeared in the form of overseas engineers who came on site in legions, disassembled the factory, boxed it up, and shipped it back across the ocean.

I had participated in an archetypal case of global change, felt its impact on a single organization, and struggled in the bloody aftermath. From my cockpit, I witnessed the long arm of macro-economic force tap an organization on the shoulder and say, ”You’re out of the game!” Emotionally, I was stunned. I had given several years of my professional life to a cause that had ended in failure and loss for several thousand people. Intellectually, I recognized that I had been thrust into a leadership issue of first importance—the imperative to respond to fearsome adaptive challenge. This is the issue that I seized upon and have tried to advance in this book.

In the field of change, we have something of a crisis of leadership today, in part, I believe because the strength of our theory has not kept pace with the magnitude of our challenge. It is ultimately not very helpful to tell leaders that the turbulence, speed, and dislocation of the global age have ushered in a monumentally challenging era. It’s equally unproductive to tell leaders that the chief impulse of organizations is to rest, and that without strong leadership organizations slump into intractable and rebellious complacency. So what? Unless there is solid, empirically-based theory and a set of practical tools to help a leader respond to a change imperative, we haven’t helped anybody. At the end of the day, leadership will always be an applied discipline.

When confronting an adaptive challenge, leaders need to know where their expenditure of effort should go, how to give them, and why. They need to know the mechanisms that arouse and call forth institutional will. They need to know the levers that will multiply force and bring transforming potential to an organization struggling to survive. These are the urgent questions that have driven my research agenda. Most of the leaders involved in the cases I studied make the same confession: they don’t have a well-developed theory about the process and how to proceed. Hence the need to puzzle out the answers.

I understand that practitioners learn from theorists. I was one of them. What I have come to appreciate is how much theorists learn from practitioners. In this book, I have attempted to make some headway in solving the riddle of large-scale organizational change by learning from a spectrum of cases and a stable of practitioners.

In Part One, I want to accomplish two things, First, I want to frame the issue. By this I mean that I want to explain just how central successful change leadership is in the global age. I want to show the immense stakes on the table and the torturous course and lasting consequences of getting it wrong. My second aim is to lay out the discernable patterns of large-scale organizational change from primary research and provide an overview of what I call the EPIC methodology. Once I set the stage with these two tasks, I will present a fuller analysis. I will attempt to explain how leaders can win titanic battles with the competitive forces that prey on their organizations.

CHAPTER ONE

A MORE DANGEROUS CALLING

Everything in life can be summarized in two words:
Challenge—Response.

ARNOLD TOYNBEE

Consider the changing physical profile of linemen who play in the National Football League (NFL). In 1976, there wasn’t a single player who tipped the scales at over three hundred pounds. Ten years later, there were 18. During the following decade, the number of players in this fleshy category swelled to 289. Fast-forward to the present, and that number has nearly doubled, with no fewer than 570 players on NFL rosters weighing in at not a biscuit under the three-hundred-pound threshold, constituting fully 20 percent of the player population.¹ Yet the beefier trend isn’t new. Players have gradually been getting bigger since the early days of the game; for example, the average lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers weighed 210 pounds in 1946. Beyond the girth, however, what catches the eye is the astonishing acceleration of the trend.

The hardwood is no different from the gridiron. Look at the mobility of labor in the National Basketball Association (NBA). When Larry Bird was a rookie for the Boston Celtics in 1979, there were six international players in the entire league. By 1997, that number had risen to twenty-nine In 2006, there were a striking eighty-two international players from thirty-eight countries on opening-day rosters, with players hailing from such unlikely places as Congo, Latvia, and Turkey. Eight players alone come from Serbia and Montenegro. A record seven international players competed in the NBA finals in 2006, and in 2007 the league’s best and second-best players were both international players.² Again, we note a curious and almost inexplicable acceleration of the trend.

These examples of accelerating change are more than carnival curiosities; they characterize the global age. They symbolize the storms of our time—a hastening pace, intensifying competition, and a new Darwinian ferocity. There are similar examples in every industry. And it’s no different in health care, education, government, and the nonprofit sector. In both scope and magnitude, the adaptive challenges confronting organizations are unprecedented. There is simply less deliverance through incremental change than there used to be. Organizations frequently require transformational change to revive their fortunes in addition to ongoing, steady improvement. One thing is clear: if there is to be no slowing down, no spontaneous return to order, and no new era of stability, the implications for leaders are permanently and profoundly important.

