Change is hard enough for the average person, CEO or company. But for Oprah and her Harpo Productions it has to be monumental. But she is doing it anyway – changing her life by dropping her talk show, the mainstay of her company and reinventing her company with her OWN television network. Pretty amazing. Just think how many people are invested in having Oprah stay exactly as she was.

• There is the audience who has watched her every weekday for 25 years of their lives. They will experience a loss, missing the comfort of this steady relationship and a repeated life pattern.  

• There are the ABC network, affiliates and the advertisers that make so much money from her audience’s attention. They will most certainly experience a large loss of revenue as she changes to Cable with a currently smaller outreach. 

• There all the employees who rely on her for employment to feed themselves and their family.
  She has said they will all come with her on the new venture. Hopefully that’s true. 

• There are the friends, especially Gayle, who have so much invested in their relationships staying just the way they were, good or bad. Gayle has a new role. Will it keep her satisfied and supportive? 

• Then there is Oprah herself and all the personal things Oprah has garnered from her success – all the trappings (the home, clothes, and celebrity), the pride of accomplishment, the ego gratification and the power. She has said these are secondary to her good works and influencing of her fans’ lives.

Human beings rely on others for a sense of self. Take away those relationships and we feel great loss. Oprah and everyone connected with her has been spoon fed love, comfort and empowerment in abundance over the years. Will everyone survive the loss, bridge the gap or will they fall into the chasm?

The Oprah Way – Something for Everyone
Oprah’s management of this transition is perhaps the best example of corporate change management to come down the pipe, ever. In this case, Oprah, the CEO, chose the change. Everyone else had the change thrust upon them.  Her strategy to ease the pain – create a very public, year-long process, providing something for everyone.

Audience: First of all she didn’t just announce, then do. During the final year, the bulk of the process was devoted to a celebration of the past and all things wonderful contained within. Episode after episode was a last hurrah enabling her audience to relive, then applaud and laud, all of the good, albeit a carefully selected and scripted, past. .

Advertisers: I am sure, though not certain, that each one will be given the opportunity to accompany her. Whatever their choice, she has made great effort to offer them final opportunities to promote themselves. Through her free giveaways and ever-growing final audiences, she gave them their own last hurrah. It is rumored that the cost of ad spots for her final shows rivaled that of the Super Bowl’s.

Employees: By not quitting, retiring or taking a break and continuing to work in a similar but different aspect of her industry, she keeps opportunity of employment for her employees. They don’t all suddenly lose their jobs. And if some do, she has given them a longer, softer, certainly less painful transition. Complete with a huge thanks for past work, instead of the typical ‘too-bad, that’s life’ boot on the backside as they go out the door.

Friends: Gayle is perhaps the best example. With her own show on the new OWN, she continues with a role, perhaps even a better one, in Oprah’s life. She has been given a new opportunity and her own set of risks and challenges to accomplish or fail.

Corporate Translation
Companies going through transformative change should adopt Oprah’s process. Examples of botched corporate reinventions laden with lead balloons of bad press, failed spin PR, golden parachutes and legions of never fading ill-will abound. Hers is a framework that translates into a positive strategy and plan for any company.

Customers and clients = her audience: If you make any large scale change – tell them, explain, be open and honest and give them a long time to transition. Oprah’s was a full year. Your customers are not your enemy. They are your biggest fans. They fill the stands that are the coffers of your revenues. They, like Oprah’s millions of followers, are number one. It’s not about what you make. It’s about who makes you. They know if you are lying and spinning and will jump ship to the competition, fast.

Vendors, outside service providers = her advertisers: Think up and give them other opportunities to come along on the new wave. They are your biggest cheer leaders.

Employees = her employees: Don’t cut your costs here. Get creative instead. Invent a vehicle, any vehicle, to take them along and keep them. The vehicle that saves them may just become your best, new business product or service.

Share holders, investors = friends: Ensure they come along by giving them a role to play in the next phase.

