Stacking the Deck. Pottruck David S.

combined to provide an unprecedented space for experimentation and risk-taking. I made my first stabs at leading breakthrough change there, and I discovered a lot of ways I would lead differently in the future.

      Since those early days, I have served on the boards of many companies – from companies in their earliest stages, to young public companies, to Fortune 50 corporations. I have seen them succeed, and I have seen them stumble and fail. I've been part of two start-ups that invested over $150 million in getting off the ground. One failed completely and the other is blossoming even as I write this. I've been on the board of Intel since 1998, and I've seen their successes and the challenges they've faced.

      I have been on just about every side of change, big or small. I've seen and made many mistakes, sometimes of judgment and sometimes of process. Somewhere there may be a file of mistakes labeled, “What was Dave thinking?” The redeeming fact is I usually didn't make the same mistake twice. As a self-proclaimed change junkie, I kept at it, trying new ideas and tactics, and learning; over time, I started to succeed more and more.

      Change and Learning Are Continuous

      Breakthrough change never, ever stops while the world progresses. Competition, the marketplace, and technological advances make it necessary to keep growing and changing. In my own career, I experienced firsthand what happens when you stop leading bold change. I weathered a number of storms during my two decades at Charles Schwab, but the burst of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s caught me by surprise. Suddenly, my job as Schwab's CEO became entirely about finding new ways to downsize, new places to cut. I did what I had to do: I downsized a 25,000-person company by 10,000 people. But I was slow and uncertain, and had trouble coping with this new reality of my job. I was emotionally paralyzed by the prospect of waking up every day and thinking about the men and women – people I knew well and who had been instrumental in making the company successful – whose jobs would be eliminated. And it was my job to direct these firings, by the thousands.

      I think the Schwab board could tell that my heart was not in it. And they could certainly tell that I had stopped scanning the horizon for breakthrough transformative change. I left the company in 2004 due to a combination of my own inability to continue innovating and my board's shrunken patience. Being fired was devastating, and is still painful to this day. Much as I wish I had responded to the downturn differently, Schwab needed more than I was able to deliver. I had stopped leading change, and instead I became a change that someone else needed to make.

      I tell this story to make it very clear that the strategies and plans described in Stacking the Deck are not easy for me, or for anyone, to implement. Overcoming emotion (your own and others'), convincing people to follow you, maintaining an extraordinary level of tenacity and resilience, conceptualizing change, and realizing it successfully: these are all tremendously difficult. Every leader I interviewed emphasized the inherent difficulty of breakthrough change. Over and over, they told of struggles that tested people to their very core and how they persevered through grit and determination.

      This book is not intended to convince you to make breakthrough changes. The world will convince you to do that! Instead, it is designed to help you make those necessary changes as effectively as possible.

      Leading Breakthrough Change Is Not for the Faint of Heart

      A fundamental truth lies at the core of introducing any large-scale change: leading change requires leading people. Any transformation you propose, small or large, will ultimately not succeed if you don't have the leadership skills to drive the process forward. Success never comes from one person's efforts; transformative change is a team sport. There is, therefore, an absolute requirement for exceptional leadership skills, a proven process, and a team capable of getting the job done. As a consequence, leadership and communication are constant threads throughout the Stacking the Deck process and throughout this book. In fact, I encourage you to be sure you have truly absorbed the information and guidance provided in the chapter on leadership communication (Chapter 11) before you begin to implement the steps. The time you spend on the foundational steps of preparing, planning, and communicating will definitely reap benefits.

      Today's business world will always demand that you do it faster, spend less money, and still get exceptional results. The ongoing pressure to take shortcuts is likely to intensify in years to come. Sometimes you may have no choice but to compress the effort and consider skipping something – in fact, some changes do not require every step in the process. However, it's relatively easy to decide to cut corners when you're thinking abstractly; it's more difficult when you can actually see which elements you are cutting out and what they specifically contribute to ensuring success. Since the Stacking the Deck process concretely shows you all the steps of a change initiative from inception to completion, you can make needed cuts with an understanding of exactly what you are removing – and what the consequences will likely be. Each of the nine steps will guide you along the way to breakthrough change.

      But make no mistake: leading breakthrough change is definitely not for the faint of heart. In fact, I found it rather heartening that time and again, the people I interviewed – leaders across all fields in businesses around the world – reinforced just how much more difficult leading breakthrough change is than anyone anticipates.

      More than money, time, or resources, it's your ability to lead people, your tenacity, and your grit that will determine your ultimate success or failure. Before communicating about the change, be sure you fully understand what the change represents to all of the groups who will be involved. If you remain open to possibilities, eager for constant challenges, and lucky enough to find mentors, your path will be easier. Most important, understand that inspirational leadership communication is critical to each step along the way, every single day.

      Part OneThe Stacking the Deck Process

      Breakthrough change is inherently unpredictable, making failures inevitable and flexibility an asset. You may find yourself needing to lead change in an environment that is indifferent or even fundamentally hostile to the new. How can you achieve breakthrough change more effectively and efficiently in such an atmosphere?

       Stacking the Deck distills the techniques and processes I have learned through direct experience and hindsight into nine logical and sequential steps, described in Part. These chapters provide practical strategies and real-life stories that illustrate the actions leaders must take when implementing breakthrough change. In reading about the ways top leaders across the business world have navigated change, you can learn from their experiences before you are faced with challenges of your own. Understanding and using these steps will enable you to derive the full benefit of many decades of experience in change leadership – my own and that of other leaders – without needing to spend years acquiring that experience yourself.

      As you use the Stacking the Deck process and revisit its steps for each change you tackle, you will find yourself capable of leading breakthrough change faster and more effectively than ever before.

      Chapter 1

      Step One: Establishing the Need to Change and a Sense of Urgency

      Change has always been part of the DNA of business, but the accelerated pace of technological innovation means that leaders have less time than ever to show a success, recover from a downturn, or make a change stick. There is no fallow period anymore, no time for business as usual, and no patience. If you do not innovate, adapt, and persevere, you will be swallowed up by the hundreds – or thousands – of other people who do what you do and spend all their waking hours thinking of ways to do it better. You have to be nimble and look ahead. Being able to anticipate massive change, like embedding technology to improve your product or service, coming up with a new way to distribute your product, or dealing with a new service's sudden popularity, means that you spend less time knocked on your back, trying to catch your breath.

      But no matter how well leaders understand the need for change, the challenges they must face in leading breakthrough change will be enormous. We can't deny that change is part of life. Yet in life and in business, some people embrace change and others actively avoid it. While “change” is theoretically a neutral word, in reality change represents the unknown, and people – some of whom you must lead – almost always find the unknown scary. As Terry Pearce,