When competitive forces accelerate, it elevates the leadership challenge. It introduces new demands and skill requirements. The compression creates more cognitive complexity and emotional intensity. Without warning, forces may combine at any time to thwart existing plans and with a hard shoulder push you as a leader onto a different path. If you are not prepared to lead in the midst of turbulence, the global age will pin you against the limits of your ability to respond. If you can’t perform on the new leadership stage, you eventually will fail upward.

The challenge is to get comfortable with uncertainty, live on the edge of chaos, and sustain competitive advantage in the face of endless dynamism. It has become a universal aspiration to figure out how. Organizations everywhere are clamoring to infuse their leaders with the skills that will combine to produce this aptitude. Take a look at almost any Fortune 500 company’s leadership development model and you are likely to find some variation of leading or managing change listed as a core competency. Non-business organizations are moving in the same direction. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the United States federal government’s Human Resources department, for example, identifies “leading change” as its first “executive core qualification” for federal employees who advance to the executive service.

The demand for guidance and direction with issues of change is also reflected in executive education. If the offerings of topflight business schools are any indication, courses on change are in constant high demand. Open-enrollment courses on the subject have found a permanent place in the curriculum. Here’s just a sampling of what the market has to offer:

• University of California Berkeley, Haas School of Business: “Leading Change: Demystifying Uncertainty”

• University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business: “Implementing Innovation and Change”

• Columbia University, Graduate School of Business: “Leading Strategic Growth and Change”

• Duke University, Fuqua School of Business: “Leading Innovation and Change”

• ESEAD (Spain): “Managing Change via Culture Reengineering”

• Harvard and Stanford Schools of Business: “Leading Change and Organizational Renewal”

• INSEAD (France): “Women Leading Change in Global Business”

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): “Leading Change in Complex Organizations”

• University of Michigan, Ross School of Business: “Healthcare Leadership and Change”

• Oxford University, Said School of Business (U.K.) and HEC School of Management (France): “Consulting and Coaching for Change”

• University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business: “Leading Organizational Change”

• University of Virginia, Darden School of Business: “Managing Individual and Organizational Change”

Why all of the fuss? Again, no matter how anticipatory or prophetic an organization tries to be, there will be trajectories in markets and technology that no one will predict. When organizations need to break camp, they need leaders who know how. If an organization initiates change behind a leader who lacks this competency, it has taken an intolerably high risk. Organizations recognize that leading change, especially large-scale change, is unquestionably the most formidable challenge in leadership. Think about the essence of the task: to lead change is nothing less than to summon and redirect institutional will and capacity.

A standard definition of leadership, taught in the nation’s colleges and universities, is the ability to influence people to achieve a shared goal. But if we’re talking about change leadership, this definition crucially misses the mark. It’s a midstream definition that assumes a shared goal. That is seldom the case. Once a goal is identified, the change leader’s first order of business is to make it a shared one, something that can be the hardest and most time-consuming part of the process. Until a goal is shared, there is only dormant potential to achieve it, and people won’t yet permit you to lead them. The goal will simply be denied or ignored. So my definition of change leadership starts one step back, where goals are made, communicated, and affirmed. The essence of change leadership is to respond to the adaptive cycle (see Figure 1.1).

The rationale behind this book is the overwhelming evidence that too few leaders do change leadership well. No leader can afford to move headlong into a serious change effort without a solid understanding of how to navigate the process. The risk is too great. At the same time, if an organization’s very existence is at stake, the leader has to act by responding to the threats, sudden shocks, seismic shifts, and rocking dislocations.

Change leadership: The ability to help an organization respond to adaptive challenge.

Here lies the dilemma: by forcing a response to adaptive challenge and at the same time by increasing the risk of failure, the global age is creating a disorienting encounter for leaders. It’s making leadership a more dangerous calling than ever before.

Change in the global age is making leadership a more dangerous calling than ever before.

FIGURE 1.1. THE ADAPTIVE CYCLE.

EVIDENCE OF EXECUTIVE CHURN

This isn’t merely intuitive theorizing. Mounting empirical evidence casts a shaft of confirming light on this thesis. For instance, the casualty rate among chief executives continues to rise. In 2005, there were 129 CEO changes in U.S.-based Fortune 1000 companies, a 126 percent increase in turnover si...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• PART ONE - OVERVIEW
• PART TWO - EVALUATE
• PART THREE - PREPARE
• PART FOUR - IMPLEMENT
• PART FIVE - CONSOLIDATE
• RESEARCH APPENDIX
• NOTES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INDEX