The more efficient you get, the harder it is to change.

thoughtful use of slack instead of the mindless obsession with elimination of all slack in the interests of efficiency.

Part One Slack

instead of eight tiles and one open space, we have a game with nine tiles and no open space.

Slack := the degree of freedom required to effect change

1 Madmen in the Halls

A dangerous corporate delusion: the idea that organizations are effective only to the extent that all their workers are totally and eternally busy.

Maybe middle management exists for some reason above and beyond filling the space between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy.

It is the middle of the organization where reinvention takes place.

Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm.

2 Busyness

Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a group, rather laid-back.

This highly efficient person doesn’t get cracking right away on anything new that comes up, because this highly efficient person is too busy.

It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better.

That’s what happens when you drive out slack.

3 The Myth of Fungible Resource

fun-gi-ble adj (especially of goods) being of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind.

you can see how appealing it is to assume that people are fungible.

If a Sylvia can be treated as goods, capable of being divided up and “exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part ” with other Sylvia-like workers, then assigning her 43 percent to one department and 57 percent to another makes perfect sense. If she’s not a fungible resource, this makes no sense at all,

The assumption of fungible humans has come into its own in that mainstay of organizational theory called matrix management

Matrix management doesn’t make a huge amount of sense … until you hit upon the happy notion of treating Lamar as a totally fungible resource.

we see Lamar involved on three different projects. Obviously, none of his bosses on the vertical can assemble a complete picture of how well Lamar is doing.

ways to split Lamar has to do with the cost he incurs in switching tasks.

There are certain kinds of work that require immersion into the task before progress can begin.

jobs like writing, research, analysis, invention, and programming.

immersion time is required to overcome a kind of mental inertia. Most of us are reluctant to begin on such a task unless we have a large block of time set aside.

The waste associated with time-sharing between two tasks is the sum of time lost to the mechanics of the switch plus rework required upon restart plus immersion time plus frustration cost. You pay the penalty each time you switch.

Moving a person who had been assigned to a single job to work part-time on a second exposes you to a loss of at least six hours per week of that person’s time.

For knowledge workers, though, the minimum penalty is 15 percent.

One of the study’s published reports was “Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace,” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Software Engineerin (London: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1985).

4 When “Hurry Up” Really Means “Slow Down”

From my visits and from anecdotal evidence collected from seminar attendees and colleagues, I conclude that a third to a half of the organizations represented are overimproved to some extent. That is, their people are pathologically busy, frantic, and at least a little bit fearful.

The survival tactic that Harry and others like him hit upon when their buffers begin to empty is to slow down. He slows down only enough to keep his supply of waiting work stable. If he slowed down more than that, he would appear to be a bottleneck, which would focus management on his work rate.

Harry is now busy 100 percent of the time, has a healthy buffer of work waiting for him, and is not a bottleneck. This is a recipe for job security;

5 Managing Eve

the great heroic figure of the story is Eve. She is everything that I respect in a person: irrepressibly curious, courageous, undaunted by authority.

She could not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit of this tree was not food at all, but understanding.

you’ve got one or more Eves working for you.

These are the people who form the heart and soul of effective organizations.

You can’t tell Eve to do something because you are the boss and you say it has to be done.

you can’t structure her work in a way that gives her no opportunity for growth.

Growth is essential to Eve, as essential as her paycheck.

manage a small not-for-profit organization where most of the work was done by volunteers.

almost no way to control the work that these people did. If you looked over their shoulders enough or imposed standards that were different from their own, they would shrug and walk away

Control, as they see it, is their payment for working.

That doesn’t mean you can’t control the quality of their product, only that you can’t seem to be controlling it.

The difference between for-profit and volunteer organizations is that in the for-profit world people do get paid and so they are willing to give up some control to the boss, to accept at least some direction. But they don’t give up all control. You couldn’t pay them enough for that.

80 percent of a manager’s time might reasonably be spent with his/her workers. However, it seemed a shame to me that these managers thought of that time as meetings; I’d rather they were spending their time one-on-one with their people, or in get-togethers that were so ad hoc as to belie the description “meeting.

