ENTREPRENEURS (/ENTREPRENEURS) 8/07/2014 @ 5:14PM 6,623 views

6 Keys To Change Management:Why Willpower AloneIsn't Enough

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This is the second article on managing change and business transformation.

Why is it so hard for companies and people to change?

Ken Krogue (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/) ContributorI'm an inside sales evangelist and social media missionaryOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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My long time neighbor Ron McMillan recently co-wrote two amazing books onchange: Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change(http://www.amazon.com/Influencer-Science-Leading-Change-Edition/dp/0071808868/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407443656&sr=8-1&keywords=influencer), and most recently, Change Anything: The NewScience of Personal Success (http://www.amazon.com/Change-Anything-Science-Personal-Success/dp/0446573906/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407443695&sr=8-1&keywords=change+anything).

Ron helped found Vitalsmarts and he and three other colleagues are probablymost known for writing the New York Times landmark bestsellers CrucialConversations and Crucial Accountability. Ron was unavailable for aninterview but his co-author David Maxfield joined me for half an hour on thetopic of change management for companies and individuals.

I was sitting on my phone, taking notes in Evernote at a table at Roxberry,drinking a green smoothie(http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2012/09/08/green-smoothies-hope-for-old-fat-busy-executives/) to lose weight as I listened to David.

The book Influencer is already on it’s second edition and is currently ranked inthe Top 20 on Amazon in three categories.

Influencer stresses the importance of leadership in helping others change.

Change Anything is about changing yourself.

I asked David, “Why did Vitalsmarts choose the topics of change leadershipand changing oneself?”

David responded, “Because change management isn’t working.”

“The Standish Group says 9 out of 10 large scale IT engagements don’t deliveron time, within budget, or to the specs that were promised.”

“At the more mundane personal level, we spend $2 billion a year on diets, but19 of 20 people lost nothing but their money. Stanford studied the top 3 dietsavailable and found that they all work… if you stick with them. But almostnobody does. We can’t live up to the change commitments we make.”

I said, “Wait, don’t call weight loss mundane! I represent that remark!” I atleast lost 13 pounds on my last very expensive dietary adventure.

I go on, “So let’s attack both directions; how to change an organization andweight loss. Every day we have leaders in companies come to us to help themchange their technology, but they don’t want to change their behavior or theirculture. They’ve been working under the traditional sales model for decades.They have salespeople going face-to-face all over the country. They are facedwith competitors who are generating web leads and inside sales people on thephone and they are getting hammered. They pull me aside privately and admitthey don’t have the skills to actually change.”

I continue, “They buy salesforce.com, they hire sales trainers. They try to get

marketing to stop worrying about un-trackable advertising and branding andstart generating web leads, but nobody wants to change. They can’t get thereps to make the calls, to use the CRM, to follow the skills training. They can’tget marketing to focus on all that matters… leads!”

He laughs. “There are two forces at play here. Those things like technology,tools, and skills are above the water line. You can see them. But then there iseverything below the water line: The cultural norms, what people do, theinternal politics, indifference, passive aggressive followers, all the things youhave to do to get things done. Change stops when it hits the iceberg below thewaterline.”

“Here’s an example,” he continues, “Hospitals in the US are all trying to get100% hand hygiene. There are 100,000 deaths a year in the US alone becausepeople don’t wash their hands enough in hospitals. We stress what we call200% accountability; for you, and for everyone else.”

“If you are a housekeeper cleaning the window, you wash your hands. And youbetter speak up to the surgeon who hasn’t washed her hands who walks in theroom with the patient. But that is hard, very stressful. That is countercultural.Housekeepers don’t speak to surgeons, nurses don’t even speak to surgeons.”

“Unless you change that norm you don’t get hand hygiene. Putting up postersdoesn’t work. But if you can change this one thing, you change all other areasof patient safety and cost control because you address personal factors, socialfactors and the environmental factors of change.”

I joked about drinking my Roxberry and my own crazy cycle of weight loss in ahigh stress environment. I asked David next, “So tell me about these sixsources of influence.”

He responded excitedly, “Before the six sources of influence you ask twoquestions: Can I change? And, will it be worth it?”

