IMPLEMENTATION

Implementation of a massive organizational change is the hardest part, because it requires selling the new response including the case for change and weeding out the resisters and the superfluous work. Implementation of an idea requires values, emotional energy, and the edge, or guts, to see it through to the end. Implementation is where you tackle the tough day-to-day issues. It’s one thing to decide to consolidate operations and eliminate 25% of the workforce. It’s another to tear down the corporate bureaucracy and streamline the processes so that 25% of the work disappears as well. This requires that leaders change their behaviors and teach others to do the same. If this doesn’t happen, any boosts in the bottom line will be short-lived. For Andy Grove at Intel, implementation meant shuttering plants and research centers and reassigning the company’s best people to produce the company’s products of the future microprocessors. Moore stated at one meeting, “If we’re really serious about this, half of our executive staff had better become software types in five years’ time.” After that meeting, Grove recalls looking around the room and wondering “who might remain, who might not.” In the end, half of the members of Intel’s senior leadership team were put in other jobs or left the company because they could not make the transition.30 Grove also made a personal commitment to change. If he was going to successfully lead a new microprocessor company, he would need to rebuild himself as well as the company. So he wrenched his calendar, his lifestyle, and his approach to leading the business. He went back to school. Rather than cling to the details of his declining business, he learned about microprocessors and software, and how microprocessors should be built to run software. He was open about his own weaknesses, going to internal people and saying, “I don’t know about this, help me.” He also visited software developers and asked them to teach him about their business. His calendar showed someone who was building a company rather than running an existing one. Today, Intel is one of the most successful companies in the world. The realization that its memory chip business was unsustainable led Grove to take all the actions to cast its future with microprocessors. All of these actions, from redirecting R&D to learning about new technologies to closing some production lines and opening others, built a new company that grew to $20.8 billion in revenue and $5.2 billion in net income in 1996 from a company that had about $2 billion in revenue and about $248 million in net income in 1987. Today, Intel owns 88% of the market for microprocessors. Compare that with companies such as Unisem, Mostek, and Advanced Memory Systems, which saw the same things that Intel did and felt the same pain but did not take the tough actions. Industries like microprocessors and computing are traditionally thought of as turbulent. It is in these industries that leadership, or the lack of it, is often most visible. But these days just about every industry qualifies as turbulent. Look at telecommunications, health care, retail banking, even your local travel agent. No one is safe. Times are changing, and the organizations that thrive in the future will be the ones that change with them. And in order to do this, they must have leaders who will relentlessly search for reality and demonstrate the courage to act.