This multi-part series will look into the application of change management principles to the development of a demand gen or marketing operations center model.
In 1965, Gene Amdahl was heading up IBM’s ACS Lab, where he helped develop the venerable IBM System/360 family of mainframe computers. By 1970, IBM was rejecting Amdahl’s development ideas, so he left to found his own company, and developed the Amdahl 470/V6, a less expensive, faster and more reliable plug-compatible replacement for the IBM System 370. By 1979, Amdahl had sold over $1 Billion (over $3 Billion in today’s dollar) worth of his mainframe computers, making it one of the world’s largest mainframe companies. Today, if you key amdahl.com into your browser, you will wind up on fujitsu.com.
I decided to surprise my wife for her 40th birthday and take her to Mexico. Her birthday is in March – right around spring break time – so I wanted a place where we wouldn’t be overrun by drunken partygoers at all hours of the night. So I went to the travel agent around the corner, who suggested the Royal Hideaway in Playacar, about an hour south of Cancun. It was an excellent suggestion. For her 50th birthday, I had to book my vacation online. In a single decade, not only that particular travel agent, but the entire industry had disappeared, victims of game-changing technology, Web 2.0.
In organizational change management parlance, what I have just constructed for you is called a “burning platform.” Similar terms are inflection point and discontinuity. The origins of the term date back to the Piper Alpha drilling platform in the North Sea, which exploded and killed 167 of the 229 crew members aboard in 1988. Every crew member was faced with a terrible decision; do I jump more than 100 feet into the frigid North Atlantic, where certain hypothermia and drowning await, or do I stay and burn? Near-certain death or certain death? Every survivor jumped.
The “burning platform” is the most often-used answer to the question “why change?”
This is the most important question you will need to answer if you want to successfully change your organization from the inside out.
Change is inevitable, right? The only constant is change. Those are great clichés with an air of authority – we innately understand the underlying truth, but we just as strongly resist. To quote the Beatles’ John Lennon, “You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world.” Everybody wants to change the world – nobody wants to change themselves. Don’t believe me?
On this past June 9th, a NY1-Marist poll of New York’s 9th Congressional District found that 56% of its registered voters did not think Anthony Weiner should resign from Congress, with a full 71% of his constituency having no issue at all with his “professional judgment.” It is not much of a leap to infer that, given no other choice, the 9th District constituency prefers to keep what they have rather than chance the unknown. It is a classic example of the burning platform. Jump or die?
In the case of the Piper Alpha, we have hindsight on our side, but you will not have that luxury if you want to successfully manage organizational change.
Stay tuned. In the next installation of {Demand Gen Brief} I will go into more detail on change management theory.