He goes on, “Then you dive into personal motivation and ability, whetherothers around you enable or disable you, whether there is a system of incentiveand if your environment makes it easy to do the right stuff, or tempting to dothe wrong stuff.”

From his book, “Influencers do three things better than others. They areclearer about the results they want to achieve and how they will measure them.They focus on a small number of vital behaviors that will help them achievethose results. They overdetermine change by amassing six sources of influencethat both motivate and enable the vital behaviors.”

The Influencer teaches how to master six sources of influence frompsychology, social psychology, and organizational theory:

Personal

1- Personal Motivation: Help Them Love What they Hate. Work to connectvital behaviors to intrinsic motives.2- Personal Ability: Help Them Do What They Can’t. Build personal ability to

do behaviors through deliberate practice.

Social

3- Social Motivation: Provide Encouragement.4- Social Ability: Provide Assistance

Organizational

5- Structural Motivation: Change Their Economy. Attach appropriateincentives or sanctions to motivate people to pick up or stop vital behaviors.6- Structural Ability: Change Their Space. Things such as systems, process,reporting structures, visual cues, work layouts, tools, supplies, and machinerysupport vital behaviors.

Combining all six of these sources of influence help an Influenceroverdetermine change.

I ask, “So tell me about your newest book, Change Anything.”

He responds, “We challenge you to escape the willpower trap and evolve a planthat works perfectly for your subject: you.”

He goes on, “When people can’t change, it’s rarely because they lack the will.They are blind and outnumbered: They’re blind to all but 1 or 2 of the 6sources of influence… and there are far more sources under the waterline

working against them than there sources acting for them.”

“People who see and use all six sources of influence are 10 times more likely tochange and create change.”

“We all think we have the power to change just through our force of will. Weknow we should change. We want to change. But we don’t change!”

“That calls into question the belief that we actually do have power to changeon our own. We call it agency.”

“The numbers say we don’t have as much as we think we do!” I pipe up.

He continues, “In the book we quote research that shows: 85% of efforts todrive new behavior in organizations fail. 87% of employees have sufferedeconomically because they didn’t change. Only 1 in 5 American adults arefinancially prepared. Only 1 of 10 couples in marriage counseling actually staytogether. 90% of those getting coronary bypass surgery are back to the samebehavior within 2 years.”

Then his tempo increased, “4 years ago we studied 5000 people who tried tochange. 4400 failed. 600 succeeded. How much more successful were the600? As I said, they were 10x more likely to change. Why? They did 6 thingsbetter.”

He lists them, so I number them:

1. They learn to love what they hate.

2. They learn skills to do that they couldn’t.

3. They recruit accomplices to help them change.

4. They remove the accomplices that stop them from change.

5. They use or lose incentives to help them change.

6. They control their space, their surroundings, to make it easier to change.”

“They focus on the 6 sources of influence, 6 levers they can pull, rather thanendlessly tugging on willpower alone.”

So I stop him, “So where do you begin? How does a business leader start?”

He responds, “Ask first… is the problem worth solving?”

He laughs, “My dad always said, ‘If something’s not worth doing at all, it’scertainly not worth doing well!’ So build a business case. In the hospitalexample we call it a clinical case. Is it worth it? Or more important, whathappens if you don’t change?”

“Ouch!” I say, “I better stick with my green smoothies!”

David went on and coached me through a similar 6 sources of influence that Icould put into place to help in getting back below a 40-inch waistline. If youare no longer at your college weight you can click through to the expanded

version of this article (http://www.kenkrogue.com/best-practices/6-keys-to-change-management-vitalsmarts-bestsellers-influencer-and-change-anything-even-explain-how-to-lose-weight/) and I’ll be happy to share. You can be anaccomplice. — Ken

I’ll leave the rest of the adventure contained within their two new books up toyou. I’m a fan of the Audible or Kindle editions.

Author: Ken Krogue (http://www.kenkrogue.com/about/) | Follow meon Google+ (https://plus.google.com/+KenKrogue?rel=author)Summary of Ken Krogue’s Forbes articles (http://www.kenkrogue.com/ken-krogue-forbes-articles/)

ENTREPRENEURS (/ENTREPRENEURS) 7/15/2014 @ 6:20PM 7,284 views

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Ken Krogue (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/) Contributor

I'm an inside sales evangelist and social media missionary

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Brad Pitt, Oakland Athletics, AndMoneyball: Still The Model ForChange Management, BusinessTransformation And PredictiveAnalytics

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I started writing this article from a hotel room in Oakland, California. I’mwithin walking distance from the stadium used by the Oakland A’s, the onlyprofessional baseball franchise that shares their playing field with the local profootball team in the country.

