Very early in my career, when I was a fairly green project manager, I experienced an eye-opening defeat. I was leading my first major project for Georgia-Pacific in Atlanta. Georgia-Pacific primarily made building and paper products, but it shipped so much product that people often thought it was a trucking company. Shipping was our second-largest cost after wood fiber. My job was to streamline a freight-rating system that would process thousands of transactions a day across six building product businesses with over 100 manufacturing sites. I spent months analyzing the situation and gathering high-level requirements.

The day came for me to present my recommendation to the most powerful men in the company. I was more than nervous; I was uneasy. My presentation would define me for these men, to whom I was still an unknown. At the same time, I was confident in my recommendation. My team and I had figured out a way to standardize all the businesses onto one of the existing systems. This approach would save the company from an investment of millions of dollars and several years of development, and it required fewer people to support it.

I didn't have to wait long to wonder what they thought of my brilliant plan. Not five minutes into my presentation, I was interrupted by the most senior guy in the room. We'll call him David.

“This is the worst idea I've ever heard in my life,” David spat out. My boss and my boss's boss were completely silent. So was I. I very quickly regained my composure, but it didn't matter. Before I left the room that day, a new project leader had been assigned.

The news spread quickly throughout the company. I went from being a highly regarded “up-and-comer” to the corporate equivalent of the guy no one would sit with in the high school cafeteria.

What I came to realize was that David and some of the other people in that room had already decided—before I walked into the room, even before I was assigned the project—that the correct recommendation was that we needed to develop a new system. It didn't matter how much sense my presentation made; as soon as they realized I was operating outside of their expectations, they stopped listening.

This was a powerful lesson in the politics of change. I realized then that creating impact requires a lot more than a good recommendation and the right job title. It requires you to be able to move others' minds from point A, a known, comfortable place, to point B, the great and threatening unknown.

I committed myself to figuring out how to manage those challenges. I would no longer first and foremost be a project manager; I'd become a change leader.

I started by taking some time to study change management as a whole and our department's track record in particular. I was stunned to find that 75 percent of recent, major change initiatives had failed to achieve their goals. Speaking now, after 25 years in organizational management, I am no longer stunned. I would say that's about average, whatever industry or department you're looking at. The pace of change has picked up dramatically, but the success rate has not. A recent McKinsey whitepaper puts the figure at 70 percent.¹

As the years passed, I developed a comprehensive set of techniques and came to see successful change management being driven by four things: priorities, politics, people, and perseverance. Not coincidentally, these are the four sections of this book. You'll find my focus is a little different from what you might have learned in a typical change management course. I took all those courses, too, and what they cover is important. But this is what I've learned as a practitioner, and it's not covered in the three Ts of project management: tasks, timing, and technologies. I've found that without these additional skills, everything else you learned is useless. (See my opening tale of woe.)

Part I: Priorities covers how to develop and launch a change initiative. By priorities, I don't just mean those you'll set for the organization. I mean those that already exist within the individuals and the cultural DNA of the organization. In this section, you'll learn a particular method of gathering data that leads to much more accurate insight; how to pick the core team; and finally, how to prioritize tasks to move forward quickly.

Part II: Politics covers the practice and theory of influence—how to build the alignment you need to persuade and motivate others. Politics are driven by the boundaries, both real and emotional, that give people their sense of safety, significance, and control. In this section, you'll learn why Captain Kirk should be your new role model, the best kind of messaging and the words to avoid at all costs, and, finally, techniques to overcome resistance to change.

Part III: People provides the insight into relationship building and human nature that you'll need to sustain and monitor progress along the way. You'll learn how to get to know people well enough that you understand their boundaries. You'll leave the section with a better understanding of how to build trust among your teams and a crash course in managing the group dynamics that can throw the best plan off course.

Part IV: Perseverance is all about how to fix the things that break along the way and how to create a newer, better way of doing things. Believe me, things break. Perseverance is also about how to institutionalize change and imbue it with purpose so that your efforts don't start with a bang and end with a whimper.

Leading change isn't easy, as the meager success rate tells us. But what that means is that those few who master it find themselves in a tier above their competition. Their careers climb high and fast.

I am glad to say that my track record as a change leader ended up being quite a bit better than average. I was fortunate to work for two global, multibillion-dollar companies within different industries that grew significantly during my time with them. When I joined Georgia-Pacific in 1984, annual revenues were around $4 billion. They were just under $20 billion when I left 22 years later. When I joined Medtronic in 2006, revenues were around $10 billion. They grew to more than $18 billion in the seven-plus years I was with the company. My point here isn't that I created all that growth, but that the growth made the ability to lead change a job requirement.

At both companies, I brought people and processes together to leverage what was common and maximize what was unique. I led upward of 15 acquisition integrations, 10 enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations, 10 shared services implementations, 5 quality and customer service improvement programs, and over 300 various other projects. I also created three innovation centers.

My track record in all those initiatives wasn't 100 percent, but I feel comfortable (if not exactly modest) putting it at 90 percent—not over my entire career, but certainly during the past 20 years after I had honed the methods I lay out in this book.

Throughout my career, I've paid attention to a powerful tutor called “trial and error,” making a conscious effort to turn every misstep into a revelation. In my early days, that kept me busy. But once I got out of my head and shifted my attention to the people whose lives I'd be changing, leading came naturally.

We all come from unique circumstances that give us particular skills and abilities. I'm an African-American male who was born in 1958 in the South, raised by a mother and grandmother whose household was rich in wisdom (especially my grandmother's, as she told us often) but poor by traditional metrics. Speaking from where I am today, you could say I started beating the odds at a very young age.

As a kid I played the violin. In my neighborhood, that wasn't just unusual, it was freakish. I did it anyway. Being in orchestras led me to interact early on with people from other walks of life. Quickly I became a very astute observer of what made the people around me tick—an invaluable skill when you need to convince others to change their thinking when the status quo suits them just fine, thank you. So while most of the stories and tactics in the book come directly from my career, I've also included some “life stories” that I've found particularly instructive over the years.

The bottom line is that leading change isn't easy because it is not totally a science. That's why the failure rate is so high. Managing each initiative requires science and art, because the people dynamic is always unique. What I can promise is that you will increase your success rate by paying attention to those dynamics and respecting the “people” part of the equation. This book provides a wealth of tools to do exactly that.

Experience will still be your greatest teacher. I'm sharing mine to give you a jump-start and to let you know that you are not alone in the trials and travails you have experienced or will experience when leading change. Most important, I'm sharing them to let you know that the art can be learned and that you can overcome and benefit from any obstacle that you encounter.

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