This isn’t really a change management (CM) plan. It is a business plan involving change, devised at the highest level of the company. Most CM plans are low-level, one-off initiatives designed to spin, keep employees contented and control fall out in order to make the change “easier” on management. Oprah’s plan, whether conscious or instinctive, is not a reactive, add-on, change management plan. It is a proactive business plan with integrated business priorities. This is what really has made Oprah so successful. She knows how to run a business well.

Bottom Line
A change management of this type is not a keep everyone ‘happy’ HR retention plan. Rather as an integrated business plan, every level of the organization is engaged to drive the business reinvention and next success. Oprah dug deep and invented a new business to grow in a new area and in new ways. Reaching beyond the short-term and the easy obvious, the new business retains its most valuable assets – its people – the customers, product and service providers, employees, investors.  An intentional mandate of full retention and inclusion strategy drives of the new business type. Collateral damage is not an option

Just as People made Oprah’s past success, it makes all companies’. People want their company to succeed again. The business’ success is their success. It has a value to them too whether spiritually, monetarily or otherwise. If change is planned and executed with taking everyone along on the journey as the number one, the right next thing will be invented. They will actively and voluntarily make the next success again, no matter what it is.

The bottom line business strategy:
Celebrate the past. All in it was relevant, useful and valuable.
Now let’s all move on and make the next succes

————————————————————————————————-

Coda and Kudos

Dear Oprah,

At first I thought this new venture was more of the same and thus easier for you. That after 25 years you were really just afraid to take a break or retire, a common fear for hyper-accomplished people. Upon fuller examination, I now understand it would have been easier to just walk away, or stay exactly the same while watching your audience and success dwindle.

Instead you chose to work really hard at re-invention. No golden parachute, no mass layoffs, no blaming others, no quitting at the ‘top of your game’. You choose to climb the next mountain; to continue to innovate, create and develop something more and larger, not for just yourself, but for all others. This way is the hard way, and yes the nobler way. This way takes real guts. This is real corporate leadership. You continue to break new ground. I am in awe.

Best wishes and may you continue to reap rewards,
Catherine Adams Lee

Copyright © 2011. Catherine Adams Lee Consulting. All rights reserved.

One size doesn’t fit all. I have said this so many times that I’m even getting tired of hearing it. So I am going to let some else say it – Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm, in his book What the Dog Saw, has an essay entitled The Ketchup Conundrum. Buried within this story is a sub-story about Howard Moskowitz, Diet Pepsi and spaghetti sauce.

Howard Moskowitz, now a legend in his industry, is the owner of a food-testing and market-research company. In the seventies, while trying to find the perfect sweetness mix for his client Pepsi’s new Diet version, he noticed all the data from his testing research was wacky. There was no clear winner. As Malcolm writes it, Moskowitz had an epiphany. “They had been asking the wrong question. There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have been looking for the perfect Diet Pepsis.”

Malcolm relates that Moskowitz spent years trying to get the food industry to understand “his idea about the plural nature of perfection.” Then in 1986 the Campbell Soup Company called. They were in huge competition against Ragu with their Prego brand of spaghetti sauce and losing. Moskowitz created forty-five varieties and, instead of just relying on professional food tasters, he took them on the road. Because, Gladwell quotes Moskowitz, “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.” Consumers don’t “know what they desire if what they desire doesn’t exist yet.”

What did the perfect competitive sauce turn out to be? It seems, after sifting through mounds of data, not one but three broad patterns emerged – “plain, spicy and extra-chunky.” Extra-chunky, the new version, brought “hundreds of millions of dollars to Pepsi” over the next decade. Thirty years later multiple flavors of spaghetti sauce is the expected norm.

Since the transition from factory work to office work, workplace designers have also been looking for perfection. They have engaged in a century-long effort to design that one, perfect place where everyone works full-throttle – happy, productive and efficient. The result is our current incarnation of supposed perfection – one-size-fits-all facilities. You know it, Dilbertville® on steroids.  Rows and rows, floors and floors, buildings and buildings of the same types of offices, varied only slightly based on hierarchy. Non-descript workspaces for a non-descript workforce of human cogs in the great corporate machine – modern age perfection.

