How to Lead A Revolution/ CHangeS

From “Leading the Revolution,” by Gary Hamel, a Harvard Business School Press book (2002)

Ready to build a grassroots movement in your organization? As you’ve probably already guessed—there’s no secret handshake. But the pioneers of corporate activism offer some guiding principles you can use to blaze your own trail.

Overview of Leading Revolutionary Change

Slides of the Leading Revolutionary Change

Build a Point of View

A point of view must meet four tests: it must be credible (supported by data and facts), coherent (the logic must be consistent and clear); compelling (speak to peoples’ hearts as well as their intellects); and commercial (show how your business concept will generate wealth).

Write a Manifesto

A manifesto is like a virus—use it to infect others with your ideas. A truly contagious manifesto must: build a case for both your intellectual and moral authority (your cause must be both economically sound and undeniably in the bests interests of the organization and its members); capture peoples’ imagination by painting a picture of what is, what is coming that causes discomfort, and what could be that inspires hope.

Challenge people to look the future in the eye; convince them that inaction is tantamount to treason; that revolution will bring both power and possibility.

Create a Coalition

It’s easy to dismiss corporate rebels when they are fragmented, isolated, and don’t speak with a single voice—but a true army of like-minded activists cannot be ignored. Your goal is to enroll and embolden the latent activists. Create a magnet for people throughout the organization who harbor the same revolutionary tendencies you do. Use the intranet, email listserves, on-line discussion groups, brownbag lunches—anything that creates opportunities for communication and collaboration among the brethren. Stay underground, at least initially, until your volunteer army has become an unstoppable groundswell.

Pick Your Targets / Pick Your Moments

Activists create movements, not mandates—you need to hone in on a someone or group of someone's who can yank the real levers of power. Stop viewing senior management as out-of-touch reactionaries, and start viewing them as potential allies. Plot all the various avenues of influence that lead to your desired targets: court the executive assistants, find out who the top guy relies on, attend meetings, workshops, or conferences your targets regularly attend. Every impromptu meeting, every hallway conversation is a chance to win another convert.

Ultimately, you’ll need to go one-on-one with your target. Your “big moment” might happen unexpectedly, so always have your elevator speech ready. Know what you want to ask for—keep it small and simple. Make it easy to say yes.

Co-opt and Neutralize

To change your company, you are going to have to learn to co-opt at least some of the aristocracy into your revolutionary cause. To do so, your campaign must disarm, not demean—and it must be waged according to these vital principles:

• create win-win propositions for the top brass;

• focus on reciprocity: you borrow a few key people from a department, you send them back with prototypes for cool new products;

• work hard to avoid an “us versus them mentality”—make divisional leaders see you as a catalyst for change rather than as a competitor for resources and promotion.

Find a Translator

Still not getting heard? Don’t be surprised. The very things that make you a revolutionary make it difficult to build a base of common understanding with the disciples of orthodoxy. You need to find a translator who can help build a credibility bridge between the old view and your view—someone who is plugged into the future, who is naturally curious, and who may be shopping around for an interesting point of view to sponsor. Senior staff and newly appointed executives can be good prospects—both are typically in search of an agenda to call their own.

Win Small, Win Early, Win Often

All your organizing efforts are worth nothing if you can’t demonstrate that your ideas actually work. Start small: search for small projects that offer the greatest potential impact for the smallest number of permissions. Look for the early win: focus on projects that will engender maximum visibility with minimum investment risk. Be careful not to over-promise: never make your new concept an “all or nothing” proposition. Every grand strategy must begin with some little “stratlets”—you have to help your company feel its way towards revolutionary opportunities, step-by-step.

Isolate, Infiltrate, Integrate

In the early stages of your activist campaign, you may want to isolate your projects from the rest of the company so they can grow removed from bureaucratic controls and orthodox thinking. But eventually, a large-scale opportunity will require a large-scale resource commitment.

To get the capital and talent you need, you’ll have make allies out of those who control them—you’ll have to infiltrate their minds and hearts with your intellectual agenda. Ultimately though, your experiments must do more than attract resources away from incrementalist projects, they must take root throughout the organization and send out runners that will transform the landscape. Wholesale integration is the ultimate measure of success for a corporate activist.