Introduction

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insolvable problems.

- John W. Gardner Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon Johnson

One reality of business that seasoned executives know well-often by learning it the hard way-is that introducing and implementing breakthrough change is an uphill battle. No matter how necessary the change or how seemingly evident the need, this process demands continuous hard work. This book is designed to help you understand and overcome the difficulties in finding and advancing a smoother path.

The problems leaders face are perhaps more pervasive today, given the accelerated pace of business in a much flatter world. However, problems also present opportunities. You can learn to recognize such opportunities and show others that the potential victories far outweigh the discomfort that change will elicit.

Breakthrough change refers to those disruptive initiatives that dramatically, profoundly affect the organization and the people in it. It redefines the prospects for the future and interrupts the organization's cautious momentum plan with incremental improvement. Breakthrough change can increase revenues or reduce costs. It can mean a new distribution channel or a new line of products. And it can be as exciting as launching an international expansion or as scary as a massive restructuring and downsizing effort. Breakthrough change also depends on the situation, or context. What is breakthrough to one organization can be business as usual to another.

You need to do everything you can to stack the deck in favor of success. That's exactly what you'll learn how to do in this book.

Why "Stacking the Deck"?

I never intended to write this book. But as it turned out, there were no practical books on change written by and for people from midcareer managers to global senior executives. There was no resource for on-the-ground leaders seeking clear ways to develop the skills to implement change within their organizations, whether for-profit or nonprofit. Plenty of books and articles about leading or managing change have been written, many of them very insightful. Some, especially John Kotter's groundbreaking Leading Change, have stood the test of time and are invaluable. But none of them offered the whole picture, or at least not the picture that I saw through the lens of my background and experience-the practical, operational side of leading breakthrough, transformational change. And none of them deeply engaged with the human reality of leading big, risky change initiatives-not in ways that could be immediately put to use.

I saw a need for a book that would go beyond outlining the strategies and processes required for success, one that would also address the challenges leaders are likely to confront in driving and implementing change. A book that told in-the-trenches stories of individuals who led bold, sweeping change; that walked readers through the social and emotional reality of leading others without shortchanging the real difficulties involved in promoting a change to people who, perhaps rightly, are fearful of it. A book not for the novice, but for people who have years of firsthand experience leading others.

These are the people I teach in various venues, ranging from Wharton's Executive MBA program through corporate programs tailored for specific needs. Whether as emerging executives or seasoned senior executives, these leaders have high expectations and enormous demands on their time. In all of my classes and presentations I offer a specific nine-step Stacking the Deck process and an approach to leadership that students and participants may never have encountered before, either in their careers or in their formal business education. By exploring leadership within the framework of a problem to be solved, this approach enables people to better understand the demands and requirements of leadership. It enables them to look at the whole picture: the people they must lead, the purpose of the change, the steps through which they must travel, and the actual situations they will confront. There's nothing abstract about change when it affects the job security, 401(k) programs, and even identities of real people in an organization. This process of contextualizing leadership strikes a chord and makes the information real, current, and immediately useful.

Eventually I realized that the book I was looking for would have to come from someone like me-someone with a personal history of business leadership that has provided a wealth of practical, hands-on lessons. Someone who had to learn on the ground, and who sometimes made big mistakes. Someone whose many attempts to lead breakthrough change were much more difficult than they actually had to be-but were certainly more instructive as a result. Someone who could keep you from making those same mistakes.

Stacking the Deck for Breakthrough Change

Most organizations' processes and culture are structured for predictability, reliability, control, and risk minimization. Breakthrough change is the polar opposite. It is unpredictable and favors responsiveness to new realities over control and staying the course. Breakthrough change is inherently risky and goes against every instinct the leaders of the company have developed over the course of their careers. Is it any wonder, then, that employees often resist breakthrough change-even in companies whose leaders say it's exactly what they need?

Every business is filled with people who depend heavily on procedures continuing "as they have always been." That's what "expertise" is; you spend 10, 15, or even 20 years doing something a certain way and therefore become an expert in it. Your knowledge of the way things have always been done is what gives you value as an employee. So when some brand-new executive comes in and tells you everything is about to change-but it's going to be great and you should greet it with open arms-how would you feel?

If you answered "pretty darn nervous," you're not alone, or irrational. People's emotional responses to a specific change initiative can be unpredictable and very powerful. Leaders must find ways to help people see the need for change and then inspire them to move toward it with confidence and urgency. This is a daunting struggle and one that is not explored deeply enough in most books on leading or managing change. Stacking the Deck explains not just the what of change but the how.

The nine-step Stacking the Deck process is designed to mitigate the risks that come with change by having you take concrete steps to increase your chances of success. This preparation does not make the change less bold-and it doesn't guarantee success. What it does do is create an advantage (or more accurately, a series of advantages). These steps-culled from my experience, tested in practice, shared, and refined-provide a guide to preparing and planning so that your change initiative, and your team, have the best possible shot at succeeding. The Stacking the Deck process allows you to take on big, transformative change with increasing confidence and momentum because you know that you have a proven approach going in.

I've seen successes and I've seen failures. The failures were not because the proposed change was toxic or wrongheaded, and not because the effort was inadequate. Instead, these failures were often rooted in an inadequate understanding of how truly difficult it is to overcome resistance, to deal with uncertainty, to respond to new facts, and to execute the myriad details necessary for success.

You may know the phrase "stacking the deck" to mean preparing a deck of playing cards so that you will almost certainly win the game rather than rely on chance. This is what I was thinking of when I coined the phrase in reference to leading breakthrough change-except that the Stacking the Deck process is not designed to cheat other players. It implies instead that thinking through and preparing for all the steps and processes we will need to undertake vastly increases our chances of success.

Stacking the Deck distills the useful techniques and processes I have learned throughout my career into a series of logical and sequential steps for leading breakthrough change. Understanding and following these steps-and reading about my own experiences and those of the leaders I've interviewed-will enable you to avoid many decades of trial-and-error that we have worked through. You will learn practical, relevant ways to deal with change and succeed, without experiencing the risks and the mistakes that were required to amass this knowledge.

A Guide to Stacking the Deck

The book is divided into two parts. Part describes the Stacking the Deck process, nine steps through which nearly every breakthrough change inevitably goes. They're presented in the order in which you should undertake them, though there are exceptions. The steps often overlap, and circumstances frequently demand that you double back to repeat or redo a previous step in the process. Change is not linear and nothing about this should throw you off your game plan.

1. Step One is establishing the need to change and creating a sense of urgency around that need. Not only is this step...