The workplace’s parallel conundrum is that the workplace industry, from corporate real estate and facilities managers to architects, designers and furniture manufacturers, also has been asking the wrong questions. There is no such thing as the perfect workplace. They should be looking for the perfect workplaces. Because, as not everyone liked plain or spicy, not everyone works well in an office or cube.

Over the years, every time a new version of workplace is created, such as the original switch from offices and the typing-pool sea to offices and the system furniture cube-farm, or the current switching from four-sided, high cubes to low or sometimes even no-sided cubes, the same old pattern is followed. Everyone gets them. This is akin to totally dumping plain and spicy and offering only extra-chunky. A new group is now satisfied but the others are left out in the cold.

If the answer is found in pluralism, as Moskowitz, Gladwell and I believe, what are the perfect workplaces? I have my own thirty year study and I guarantee that it is not just some new combination of office workspaces. With the discovery of extra-chunky, that version was just one of forty-five tried that seemed to rise to prominence. Today there are even more flavors fulfilling every niche. For workplace, most companies and the workplace industry have yet tried only a few variations on the same theme.

Also key is another concept Moskowitz espoused – his mind-tongue ambiguity. That people don’t know what they don’t know is especially true for workplace. Having only been presented with two choices in their worklife, they don’t know what other types of workplaces really might be the right ones for them. Again, it comes back to asking the right question. The right question is not “What is the perfect workplace?” The right question is “Where do people work best?”

From my years of research and experience, I see there are also three strong patterns emerging. Most likely they are not the ones you think. Given the heavy industry pursuit in a single direction, you may never have been presented other choices to try. Try some, you might like them. But don’t just try one, try many. The plural nature of perfection is about choices.

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

Gladwell at TED, talking about Ketchup, makes the larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.  “Embracing the diversity of human beings is the path to making them truly happy.” – Malcolm Gladwell

Copyright © 2011. Catherine Adams Lee Consulting. All rights reserved.

A tug of war is occurring in the workplace between face-to-face interpersonal relationships and those that occur at a distance over technology. As the old saying goes, if I had a dollar for every time someone said to me “Fact-to face is important”, I’d be rich. And I‘d agree. But the proverbial barn doors for work and interactions over technology have been open for over fifty years. To stay firmly planted and safe in the barn when the larger world is changing so rapidly is hard for everyone.

People of all ages and genders find themselves heavily guarding their comfort position, most often driven by the fear they won’t find a place in the new world outside the barn. This new world may not be better, or worse. It just is. And it’s different. Besides, face-to-face (f2f) is not the win-all answer. Face-to-face has always been a multi-edged sword. There is the good, the bad and the ugly of it.

The good – humans need to be around other people. The new, seemingly daily, discoveries in cognitive neuroscience appear to reinforce this as true. Proximity dynamics of the transfer of energy, brain waves, and pheromones enable accomplishment and exchange of ideas that don’t happen over technology – for most people. There is a qualifier. The jury is still out for future generations as to whether nature or nurture will overcome the f2f ‘deficiency’. Or if, like a blind person compensating with increased hearing abilities, people will develop a new normal – other skills to fill the void and accomplish the same thing in different ways. Not better, or worse, just different.

The bad – those who abuse and misuse f2f to influence. Not the charismatic speaker (good, hopefully), but the boss or other authority figure who demands compliance and obedience reinforced by the threatening, intimidating or bullying use of his or her physical presence (the bad). According to Wikipedia, research by The Workplace Bullying Institute suggests the #2 highest tactic used by workplace bullies is “stared, glared, was nonverbally intimidating and was clearly showing hostility (68%).”

