Thank you Readers – and a Look at 2007!

Our sincere thanks to the thousands upon thousands of people who have interacted with this blog and who continue to download the white paper that set this in motion. Government change agents will be on break for the next few weeks but we look forward to keeping this blog active in early January. Our warmest regards to you your families this holiday season.  What you can expect from us in the new year:

• We will post with less frequency (4-6 postings a month) with emphasis on leadership, organizational change, and change agents acting both in the government and within commercial space.
• We will continue to conduct in depth and exclusive interviews with government leaders who we believe have a massive impact.  (We are currently speaking with a very senior level change agent from the Intel community, which should make for a fascinating pod cast by February.) Stay tuned.

Finally, as the year comes to a close, a recent article from Business Week caught my attention. This article focuses on 140 executives within the commercial space who are CEOs of publicly traded companies, and all of whom are under age 40. We have discussed Generation Y on this blog many times, but it is also nice to see Generation X stepping into leadership positions that provide massive global platforms. What struck me in this article is the notion that those who are most successful in their jobs (private or public sector) bring a certain passion to their role. Passion propels them. Passion enables them to take risks, make the case for change, and then to perform. As our government continues to evolve and transform into a customer led and agile enterprise, it will be these change agents who enact change. And they can only do so if they bring passion. Why would you take a job that you did not feel strongly about? Take a read from a few sections within the article:

Ready for RiskAnd like having children, CEOs typically say the job is worth any sleepless nights. “I have to say I really love it,” says Michael Chasen, 35-year-old head of school software developer Blackboard (BBBB). “I thrive on the fast pace and excitement in running a fast-growth, successful company.”

The people who become CEO at a young age are increasingly unafraid to take risks, notes Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “They’re willing to look for opportunities to stand out,” Cappelli explains. Still, he cautions that bigger appetites for risk may have unwanted consequences, citing the Enron scandal.

Today’s young CEOs are likely to have a better understanding of technology and globalization than did the bright up-and-comers of decades past, adds Michael Feiner, a management professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business and author of The Feiner Points of Leadership. “The biggest challenge is the leading-people piece,” Feiner says. “It takes a while for even really smart CEOs to understand it’s people first, strategy second. That comes from experience and mistakes, and I don’t think there’s a shortcut.”

Passion Projects

Meanwhile, new CEOs are taking on the mantle at a time of unprecedented turnover. Corner-office job changes this year are on pace to top last year’s record 1,322 departures, according to Chicago consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas (see BusinessWeek, 10/30/06, “The Great CEO Exodus“). Such big-name companies as Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), Ford (F) and Viacom (VIA, VIA.B) were among those making CEO switches in 2006.

Ultimately, a CEO of any age needs to have a passion for the job. “You can have all the products and packaging and scale that you need to perform, but really none of that takes you any place if you don’t have the right attitude about the business,” says Mariner Kemper, 34-year-old head of Kansas City (Mo.)-based financial services company UMB Financial (UMB).

The best CEOs grow into the position because they followed what excited them, not because they set out to become CEOs, adds Mark Vadon, 36-year-old chief of online jewelry retailer Blue Nile (NILE). “Do something that you really love doing,” Vadon advises. “If you’re not doing something that you really like, you’re not going to be that successful at it.”

Transforming the Perception of Poverty

Yesterday, economist Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work helping to curb poverty in Bangladesh.   Yunus founded the Grameen Bank which takes an innovative approach to lending and finance.  Grameen Bank bank specializes in microcredit; lending out small amounts of money to entrepreneurs.  In poorer countries many people do not have the collateral, credit history, or employment necessary to qualify for a basic loan.  In addition, the bank helps with loans for women in Bangladesh, assisting them to found small businesses from basket making to clothing stores.

Here is a great interview where Yunus discusses the incredible history behind building this bank- and his vision for it’s success. As a professor of economics, he realized that many of the traditional theories cannot be applied to countries with such impoverished conditions. He had to completely throw out classic thinking order to build an infrastructure that could help a people considered high-risk and not “bankable”. The result is a successful multi-billion dollar lending institution with a 98% loan repayment rate; an unheard of figure in traditional financial institutions. Yunus equates much of his success to a natural trust of people to do the right thing.

“Well, people are people everywhere, same way. Natural tendency is for people to stay honest. If the system encourages them to go wrong, they take the other route… So we created an environment where everybody remains at their natural state of affairs, which is to remain honest.”