The managers’ time is spent in meeting with clients, project stakeholders, and other external entities, all the various parties to the work who are not direct reports. And then they are shuttling what they learn from these partner organizations down to the people below them on the org chart.

The premise here is that the hierarchy lines on the chart are also the only communication conduit. Information can flow only along the lines. But this is a disaster. The hierarchy lines are paths of authority.

Communication in healthy companies takes place in the white space.

When communication happens only over the hierarchy lines, that’s a priori evidence that the managers are trying to hold on to all control. This is not only inefficient but an insult to the people underneath. An Eve would never work for such a manager.

the paradox of managing Eve: In order to keep control, you have to give it up. You have to use your authority so sparingly that no one notices that it’s being used.

You have to create a real sense that control is not completely centralized in your hands, but spread generously over the whole of your organization.

6 Business Instead of Busyness

Sensibly designed-in slack includes all of the following:

• Flexibility, a capacity for ongoing organizational redesign
• Better people retention
• A capacity to invest

Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.

core capability that a knowledge worker brings to the task is domain knowledge

The more important that domain knowledge is, the less fungible the people are.

Assume that Orin is about to leave.

Let’s say the replacement’s name is Oliver. Oliver arrives the day after Orin departs.

On some day in the future, you will conclude that Oliver has learned enough to be essentially as useful as Orin was.

How long this takes is a function of how unique your domain is, and how different it is from the last place that Oliver worked.

Human Capital = Time to get up to speed × (Salary + Overhead) × 50%

Thus, if it takes him six months to get up to speed, then your investment in his domain knowledge is 50 percent of that, or three times his total monthly cost.

when Orin left, your capital loss was, similarly, three person-months.

Aggregate Human Capital and Capital Drain

Example:

• Knowledge-worker staff 30 people
• Average ramp-up time 6 months
• Average cost per person-month (plus overhead) $7,500
• Aggregate human capital (30 × 6 × $7,500 × 50%) = $675,000

Human Capital Drain = LOSS(Orin) × % staff turnover per month

On projects, the turnover calculus works somewhat differently. First of all, the extent of required domain knowledge is larger, since there are two important domains to master: the business area being impacted by the project, and the project itself

a common feature of exit interviews is a sense that the departing person felt used.

The more successful a company is in extracting every bit of capacity from its workers, the more it exposes itself to turnover and attendant human capital loss.

when people stay on, they are often motivated by the lure of personal growth. The organization’s agility, its healthy capability to take on change, is an important factor in supplying opportunities for such growth to the individual.

Managers who inspire extraordinary loyalty from their people tend to be highly charismatic, humorous, good-looking, and tall. So, by all means, strive to be those things. If you don’t feel able to improve any of those factors very much, you might consider holding on to your people by designing a little slack into their lives.

It makes a lot of sense to invest in someone else when you have already saturated or nearly saturated your market. This is something that G.E. and Disney, to take two very successful examples, do all the time.

I am much more concerned, though, when smaller companies invest outside their own product areas.

I see this as bankruptcy of inventiveness.

Their willingness to spend this found capital outside their own backyard is a signal that they have no real vision, no idea of how to grow in the arena that they know best.

A penny saved is not a penny earned. At least not all pennies saved.

Because the R&D expenditure is investment, trimming it may succeed only in moving profit from next year’s bottom line to this year’s.

Part Two Lost, but Making Good Time

Minimize time OR Minimize cost

You have to pick one or the other.

organizational stress looks like nothing more than a sign of deficient slack.

7 The Cost of Pressure

THE HURRY UP ORGANIZATION is under constant pressure.

Meet a deadline and everybody on the team gets 5,000 Advantage Miles, redeemable for travel and other goodies. Yawn. It would be different if the prize were a few million bucks to be divided up among the six people who brought the project home ahead of schedule.

Empty honors like Employee of the Month or Team of the Month?

An increasingly common bit of our organizational folklore holds that pressure improves performance and that maximum performance can occur only in the presence of maximum pressure.

