Amsterdam 1-4 May, 2001

Dexter Dunphy

Where and when:
Change 2001 was an international conference developed and organised by Linkage International. The main conference was held over two days, 2 and 3 May. In addition, there were 5 pre-conference workshops, running concurrently, held on 1 May and 3 post-conference workshops and a Corporate Culture Forum, all running concurrently, on 4 May. The conference was held at the Sheraton Hotel, in the Schiphol Airport, about 20 minutes from Amsterdam city centre by train. My guess is that the conference was attended by between 150 and 200 people, from all continents and it seemed like most countries. There were two other Australians.

I travelled to Amsterdam specifically to attend the conference and to make contact with members of The institute for Environmental Management (WIMM) at the University of Amsterdam who are doing interesting research in the area of corporate sustainability. This report deals only with the conference.

The main conference featured some of the world’s leading change gurus. Keynote speakers included:

• Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor, Harvard Business School and author of several best sellers on the management of change. Her most recent book is Evolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow.
• Professor Rob Goffee, Professor, London Business School, who shared a session with his colleague, Gareth Jones, Director of HR and Internal Communications, at theBBC.
• Gary Hamel, Visiting Professor, London Business School, who spoke live by satellite.
• Julie Meyer, Founder and CEO, Ariadne Capital, and Founder and former Chief Marketing Officer, First Tuesday. (For those unfamiliar with First Tuesday this started with a cocktail party in a Soho bar and developed into an organisation represented in 120 cities on 6 continents. It found and dispensed more than $150 million in seed capital and was then sold five years later for 50 million pounds stirling).

Some insights from the main sessions:

Julie Meyer: Her title was The Changing Worldwide Web. There is a huge transition occurring as we move from the old economy to the new economy. Oil fuelled the industrial economy; bandwidth will fuel the new economy. Technology is becoming a driver of business and it is dangerous to outsource technology. Many companies that were leaders in the past have already disappeared, many others will not keep up with the speed of change. This is a dilemma for investors but what will be critical is to bring capital, talent, technology and services together to enable rapid change and growth. She pointed out that Silicon Valley has been the largest legal creator of wealth in human history the new economy started when people tried to work out what would evolve from the internet. The new generation entrepreneur is one part leader, one part manager and one part entrepreneur. (Like herself, presumably).

Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Evolve! Organisations and Change in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow. Kanter reported on her global survey on the e-economy. 300 people in 80 companies were interviewed and detailed case studies made of 24 companies. Her central interest was what constitutes the leadership of change in the new circumstances. The new .com companies didn’t have the massive change problems of relating to the new technology that were experienced by the established companies. So she concentrated on the established companies and divided them into the ‘pacesetters’ and the ‘laggards’. She found major differences in the way the two sets of companies handled the need to change. The laggards face change with initial denial (e.g. Barnes and Noble’s reaction to competition from Amazon.com). They move on to anger and blame. When they finally start to accept the unpleasant reality, they respond with cosmetic change and fail to connect the new technology with the main business. By contrast, the pacesetters start with curiosity, open minds and set about learning. They go on to challenge their own traditional beliefs their prevailing business model. They move on to mobilise a network of external partners, often small external partners who bring in new knowledge. They then retain what is best in their organisation while embedding the new knowledge into the organisation. (Rosabeth is a great storyteller).

Gary Hamel: Larger than life on the huge screen, Gary made a tough, no-compromise, hard-hitting presentation. We are in the age of revolution, of exponential change if you fall behind now, you never catch up again. We live in a world without tenure that demands new kinds of organisations. Hierarchy, size and control are no longer the basis of success they are now being replaced by creativity, speed and imagination. The big dangers for companies are nostalgia for the past, having inflexible, immobile resources and too little strategic innovation. Imagination is the key to the future Enron is the most innovative company in the US 45% of its wealth today comes from businesses it wasn’t in 3 years ago. Change begins with people who have more passion than power we need companies that are habitual innovators, where all employees are radical innovators. Companies like Virgin and Lush show how successful innovation can be compared to the merger mania that is destroying value and creating organisational dinosaurs. Change begins when you change people’s perspectives analysis never convinced anyone to do anything. We need to get people into the customer’s skin, have them understand what it feels like to be a customer and then reinvent the business, particularly by moving into a space where your competitors aren’t even looking. And, quotable quote, “The average corporation has a very low sperm count”. The answer is to create coalitions of passionate individuals who think in terms of “opportunity share” rather than market share. (Presumably that raises the corporate sperm count).

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones: Their joint presentation was titled; Understanding Your Corporate Culture, How it Affects your Bottom-Line and How to Change It. (Their latest HBR article is The Character of a Corporation: How Your Company’s Culture Can Make or Break Your Business, Oct/Nov 2000). They started by looking at the nature of corporate culture and the role of leaders in shaping it. They then went on to outline a contingency theory of culture, arguing that there is no one right culture of success that fits all situations but different cultures suit different business conditions. The two dimensions they dealt with they called “Sociability’ and “Solidarity” sociability is the human relationship aspect of organisations and solidarity is the tight focus on business. Organisations can be high or low on each of these dimensions so put them together and you get 4 types: # networked high sociability and low solidarity, for example Heineken and Unilever # fragmented low on both dimensions, for example, Harvard Business School # mercenary low on sociability and high on solidarity, for example, Pepsi and Mars #communal high on both dimensions, for example, Hewlett Packard. They examined each of these cultures in detail, looked at their up and downsides, and then outlined change strategies to move from one to the other. A word of warning to change agents: “Networked cultures are world class at undermining planned change programmes”. (Academics love these four fold classifications but who am I to object!).

There were also valuable insights to be gained from many of the other sessions at the main conference and from the pre-conference workshops and the Culture Change Forum. I was delighted to hear the conference opened by the statement from one of the organisers that the number one issue in change today is how to handle corporate culture change. I have been arguing for the last two years at least that this is the way forward and that there are few players in this area, particularly global players, and the approaches of those who are working in this area are inadequate. So this is a big challenge for all of us how to develop realistic, workable culture change strategies.

On a more personal note, I recommend a trip to Amsterdam which I fell in love with on a trip to Europe last year. I had a day before and a day after the conference to renew my relationship with this charming city. On both occasions I have been there it has been spring with the trees coming into their new green foliage and the tulips and blossom trees breaking into bloom. The day before the conference was Queen’s Day, their Queen’s Birthday Holiday and the city filled (literally) with merrymakers picknicking in parks and on barges in the canals. There were street stalls and vendors everywhere, enormous amounts of Heineken being consumed and everyone wearing orange (The Royal House of Orange, remember?). I left for Schiphol before it all got out of hand and ended with police baton charges and teargas not everyone at the conference was so lucky. On the day before I left I went downtown again and the city had returned to normal even the piles of beer cans had been cleared away. Looking at Amsterdam and thinking about other cities I have known, I decided that the most human cities are those like Amsterdam with about 1 million inhabitants. But also the Dutch have been sensible enough to preserve their heritage buildings, their street and canal scapes, and many aspects of their traditional way of life while embracing the new. Perhaps we could learn from them.

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