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“Avoiding Failure” – Pioneering the Change Enablement Movement
 You know
what it’s like when “corporate” tells you to do the impossible
and you have no earthly idea of how you’re going to get it done? This is
the unenviable position I faced with Basic Vegetable – a spin-off vegetable
manufacturing plant attempting to merge with an extremely incompatible subsidiary
of Kraft Foods.
These two orphaned companies were forced into an unhappy merger while customers
struggled to sort out basic things such as two separate invoices for a single
shipment. In the manufacturing world, this is an absolute nightmare. Upper management
(the sole group with a vested interest in the success of this merger) was enthusiastic
about it while the hard-working line employees at both Basic Vegetable and Kraft
were resentful of being forced to join a competitor. The walls between these people
were up and it was our difficult job to keep these companies alive and integrate
them -- through technology.
One of the more compelling problems facing the client was: The CEO had no idea
what was going on financially and was “always surprised” every time
he took a look at the numbers for the company. Faith in the future of this joined
company was crumbling from the top down and their largest customer, Lipton, was
threatening to choose another vendor if the company didn’t get their customer
service up to speed.
Having been through a painful merger, I had some major takeaways – the most
significant being: if there’s an immediate goal to focus on, you’ll
become so occupied with the goal, you won’t have time to be adversarial.
Basic Vegetable needed that mechanism to enable its transformation and eventually,
it would come in the form of a manufacturing systems implementation.
We presented a plan to the CEO for making the merged business profitable and he
politely declined our services. Six months later, the phone rang again and we
found even more reasons why a systems implementation would be the right solution.
The facilitation session went swimmingly. Once again, they politely declined.
Three months later, the phone rang a third time. They were about to sign a lengthy
software contract for tools that not only were a horrible fit for the manufacturing
business but also lacked so much functionality that implementing them could very
well destroy the entire business.
The CFO was scared. We offered to come out for a three-day assessment of how well
the software would fit into their business. In two days, we came up with a list
of 40 reasons why this solution would fail. For the CEO of a vegetable manufacturing
business in Central California, the “sticker shock” of our $2.5M proposal
initially concerned him. He said it was too expensive. But “too expensive”
in comparison to what? Too expensive in comparison with losing your biggest customer?
Too expensive in comparison with laying off half your workforce? Too expensive
in comparison with destroying the company?
Finally, we had arrived at yes. They received a real technology solution, with
the right team, at a fair price. My team gained manufacturing experience with
transferable value to other clients and everybody left the table with a "win."
They believed that the solution would work, and the implementation was the means
to bring everyone together. Their good business decision was rewarded handsomely.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we were pioneering the “change
enablement” movement within the consulting industry. It was the idea of
using existing methodologies and tools and applying them in a different way to
gain immediate competitive advantage. And it really worked.
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