Lister’s Law: “People under time pressure don’t think faster.” -- Tim Lister

Lister’s astounding fact tells us that the galley slave model is entirely wrong for knowledge workers. Since they can’t alter the rate of mental discriminations (basic elements of knowledge work) per second, their potential to respond to pressure is severely limited.

All they can do is

• Eliminate wasted time
• Defer tasks that are not on the critical path
• Stay late

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don’t waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them

A more realistic model of how pressure impacts performance is, I believe, shown in the graph below.

Here we see that pressure has a fairly limited capacity to reduce delivery time, maybe 10 or 15 percent at the most.

In Region I, workers are responding to increased pressure by trimming any remaining waste, by concentrating on the critical path, and by staying late.

In Region II, workers are getting tired, feeling pressure from home, and starting to put in a little “undertime” (taking the kid to the dentist during work hours, since the company owes them so much time anyway).

In Region III, workers are polishing up their résumés and beginning to look for work elsewhere.

The long-term effect of too much pressure is demotivation, burnout, and loss of key people.

8 Aggressive Schedules

projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes.

A bad schedule is one that sets a date that is subsequently missed. That’s it.

The marketing manager, for example, who throws a tantrum to force a new project to commit to the one-year schedule has to accept responsibility when the project actually takes two.

Forcing a project onto an unrealistic schedule is dangerous for the company and has to be made dangerous as well for those who impose the schedule.

9 Overtime

Sprinting can make perfectly good sense in the right circumstances.

When you’ve all been through it together, and shared an important success, there is something profoundly changed about the culture of the organization. The energy is still there after the workathon weekend is long past.

The manager who makes effective use of the occasional sprint needs impeccable timing, a flawless sense of what can and can’t be accomplished over a short period

And enough raw leadership talent to pull the whole affair together.

Finally, such a manager also needs to have a huge reserve of trust to dip into, the clear sense shared by all that the call for extraordinary effort is truly extraordinary, not likely to be wasted and not likely to become a regular fixture.

Sprinting at the end of a marathon makes good sense, but sprinting through the whole twenty-six-mile race makes no sense at all.

The sprint-gasp-sprint-gasp marathon would probably take you twice as long to complete as a more normally run twenty-six miles.

you may get a full night’s sleep every night. It’s your personal life that pays the price for the extra time given to the company.

Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique.

There are four reasons why overtime hurts enough to offset the effect of the added hours.

1. Reduced quality
2. Personnel burnout
3. Increased turnover of staff
4. Ineffective use of time during normal hours

Because most companies don’t capitalize their investment in people, they fail to note the dollar cost of their lost human capital due to turnover.

When we measure human capital carefully and use the measurements to give a cash quantification to personnel turnover, it often becomes the second or third largest cost category.

In Soul of a New Machine, the retrospective of Data General’s overtime-intensive Eagle Project, the author, Tracy Kidder, reports that every single member of the Eagle team was gone within a month of the end of the project.

Even those who stayed on till the end (and many didn’t) were unwilling to continue working for the kind of company that had so used them.

I’m much more impressed with a manager who never breaks a sweat, who never looks busy at all.

Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn’t be doing.

When managers are overworked, they’re doing something other than management; the more they allow themselves to be overworked, the less real management gets done.

10 A Little Sleight of Hand in the Accounting Department

A worker who has put in sixty hours in a given week now goes through a little ceremony at the end of that week, filling out some sort of a time record that reports Total Hours Worked as forty.

Reported productivity can apparently be inflated by goading workers into working overtime; managers who extract more overtime from their workers look like more effective managers.

When people put in lots of overtime over an extended period of time, their net effectiveness is not just decreased during the extra hours; they begin to limp during the main body of the workday as well, due to built-up fatigue and reduced motivation.

11 Power Sweeper

Before word processors, managers had to be given secretaries to type their letters,

Today those same managers do their own typing, all made possible by that laborsaving device the word processor.

The word processor is a laborsaving device but it has also served a face-saving role, enabling us to transfer a class of what was previously considered clerical work up to higher-paid workers.

