Foreword

WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY TWENTIES, the US Navy taught me how to fly airplanes. It took considerable study and work, as well as great coaches. Under their direction it was not long before my fellow rookie pilots and I were mastering takeoffs, landings, formation flying, and all the complex steps in between. Then they presented the next challenge: landing on aircraft carriers.

If you have never tried to do this, I’ll tell you what an aircraft carrier looks like from 20,000 feet: pretty darn small. After a couple weeks of intense practice and feedback from our coaches, the moment of truth arrived: it was time to actually land on an aircraft carrier. That meant there was no room for error. Your only option was to bring the plane down exactly right.

Certainly, we trained hard for that moment. But in all honesty, no amount of practice on a runway can prepare you for landing on an aircraft carrier at sea. You have to account for shifting winds and the fact that the ship is rocking in the water, not to mention the tiny landing strip you’re targeting. If you are planning to pull this off, you need to adapt and react—very, very quickly.

As I meet with the leaders of the many businesses, government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and educational institutions that the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is privileged to serve around the world, it strikes me that they are trying to do something quite similar to—and ultimately far more difficult than—landing on an aircraft carrier. They are trying to guide their organizations through an era of complexity and change that is unfolding at unprecedented speed, and finding the right place to land takes all the vision, skill, and courage they can muster. Like US Navy pilots soaring high above the ocean, they have no room for error. These executives need to get it exactly right. Their employees, clients, and communities are counting on that.

Yet all too often, disaster strikes.

Research shows that 50 to 70 percent of organizational change initiatives fail, wasting untold sums of talent, money, productivity, and opportunity. That is the story of the doomed DaimlerChrysler and AOL–Time Warner mergers and the disintegration of Polaroid. Even companies with very impressive track records, like Procter & Gamble and Walmart, have had to exit some countries where their usual recipe for success did not work.

Over the years in executive leadership roles with the US Navy, the State University of New York, and the Center for Creative Leadership, I have attempted to lead through the kinds of complexity that Bill Pasmore writes about in this book, and his guidance is right on the mark. Change initiatives fail, fundamentally, because leaders lack sufficient focus and a comprehensive plan. And that’s usually because we are too consumed with the crisis of the day to take the necessary time to pause and reflect on the broader, deeper factors that will really determine longer-term results. As we say at CCL, leaders need to slow down to speed up.

And as with US Navy pilots, they need a great coach who can show them how to do that. Bill is that coach, and in this book he generously distills the remarkable wisdom he has gained over 40 years of researching, teaching, and consulting on change. For the better part of a decade, Bill has been a colleague of mine at CCL, where he has assisted numerous clients globally—many of them in the Fortune 500—with successfully navigating the complexities of change.

His opening advice for clients essentially boils down to this: check your ego at the door. The fact is that almost no one has done a great job of figuring out the intricacies of leading through continuous change, in large part because there’s not a predictable formula for it. Every change initiative demands a customized approach that must first be created and then constantly adjusted as conditions evolve.

Bill cannot offer the Easy Button that the iconic Staples advertising campaign made popular, but in this book he does deliver an invaluable four-step framework for leading change. His emphasis on Discovering, Deciding, Doing, and Discerning offers a superb starting point for mapping out change initiatives in organizations of every size and type in any sector.

As a member of several corporate boards, I have learned the importance of stepping back and looking at the larger reality of what’s happening in a business environment, which makes it possible to help leaders see things that they might ordinarily miss because they are too focused on narrow objectives. The process Bill describes equips every leader to take the stance of a board member, of someone who cares deeply about the success of the organization and is thus willing to challenge conventional thinking in search of bolder and smarter alternatives.

While leading change is the kind of topic that can easily elicit theoretical responses, Bill remains eminently practical, breaking the extremely challenging process of change into manageable increments that make the seemingly impossible finally approachable. And that is a welcome gift because the sooner business leaders understand and experiment with the principles of leading change, the sooner they can build better, more sustainable businesses for the benefit of everyone. Bill’s trenchant insights, applied by the governments, NGOs, and educational institutions that are just as critical to the health of society, will help us build a better world, too.

John R. Ryan

President and CEO

Center for Creative Leadership

March 2015