The Oakland A’s changed the way the game of baseball, and all professionalsports are played. They transformed an entire industry forever by using mathand statistics to choose players and make decisions.

Science over 150 years of art.

They figured out they are in the business (http://www.forbes.com/business/)of winning.

Just how good are they?

Billy Beane, who was played so convincingly by Brad Pitt(http://www.forbes.com/profile/brad-pitt/) in the movie Moneyball, is theGeneral Manager strapped with one of the lowest budgets in the country out of30 teams, yet they are tied for the most wins of any team in the 2012 and 2013seasons combined (94 + 96 = 190 wins.)

Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the General Manager of the winning Oakland A’s who used predictive analytics tochange professional sports forever. Theatrical Release Poster, released by Colombia Pictures in 2011.

As of today, half way through the 2014 season, they have 59 wins and 36losses, the top record in all of Major League Baseball(http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/standings/).

Is it working?

Results over time don’t lie.

A decade after the original Moneyball book written by Michael Lewis sharedthe secrets of using math to make decisions, the strategies are still paying off.

I loved the movie when it came out in 2011.

It told the story of the 2002 Oakland A’s, with a payroll of $41 million, whohad to be competitive with larger market teams like the New York Yankees,whose payroll topped $125 million the same year. They were not onlycompetitive, they tied with the Yankees at 103 wins, won the division and 20straight games that year, and forever changed the world of professional sports.

In 2013 the Los Angeles Dodgers started the season with a payroll of $213million, the New York Yankees close behind with a payroll of $210 million.Oakland paid out 60 million.

If you own or run a business, watch Moneyball. If you’ve seen it, watch itagain.

The Oakland Athletics, led by Billy Beane, have mastered the concept ofchange.

We invited Billy to keynote our 1 annual customer conference in Park City atthe end of May this year. He held us spellbound for over an hour. He swore usall to silence, so I won’t breath a word about the amazing stories and strategieshe told.

Not a word…

Suffice it to say he is the real thing. Business, and entrepreneurs in particular,can learn a lot from Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s about change.

A lot of skeptics have come and gone. In 2011, Sports Illustrated ran an article,“The Art of Winning An (Even More) Unfair Game” with the introduction:

Let’s see, hmmm, Red Sox 43 wins and 53 losses so far in 2014.

Billy Beane has changed things again.

What is change? It is to make a difference, to become different.

st

“ “Eight years after it forever shifted baseball’s tectonic plates, Moneyball is a Brad Pitt movie,but its ethos has changed. Intellectual firepower is mandatory, but no guarantee of successnow that the game’s financial giants have cracked the code. Competitive advantage: RedSox.”

A person changes.

A team or business transforms.

When a consultant helps a business change they call it transformation becausethey can charge a lot more the bigger the word or phrase they can coin. Youcan’t copyright and trademark simple and clear concepts.

In education change is called learning.

In religion change is called repentance.

Same concepts.

Youth want to change the world and still think they can. Their elders worrythey are too old to change, yet they often have the power and wisdom to effectbig change, though young entrepreneurs who are successful often gain thepower to affect big change, we just hope there is some wisdom also.

Technology is the lever of young entrepreneurs to make change. Science triesto explain why the technology actually works and whether it can continue towork.

The predictive analytics model that Billy Beane and staff use they callSabermetrics. They find undervalued players who are much better than theirpaychecks indicate… using math.

Now I know what to tell my kids when they don’t like doing their mathhomework.

It pays…

Stay tuned, this is 1 of a 3 part series on Change Management and BusinessTransformation

Author: Ken Krogue(http://www.kenkrogue.com/about/)Follow me on Twitter(https://twitter.com/kenkrogue) | Follow me on Google+(https://plus.google.com/+KenKrogue?rel=author)Summary of Ken Krogue’sForbes articles (http://www.kenkrogue.com/ken-krogue-forbes-articles/)

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