Use of face-saving schemes to push clerical work upward (usually to managers or to knowledge workers) has given us organizations that are critically starved of low-level support.

When a low-level employee off-loads someone who makes six or eight times as much, the organization is a big winner.

12 The Second Law of Bad Management

First Law of Bad Management: If something isn’t working, do more of it.

Second Law of Bad Management: Put yourself in as your own utility infielder.

I have known managers who took on as many as three full jobs reporting to their own management position.

the lore tells us, management is often in the way.

The germ of truth is this: Managers don’t perform any of the services or make any of the products that our customers pay for. It’s the people who report to them that do this work.

Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.

Management is all nuance.

Management is hard because the skills are inherently difficult to master. Your mastery of them will affect your organization more than anything going on under you.

13 Culture of Fear

“Laughter, for a few minutes, distracts the villein [common person] from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is the fear of God. This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world.” -- In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

“What would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted and most loving of the divine gifts?”

Among the characteristics of the Culture of Fear organization are these:

1. It is not safe to say certain things
2. In fact, being right in your doubts proves that you must be the reason that the fondest wishes of those above you did not come true.
3. Goals are set so aggressively that there is virtually no chance of achieving them.
4. Power is allowed to trump common sense.
5. Anyone can be abused and abased for a failure to knuckle under.
6. The people who are fired are, on average, more competent than the people who aren’t.
7. The surviving managers are a particularly angry lot. Everyone is terrified of crossing them.

14 Litigation

1. Litigation can be an effective way to deflect blame. A failure that cannot be blamed on someone outside the organization must be accepted within the organization.
2. Litigation can be a consequence of an intrinsically flawed contract.

In a healthy organization, a certain amount of failure is okay.

At Microsoft, for example, there has long been an almost official policy of “sink, then swim.” People are loaded down with so much responsibility that they sink (fail). Then they have a chance to rest up, to analyze and modify their own performance. Finally, they are loaded again with a comparable amount of responsibility, but this time they succeed. If they don’t sink the first time, that just shows they weren’t challenged enough.

Healthy companies know that they have to allow people to fail without assessing blame.

They have to do that or else no one will take on anything that’s not a sure bet.

Nobody ever wins a litigation. Everybody always loses. To make matters worse, litigation is such a crapshoot that the relatively innocent party may end up losing worse than the relatively guilty party.

The chemistry of Culture of Fear organizations seems to call for a fixed minimum amount of blame. In some companies, this minimum may even be written into policy.

for example, G.E.’s policy that all managers be evaluated every year and the bottom 10 percent be fired.

The strategy I would urge upon you is what the author Verna Allee calls the principle of fair exchange.1 Simply stated, this principle requires you to arrive at an agreement that would be equally acceptable to you from either side.

Someone in authority has trumpeted, “Don’t tell me it can’t be done by April. I am the vice president!” And so authority is used to trump reality … briefly.

Those lower down on the totem pole suppress their reservations and try to put on a good face, for a while at least.

15 Process Obsession

STANDARDS are a very good thing.

Consider: Your new Lucent telephone uses the exact same modular connector (RJ-11 in the United States) to plug into the line jack as your older Panasonic phone used.

The standards we depend on to give us choice in our lives are all product standards. Almost without exception, they are used to constrain the interface characteristic of a product, not the way that product is built.

Frederick Winslow Taylor. His 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management, set out to do for the human aspect of factory work what the principle of interchangeable parts had done for rifles half a century earlier.

Taylorism called for rigorous standardization of manual factory activity.

I shall argue below that it is particularly ill suited to knowledge work,

Volvo, which during the 1980s hit upon a team-based vehicle assembly scheme that would have given Taylor fits.

Post cereal factory in Jones-boro, Arkansas. Here, too, a factory that could be run in strict Taylor methodology is run in an entirely different way.

There is human capital in factory workers too, an ever-increasing amount; preservation of this factory human capital may well require us to rethink the benefits of Taylorism even in the domain for which it was intended.