This is bad f2f. Included are the team members who dominate to control the outcomes their way versus team agreement, consensus or thought-out business intent. And the people who get included or excluded, rewarded or punished, promoted or passed over, liked or shunned, based on physical attributes – biases of gender, race, size, age, good looks, et al, not capability or value of accomplishment. All stereotype characteristics, the knowledge of which is gleaned mostly through visible, face-to-face interaction.

The ugly – the extreme verbal and physical abusers. People who overtly intimidate, scream, threaten, even physically hit and accost to get you to perform as they want or keep you “in line”. Yes, I have experienced pretty much every one of them. I even had a client who experienced a workplace shooting. So traumatic was the incident they disbanded the company. An extreme example of how f2f can be bad for business. OSHA statistics state that homicide is the second highest cause of death on the job, after motor vehicle accidents.

Distance and distancing can be a tool to ameliorate these bad and ugly situations. That’s not to say that you can’t be screamed at over the phone. But the verbal threat may be diffused with greater ease with a sort of distance-enabled ‘time out’, than a threat accompanied by physical presence. The physical gap allowing for a cooling off or cooling down period and faster reengagement when calmer heads prevail.

Finding success in this new world of work is about finding the right combination of f2f and non f2f. To do so, you need to:

• Learn to look at each with eyes wide open.
• Understand the role and the possibilities contained within each as a tool for the future and healthy growth both monetarily and psychologically of the business.
• Recognize and employ their attributes and avoid their faults.
• Open up room for positive opportunities brought by non f2f – like a more level playing field, increased productivity for both on-site and off-site or distributed employees.
• Develop a combination of all forms of relationship interactions that works for each individual, team or group performed at the micro-level.
• Reap the rewards of greater full-immersion diversity and accessibility brought by good ideas and innovations that come bubbling forth in a safer environment.

Work over technology at a distance is not a panacea for all corporate relationship ills. But neither is it the devil it is so often made out to be. I have been on global teams that functioned very well for extended periods of time. We invented new processes like global, round-robin brainstorming and time-zone IMing to deal with the asynchrony. When achieving consensus was needed or we felt alignment was slipping, we then came f2f, usually about once a quarter.

Conversations and work over computers may not be your preferred world, but this is the way of the new world. You just may not be living in it yet. You can choose to accept this as true, reject it or escape it. Just remember, the new world of relationships over technology may not be better, or even worse, but it is different. And it’s here.

Catherine Adams Lee is a workplace business strategist and organizational innovation coach helping businesses build their bridge between old and new work places. Catherine encourages businesses to engage in distance in order to make NewWorkPlaces work and become a 21st century business success story. To find out more about Catherine and NewWorkPlaces go to http://www.newworkplaces.com/.

Copyright © 2011. Catherine Adams Lee Consulting. All rights reserved.

Before you answer that question, let me ask you another one.

Which kind of player do you use to listen to music – MP3 player, CD player, computer, cassette player, 8-track tape player, record player, radio?

If you entered MP3 player, you are up-to-date, new. If you entered record player, you are old school. But the question isn’t about what you use. The question is about having your brain look at the idea of  using old or new things that were built to essentially do the same, one thing – listen to music. Let’s think about it together.

Things that play Records are:

1. Large
2. Cumbersome
3. Attached to the wall
4. Fixed in one place
5. Can only be heard from where the speakers and you sit
6. Need to be plugged into an electric wall plug for power
7. Scratch and ruin the record if moved while playing
8. Only play a prescribed list – the songs on the album

 Compared to say – MP3 players, MP3 players are:

1. Small
2. Light and portable
3. Attached to nothing but you
4. Easily operated anyplace
5. Can be heard anywhere
6. Power moves with it
7. Designed to be mobile
8. Play list is customizable to your wants and needs

There are more comparisons I could make, but you get the idea. So let’s take this process and apply it to the workplace.

