 Change is always an opportunity, and so organizations need to be focused on change, not as something to be avoided, but rather as an opportunity for organization success. Why do so many change efforts fail? The literature tells us that the best case scenario is that 50% of organizational change efforts fail, and the estimates are as high as 80%. So when you think about that, if we're going to do these major things that are costly, or disruptive to the organization, what is it that causes so many organizations to fail? And there's a number of very good change models that give us some insights into what the processes and procedures are that enable effective change efforts, and yet organizations ignore them time and time again. And perhaps the biggest one in that whole group is this notion of impatience. Change requires significant time. In many times in organizations, we get impatient. Once someone gets clear about what needs to change, then they want everyone else to change as quickly as they did. It's top management that typically sees change first because the very nature of their job is to be outward facing, talking to stakeholders, governments, other organizations. So the very nature of their job, first of all, is outward facing, so they're more likely to see the reason for change first. And secondly, it's their job to think about how the organization needs to change. So let's say it takes them six months, eight months to get clear on the need for change. They're then going to now be ready to roll that message down to middle management. And middle management needs that same six months, eight months to get clear that they need to get behind the change. And then when you think about the lowest levels of the organization, you've got another six to eight month window. But what we often see is that organizations, once we get clear at the top, we want everyone else to not need the time that we needed to adjust to the change. And that's what all the change literature says, is that really to do effective change, you need a minimum of three years. And when you're talking about large scale change in very large organizations like an IBM or an Oracle, that often a change effort can take as much as 10 years to be effectively implemented and roll all the way out. So among the processes that enable effective organizational change is to build a powerful coalition. And often when we think about who's powerful in an organization, we make the mistake of pulling out the organizational chart and saying, oh, these people here must be powerful because they are at the top of the organization. And yet we know in every organization, and we've gotten more sophisticated about knowing this through network analysis, there are people in every organization who we might label as influencers who sit at different places in the organization. They're the hubs of opinion. They're the thought leaders. And those thought leaders often have little to do with the formal hierarchy. So someone who's going to engage in an effective change effort is someone who identifies who the influencers are, who can bring the others along to use Jim Collins's phrase to get the right people on the bus. And it's also important that, according to most of the change experts, that while it's okay to have a notion of a vision for the change, the vision usually changes a bit just from having identified that powerful coalition because if you get those people in the room who are the influencers, they have their pulse on the organization. They can feed things back into the change process that perhaps allow us to see obstacles ahead of time that we wouldn't otherwise if we had just used hierarchy to roll the change through. Organizational culture can certainly enable or hinder change. And in some ways it depends upon how far you're moving from the existing culture to a different culture. Edgar Schein, who is perhaps sort of the leading guru on organizational culture, defines culture as a set of policies, practices, and procedures that have made you reasonably successful in the past and therefore are taught and learned as the way to do things. And so if we think about where culture comes from, it's not this amorphous, it is sort of a natural selection or process that successful organizations have either done sometimes intentionally or sometimes stumbled through, but for whatever reason what they have been doing has made them successful and as each new hire is hired, they're taught this is the IBM way or this is the Oracle way or this is the General Electric way. And so what we are doing oftentimes when we're asking people to change is we're asking them to give up their very identity. And I think that's why we see cultural change being so difficult. When you give up your identity, you're mourning, or you should be mourning the past. The thing that brought you there is no longer the thing that's going to get you to the next place. And so we can see some spectacular examples of bankruptcies where organizations just failed to change. The culture was such that the bureaucracy was so important, the titles, how many lights you had in your office and what sort of plants you had in the corner defined who you were and where you stood in the hierarchy, the notion of entitlement around benefits. If we look at the airline industry, which has been very dynamic, you think about a company like Pan Am that was very early to international markets and in some way owned the world internationally. They wound up going bankrupt because they couldn't let go of those bureaucratic processes, those mechanisms that were expensive and made sense in a period of time when you owned the global market. The process of change is just as hard, maybe more difficult in small and medium-sized enterprises because often the organizational culture in those sorts of organizations is a real family culture or a clan culture is sort of the literature's word for that family culture. And families have a particular way of operating and it's very nuanced. In some ways it's emotionally charged because we feel so much collective bonding and when we go through and say the way we have worked together has to change, that can be extremely difficult. So in some ways we may find the change process more difficult the stronger the culture is and those very strong cultures are as likely to occur, maybe more likely to occur in small and medium enterprises. So the notion of what effective change looks like applies really to organizations of all size and we can't necessarily equate large size with more difficult. When we think about the role of the leader in organizational change and we could go back and forth about whether it's the leader or the leadership group but however we might consider where leadership comes from at the moment, the role of the leader is really to make sense of why the change needs to occur for the organization. The biggest reason we see resistance to change is that people feel that the change is being done unto them as opposed to the change being something that they are part of. People like the change that they choose. They don't like the change that they feel like is imposed on them. So part of what the leader needs to do is develop a compelling story about why the world has changed, what we need to do about it including how the organizational culture needs to change. He needs to think about how to build a compelling story that's a big enough tent for everyone to get under and different groups of the organization care about different things. Some people care about flexibility. Some people care about being innovative. Some people care about extreme levels of customer service. So what I need to do as the leader is to figure out what you care about and roll the core of that story out and involve people in a way that touches them personally, touches them emotionally, has them holding their hand up saying I want to be a part of that as opposed to oh my gosh, here we go again. And they're doing unto me version 6.0. And so if we really get back to me, a really good leader is a really good storyteller. And a really good story needs to be based on facts. It needs to be based on the market. It needs to have a compelling reason to change rather than sometimes people feel like we're changing just for the sake of change. That doesn't enroll anyone. But if we think about leadership and change as an enrollment process and what does it take to enroll every person in the organization, we're much more likely to move towards an effective change. Now I won't pretend that you don't have 5% of the people in the organization whose favorite indoor sport is complaining about everything. You can't always get 100% of the people on the bus, but I do think you can have measured processes around storytelling, around making people part of that story that will bring most of the organization along.