Knowledge work is a domain for which Taylorism was never intended.

Knowledge work is just not very like factory work. There is no assembly line and there never will be, there aren’t many fixed rules, values are more subjective, measurements more dubious, judgment is all-important.

In a study of workers at Bell Telephone Laboratories, interviewers asked engineers in one division to identify stars among their peers.

Surprisingly, the stars approached their work in ways that were not very different from the way their peers did.

But there were marked differences in how they managed their networks of connections, liaisons to fellow workers whose cooperation was required to get anything done.

Each time you add automation, you choose some particularly mechanical component of the work

When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder.

the paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier. After all, it was the easy stuff that got absorbed into the machine, so what’s left is, almost by definition, fuzzier, less mechanical, and more complex.

Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure.

It tries to avoid all chance of failure by having key decisions made by a guru class (those who set the standards) and carried out mechanically by the regular folk.

16 Quality

My problem with the Quality Movement is not that it costs too much or that it saps too much energy out of our organizations. My problem is that it is too little service and too much lip service.

When there is neither time nor staff to cope with work that runs more slowly than expected, then the cost of lateness is paid out of quality.

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.

Real quality is far more a matter of what it does for you and how it changes you than whether it is perfectly free of flaws.

That browser, even though it crashes maddeningly often, should be considered a quality

Its quality is most of all a function of its usefulness.

a real Quality Program should spend one-ninth or less of its resources on defect prevention and removal, and the rest on assuring product uniqueness, usefulness, market impact, change of customer work modes, etc.

Suppose you were to read in the newspaper that your country’s brand-new air traffic control system was to be developed on a “highly aggressive” schedule.

Quality takes time. Even quality in the “defects only” sense takes time.

I’d much prefer the opposite, in which the Quality Assurance organization did its work only at the beginning of the project, assuring reasonableness of schedule and work procedures, and then disappeared for the rest.

If you buy the notion that quality takes time, then it won’t come as any surprise to you that there is an inverse relationship between quality and quantity: The higher the quality, the lower the quantity

Whatever it is that your organization makes, make less of it.

This unfortunate quality/quantity dynamic was at work at Apple Computer under Michael Spindler. The company proliferated products as fast as it could. The consumer was confronted by a baffling array of model numbers and variants.

When Steve Jobs arrived back on the scene, he turned the dynamic around and focused all available resources on a much-reduced iMac product set.

17 Efficient and/or Effective

The overstressed organization is so busy making itself efficient that it has clean forgotten how to be effective. The two are not at all the same.

You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste.

And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.

Yogi Berra’s words, “We’re lost, but we’re making good time.”

Directing an entire organization is hard. Seeming to direct it, on the other hand, is easy. All you have to do is note which way the drift is moving and instruct the organization to go that way.

Because modern market economics are in such flux, companies have to be aggressive risk-takers to succeed. But the efficiency imperative has the direct result of making them risk-averse.

18 Management by Objectives

Management by objectives is a fad from the 1950s, now largely discredited. But it hasn’t gone away.

MBO is always based on stasis, the organization’s present steady state. MBO sends the message “Do everything the same as last year, only this year do more of X.”

MBO’s objectives are always simplistic approximations. The total meaningful contribution of the few hundred (or few thousand) employees that constitute a typical department is far too complex to quantify.

The rub here is that something else always changes. For example, a department managed to the objective of increased throughput may drive up its personnel turnover. The net effect of worsened turnover may more than offset the effect of increased throughput.

W. Edwards Deming, famous for his “Fourteen Points” leading to organizational transformation.

MBO, Deming writes, provides artificial, extrinsic motivators

So a salesperson, for example, driven by the extrinsic motivator of selling to a quota, will set aside the intrinsic motivator to assure customer satisfaction.

Part Three Change and Growth

You can’t grow if you can’t change at all.

Part Three turns to the subject of making organizational change—and hence growth—possible.

This ambitious task involves more than simply removing barriers to change. It also requires vision, leadership, timing, and a lot more. Slack is the lubricant that makes all these things possible.