Old workplaces are:

1. Big
2. Cumbersome
3. Is and is full of attached things that take a small company fortune to move
4. Takes another small army to keep operating in that one place
5. Seemingly can only be heard/managed if you are located right there
6. Everything needs to be plugged in right there to operate – equipment, technology, people
7. Moving any part takes 3 and 4 above
8. Can only used in a prescribed way, usually as determined by Facilities, HR and IT

You see where I am going with this. Does your old workplaces list match mine? It doesn’t matter if it does. Just like it doesn’t matter which thing you choose at the beginning to play music. Any answer is valid. If you play records, or tapes or digital media, all is okay. But pretty soon you can’t get the right or new music on the old media. When the records become unplayable, scratched, you can’t buy new ones. When the record player breaks you can’t repair it. If it works for you right now, that’s fine. The question is – will it work for you later? And if not, when is later? I think later is today.

So it’s not about right or wrong. It’s about saying out loud, truthfully what the ‘As Is” is so you can accurately and successfully plan what you want the “To Be” to be for you, for your company. I call this congruency – when the thing and the need are in sync. How does it work, here is an example.

Vision:   Play beautiful business music. 
Strategy:   Become a 21^st century business player of new business music.
Plan:   Be a  21^st century business.
Road Map:   Innovate to be a NewWorkPlace.

Coda:

My “New” WorkPlaces list:

1. Small
2. Light and portable/agile
3. Attached to nothing but you, the employee
4. Easily operated anyplace
5. Can be heard connected anywhere
6. Power moves with it
7. Designed to be mobile
8. Play list is customizable to your needs

Yes – this is the same list as the MP3 player. Think about it. It works.

Copyright © 2011. Catherine Adams Lee Consulting. All rights reserved.

I am now a Certified Scrum Master -
as certified by the Scrum Alliance,
“a not-for-profit professional membership
organization created to share the Scrum
framework and transform the world of work …
Scrum is an agile approach to managing complex projects.”

The Scrum and Agile movements today are moving beyond the software development venue. Those involved, I included, see the need and application in many parts of the company and for any business type that wishes to be creative, innovative or just ensure that true collaboration is occurring.

For me, this has been a circular journey, having operated in a similar manner with my own design business. Much of its success was built on such things as fast track (scrum translation = sprints) and having my designers meet directly with the client (scrum = product owner and team interaction, backstory creation), just to name a few corollaries.

I was introduced to the word Scrum about 4 years ago by a client whose new style of workplace I was creating.  As a VP of Software Development, he wanted rooms for virtual daily scrums. Daily scrums are quick, fifteen minute meetings meant to set up the framework and context for the day’s work. The virtual part was to enable these meetings between team members in California and India.

As the project progressed, I found that this VP and I similar work philosophies. The project was fast, tasks given were completed in a timely manner, input supplied was relevant, prompt and appropriate and key stakeholders participated in the design process and solutions. Though there was heavy pressure from outside, we both worked hard to follow Agile principles and not become a tops-down, hierarchical, isolated process. Ideas abounded and positive creative tension resulted in innovation and a design strategy that supported the work of the business line, not singly the demands of finance or real estate.

I ran across the term Scrum later while attending an Organizational Development conference. Their emerging interest was as a new change management process. Seeing Scrum start to move beyond software development motivated me to dig further, which eventually led to my training and certification.

Upon critical reflection, I have come to realize that the success of that original project resulted from all parties, the business VP (scrum=product owner), me (scrum=master/facilitator) and the team (scrum=broad, cross-represtational, horizontal, non-siloed), being truly invested in:

• the real concept of team and team responsibility, both as a group and as individuals
• invention and out-of-the-box problem solving, even if it has not been done before
• people and the work produced first, process and tools second
• the courage to truthfully define the problem and a willingness to find real, workable solutions

All results supported and facilitated by Agile and Scrum and, as evidenced by the exploding growth of Agile in the  software development industry, hugely successful when allowed to work freely, unencumbered and supported.

I look forward to continuing my facilitation under this framework and to helping people, teams and company’s to capitalize on their internal creativity and innovate to make workplaces work.