What Is An Agent Of Change?

When you manage people, you are in it together.
And because you are the leader, you own all the outcomes, good and bad.
- Jack Welch

With the coming presidential election we've been hearing the word change used a lot. It's nothing new - it just seems to be ratcheted up because we're dealing with some extra hot issues this round. So..... what is this change stuff all about? Jack and Suzy Welch have an interesting perspective. In the October 20, 2008 Business Week WelchWay column, they are asked the following question by Anil Kale from Pune, India:

What kind of person is a change agent?

Jack and Suzy's answer is an interesting one. They start by saying that true change agents must have a single critical trait - power. They say most questions they get about change come from people deep within their organizations who have a burning desire to improve things and are frustrated with the organizational inertia in their way. They have good ideas, passion, dedication and hunger to be change agents but worry they cannot be.

Jack and Suzy go on saying by and large, change is still made by people with some sort of authority. It's driven by managers who have a platform to advocate for a new direction and the ability to hire, promote, and reward those who embace it. Change agents must be leaders to be effective - unfortunately - not all leaders are change agents.

Here's three other traits (besides power) that Jack and Suzy say are essential:

1. True change agents see a future no one else does, and that vision won't let them rest. They don't lead change because it "makes sense" or because change is "necessary." They lead change because they believe their organization must get ahead of an approaching "discontinuity" in order to survive and win. Typically, they've risen through the ranks because they've seen around corners before, and they're recognized for what they are, serial visionaries.

2. Change agents have the courage to bet their careers. True change agents are willing to take bold action - and accept the consequences. They know that leading change can be messy, with few clear-cut answers about how events will play out.

3. Change agents have something about them that galvanizes teams and turns people on. Perhaps the biggest misconception about change agents is that they're Lone Ranger types. In fact, the most effective change agents have a fervent core of supporters, cultivated through intensity and caring.

What's the business award? According to Jack and Suzy - for some change agents, it's the organization's survival. But for many others, it's not nearly as dire. It's growth, and all the good things that come with it: more and better jobs, new products, global expansion, not to mention their byproducts - excitement and fun.

True change agents have power, vision, bravery and support - Jack and Suzy say these people are rare - from my perspective I would agree.

*****
Take a look at Jack and Suzy's Business Week piece here. You can also listen to a podcast titled True Change Agents, found on their website The Welch Way.

Broadband Divide: People and Businesses Moving for Bandwidth?

Ars Technica has an interesting post titled FiOS tops satisfaction survey; worth moving for? The post discusses a recent issue of Consumer Reports that rated Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In the Consumer Reports article Verizon's fiber optic FiOS service was declared to be best of breed. The Ars Technica post then goes on to highlight a couple of people who's recent moves were, at least in part, due to Verizon FiOS availability. Here's a quote describing Andru Edwards' relocation:

Andru Edwards of Gear Live tells Ars that he's one of those willing to relocate for the promise of fiber optic goodness. "I moved 10 minutes north of Seattle specifically for FiOS service," he tells Ars. "We push a lot of video to the web, and Comcast's 768k upload wasn't cutting it. Gear Live now has a 30 megabit down/15 megabit up connection. While customer service is horrendous (even ignoring possible security flaws that can result in easy identity theft), the FiOS connection is a Godsend for us."

And another quote describing Ars Technica's Editor in Chief' Ken Fisher's move:

"We're in a region where everybody is getting FiOS within six months, so it didn't really influence our exact location," he said. "We've had FiOS for almost four months and there hasn't been a single outage. It's always fast, it's so reliable that when you see performance problems online you can assume it's something other than your connection. In fact, some people will be disappointed when they get it and realize that it can't make Yahoo serve to you any faster."

I'm sure Yahoo (and others) will catch up in serving these high bandwidth areas so I'm not too worried about that. This is also not new news - Realtors have recognized over the past year or so that high bandwidth (like FiOS) availability can be used as a marketing/selling point - much like a 3 car garage or bonus room!

I'm also sure we'll see the cable companies going in with competing DOCSIS 3.0 based services in areas of high bandwidth availability. My concern continues to be the under served areas and, over the past year, my definition of an under served area has expanded to places where ADSL is offered. Sure ADSL is faster than dialup (if that is all you have) but when you compare it to FiOS type bandwidths.... it crawls. And........... don't forget, the "A" in ADSL stands for "Asymmetrical" - I've written in the past about the shift to symmetrical services.

Here's a few questions I've been asking myself:

• Will people start moving out of areas where high bandwidth is not available?
• What will happen to property values in these under served areas?
• Will businesses want to move into areas where high bandwidth is not available for the business and their employees?
• What kinds of academic issues will these communities face?

The Speed Matters blog has a post titled To candidates: How will we get high speed Internet?
Sounds like a pretty good question to me.