Vision and leadership, in particular, depend on degrees of freedom made available to the potential visionary or leader.

19 Vision

The most common sign of absent vision was the sense of not knowing “who we are.”

It’s nontrivial for a company and everyone in it to know “who we are.” A little bit easier, however, is to know “who we aren’t.”

Without vision, a company can react, but it can’t pro-act.

Without vision, flexibility is just an abstraction. It is a measure of what we could do if we ever got the gumption to try it (but we haven’t and we won’t).

The successful visionary statement will typically have the following characteristics:

1. There has to be an element of present truth to the assertion.

The challenge “Run a four-minute mile because that’s what we are all about ” would not inspire most of us because we wouldn’t see the present truth of the “what we’re all about” part.

2. There is always an element of proposed future truth in the statement.

Though it masquerades as “what we are all about, ” it is at least partly urging us toward “what we could be all about.”

3. When the statement walks perfectly between what is and what could be, and the could-be part is wonderful but not impossible, acceptance by those listening is almost assured.

People want to sign on. They want to be enrolled.

The emergence of a leader is a source of satisfaction and completion for all.

The fact that people want to be led is what makes leadership possible at all.

20 Leadership and “Leadership”

There’s LEADERSHIP, and then there’s “leadership.” The first conveys vision, engenders confidence, and encourages striving toward common goals. The other doesn’t.

Leadership is the ability to enroll other people in your agenda.

Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers.

Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power.

In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.

21 Dilbert Reconsidered

The geeky guy with the pointed-up necktie is no hero. Dilbert is a jerk.

He keeps his head down, doesn’t object to even the most absurd of corporate absurdities, never makes waves, never puts his job on the line. It’s Dilbert and his ilk who make stupid management possible.

“Yes, but are you like Dilbert?” Are you keeping your head down? Are you accepting senseless direction when it’s offered? Are you letting the bureaucracy dominate at the expense of the real goals? If so, I’d like to tell that person, then you’re part of the problem.

when I listen to executives wax loquacious on the importance of leadership, I’m often impressed that the real message they’re conveying has more to do with followership than leadership. They’re trying to instill an ethic of followership in the organization. The leader, as they see it, is an elite,

The most exciting companies I know have no ethic of followership at all. By that I mean that people sometimes follow, but they are not innate followers. In such companies, leadership is everybody’s business, and following someone who’s got the inspiration of the moment is also everybody’s business. Leadership is a rotating function.

22 Fear and Safety

In a successful organizational "change” means proactive change, not reactive change.

Since people define themselves—in part at least—by what they do professionally, changing what they do gets deep into the matter of personal definition. This is scary stuff.

In an unsafe environment, people are not likely to let themselves be thrust into a position of inexperience.

They will resist the change, and all your urging won’t shake them from their determination to have no part of it.

To make an organization change-receptive, you need to rout all of these various kinds of disrespect from the culture.

Replace them with a clearly felt sense that people at all levels are to be honored for the struggle they’ve been willing to take on.

The person who fails is a hero, the backbone of the change effort. Failure gains that person more respect, not less.

23 Trust and Trustworthiness

Without this gaining of trust, there is no leader, and no real turnaround.

You gain trust by demonstrating trustworthiness.

The only path to success is to acquire not-yet-deserved trust.

The people who do it best tend to be articulate, colorful, attractive, wry

Those are innate characteristics: Either you’ve got them or you haven’t.

They acquire trust by giving trust.

The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness.

But not too much in advance.

Setting people up for failure doesn’t make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you’re risk-averse, you won’t do it. And that’s a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure.

24 Timing of Change

Doing the “right” thing at the wrong time is worse than taking no action at all.

To overcome resistance to change, you need

1. a set of sensible approaches to change introduction
2. a culture that is not change-phobic.
3. proper timing.

The Goliath-like resistance to change is not exactly logical; it’s much more likely to be emotional.

The period of growth is one in which people are naturally less change-resistant. It is therefore the optimal time to introduce any change.

25 What Middle Management Is There For