DVDs, Managing Fear, and Being Very Human

Governmentchangeagents.com has been winding down our posts to one or so a week. We plan to keep this model as we are nearing the one year anniversary of the publishing of the paper. Yet we continue to see people in our reading and work that inspire us and fit some of the attributes that we uncovered in our research.

A great source for change agent observation has been the legendary TV show 60 Minutes. Each week the show profiles one to three people who are either notoriously bad or others who are blessed with talents and insights that make the rest of us stare in awe. This week the show featured an overview of Netflix, a company that has revolutionized the way millions of people consume content via DVDs. The company itself is a change agent but perhaps one that may not achieve greatness given all the competition that it will soon face in downloading content from the web. The firm is headed by Reed Hastings. Reed is a self made man who during the 1990’s led a software company to be acquired giving him riches beyond his imagination. He was often criticized for his leadership as CEO and that has continued to haunt him even today.

The most telling part of the interview with Hastings was not the focus on the innovative company, his riches or even fame but it was the candid discussion this leader had about his own self doubts. Self doubt and fear is a topic we rarely touch on this blog but one that is worthy of much consideration.

Something we discuss often at Sapient is that leaders are people who manage fear. I really like that statement as its rational and not pithy. By manage fear we mean that conquering fear is illogical given that we are all so very human and our minds and bodies are governed by the flow of hormones and chemicals that help shape our view of reality and therefore ourselves. The leader then is one who has conversations with him or her self and act in ways that don’t imply that they more than human or helpless victims in the face of challenge and intense pressure.

CEOs and change agents in government must come to grips with managing their own fears and insecurities on a daily basis. It strikes me that the change agents I have come to know exude confidence and let it ride the line with humility but they also manage fear that creeps in. Take a close read of what Hastings said below as he implied a humility and sense of self that you rarely see displayed by CEOs and leaders of companies. He speaks volumes here with out bragging or self promoting. In fact, he is being honest and open about the thing that connects everyone—the condition called being human.

Up to now, Hastings has been a big fish in a small pond. But with the downloading wave coming, his confidence about the company comes with nagging questions about himself.

“I think for sure in my first company I had a lot of self doubt. And I have some now. But it’s manageable now, where it was troubling before,” he tells Stahl.

Asked if he feels that he has mastered whatever it was that he was struggling with before, Hastings says, “Being a CEO is a lifetime of learning. So I would never say the word ‘master.’ But I’m continuing to really enjoy the learning of it.”

Learning the “Art of Influence”

Those who earn the moniker of “change agents” are clearly known for their great leadership and management abilities, and quite often their ability to think outside the box as well.   Nonetheless, a change agent cannot succeed without the direct support of and personal investment in those they lead.  In other words, one of a change agent’s most critical attributes is their power to express “influence” over their staff.  Even during the past week at Sapient, I saw many examples of how pivotal staff and stakeholder buy-in can be when aiming to complete projects and make decisions.

I came across a good article this week that highlights the power of influence by following case studies of four CIO’s: Scott Heintzeman, CIO of Carlson Marketing, Peter Walton, CIO with the global energy company Hess, Partners HealthCare System CIO John Glaser, and Sue Powers, CIO for Worldspan. What is particularly interesting about these cases is that CIOs often have, as the article says, “little formal power”, and so often a “CIO’s impact comes down to how good [he or she] is at convincing business leaders and end users—who don’t have to listen to [him or her]—to follow a strategy that the CIO deems important.” Any true change agent will have harnessed the power of influence in some way, shape or form, and these CIO’s exemplify how that can happen.

Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

“To have influence, it’s not enough to be able to explain IT in an easy-to-understand way. To sway opinions and convince others to act, CIOs need expert knowledge of their subject and its relationship to the business, the ability to adapt their message to how their audiences like to learn, access to allies who will support their goal and the ability to vet ideas in a nonthreatening way.”

[In reference to convincing his company to go about outsourcing carefully] “You need outside materials that have a wow factor that can hit [your audience] right between the eyes,” Walton says. “When you’re [looking at] a way of operating that is just like a case study that ended in failure, that’s powerful.”

“Sue Powers, CIO for Worldspan, relies on a methodology called ‘socializing an idea’ to nudge, cajole and encourage her colleagues to consider a new IT system or business process…The approach is an active one. It requires more than simply running an idea up the proverbial flagpole. Socializing means active engagement and interaction outside formal meetings, where people are less guarded. During casual conversations (in the hallway, in their offices, over lunch), people are more at ease and more willing to discuss change. They also are more likely to discuss their objections to an idea, making it possible to come up with solutions. ‘In a formal setting, people can feel pushed into an idea’, Powers says. ‘This way they feel they can be more honest.’”