A Change Agent is a person who starts almost every sentence with "why" and is very creative, innovative, and highly knowledgeable in their respective field of expertise. Every company that wants to pivot to new products and markets that genuinely is "disruptive and game-changing" must have Change Agents.
They are crucial for innovation, new product development, and creating whole new markets. Also, Change Agents are few and far between. They never fit into a traditional company structure. Most companies do not take it to the "big stage" of global impact and change markets because they either don't have the Change Agents or don't let them operate freely within the company. The reason is that they are perceived as too challenging to work with by traditional standards.
At Cisco, I had the privilege of closely working with and observing Change Agents. Cisco's massive impact on changing how "the world communicates" and providing the technology that made the Internet possible would not have happened without the Change Agents.
The truly "big thinkers" and creative forces who came up with the ideas and design of the routers that eventually would become the backbone of the Internet were created in a few people's minds. The rest of us "just" had to execute those ideas and get them to the market. Initially, because of the truly transformational impact of those ideas, very few believed in them. Therefore, a handful of Change Agents were also needed in the "go-to-market" area. Cisco set out to "Changing the Way We Work, Live, Play and Learn (Vision statement), a tall order. But we achieved it. Other companies have changed the world, from Ford and Kodak to Apple. While I was not inside those companies, I'm sure they had Change Agents.
And when a company like Kodak could not pivot to the new age of digital photography, I'm sure the few Change Agents they had left were stifled and not listened to anymore. A company that appreciates and accommodates Change Agents doesn’t make massive mistakes like Kodak and doesn’t do market research — because they have the confidence that they know what the market desires and needs long before the "market" knows what it wants. Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Similarly, it would have been meaningless for Cisco to do market research, asking people, "Do you need the Internet?"
How to work with Change Agents
These highly creative and disruptive minds must be allowed to operate on their terms. They can not be chained by time, locations, or a specific company structure. Also, they are often not "politically correct," so they will offend other employees and might come across as aloof and arrogant. However, they are singularly focused on the idea or project at hand. They are way ahead of "everyone" else in terms of understanding the opportunity and the immense potential challenges.
Most importantly, they are already seeing solutions that no one else sees. They might be abrasive and insistent, which will often rattle others. Therefore, dismissing or "kicking them out of the room" is easy because they are considered "impossible to work with." However, you must hear them out, listen intently and respond with “why” to get to the bottom of their thinking and reasoning.
In smaller companies, it's easier to handle Change Agents, but as the company becomes large with more structures, it can be hard to accommodate these innovators. Therefore, as the CEO or EVP of Innovations at a large company, you must put in place a way to "protect" them; they often can not have anyone reporting to them because they are not "people" leaders. This was also a challenge at Cisco, as we became a global behemoth. Still, enough top executives with the "old culture" background understood the immense value and importance of keeping these people. One way of structuring it is to keep the Change Agent as an individual contributor but report directly to, say, the SVP of Engineering. They can never be left reporting "low" in the organization; they must be identified, recognized, and lifted "high" on the reporting structure. Many Change Agents also do crave recognition for their knowledge and talent.
At one point in Cisco's history, we fell behind one competitor for the massive routers that handle the traffic in the backbone of the Internet. Who was called in and given immense authority to drive the development of Cisco's next generation of routers for the backbone of the Internet? The Change Agents. And not many, probably less than five in total, but with large teams and funding to execute the product development. Did they succeed? A resounding yes! Cisco came back with the technology and solutions to lead the Internet's backbone. A great story about the value of Change Agents fully understood and "protected" up to and including the CEO.
Operationally within a company, a Change Agent must be allowed to work in the space between "order and chaos." This is not easy but necessary. If the goal is to drive product disruption and create new markets, many more employees must also be allowed to operate in that zone between "order and chaos." To succeed with such an operational strategy, you must hire people with the mindset and attitude to work in that space. This will challenge any leader and company structure to the maximum, but the results, if done well, will be extraordinarily impactful.
Please stay tuned for my next article on how to operate in the borderline space between "Order and Chaos."
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