The last chapter. I feel like I’m in the final few minutes of a football game and quickly running out of time to score. Coach Duffy would probably tell me to stick to the plan, throw the ball to an open receiver, and pray.

Sounds good to me. Here goes.

Change—how’s that for an open receiver. One of the most talked about and written about topics in business today.

Change must be really, really difficult, judging by the number of change meisters who are available for hire. But I don’t get it. Change isn’t hard if you do it every day. Small constant changes are the way to go.

It’s probably my short attention span, but I don’t want to keep doing the same things over and over again. It’s boring. I don’t care how successful we’ve been. Keep asking:

• How can we do this better?
• How can we do it faster?
• How can we be more productive?
• How can we provide more service?
• How can we have more fun?
• How can we create more customer value?

Nothing is perfect. Everything can be improved. The whole process of driving constant change creates energy and electricity. Change becomes part of the game. People look forward to it. However, change becomes overwhelming when we are allowed to settle into a rut, even a successful rut. But Coach Oliver Purnell of the University of Dayton puts it well: “What made you successful today won’t make you successful tomorrow.”

One good thing about constant change is that nothing you do is going to burn the place to the ground. But when change is postponed and allowed to accumulate, major upheavals occur and there’s no chance to back off. If I tweak my process and it produces too much paperwork, I can re-tweak it in thirty days or less. Constant change is like a regular savings or reinvestment plan. The effects build over time. But spend some of the capital on worthy causes. Many managers try to hoard their success. Go ahead and rack up victories, but then take some risks. You’ve earned the right. If you lose, the previous successes will cover it. Don’t squat on a pot of gold.

A Simple Tool Will Do

Small changes won’t cut it? First, get a hammer. “Hammer” is a term I first heard from consultant Mark Donnolo. I love it because it perfectly captures the tool that you’re going to need to force meaningful change through the organization. The hammer is a senior executive, preferably the CEO, who is committed to making the change happen successfully. If there’s no hammer, there’s no chance. Zip. At Xerox in the 1980s, David Kearns was the hammer. He made sure change happened, and without him Xerox probably wouldn’t exist today.

If the CEO declines to be the hammer, it’s a bad sign. But whoever he or she is, make sure your hammer has a nice long contract. There’s nothing quite so maddening as going halfway through a change process and having the executive leave, taking the commitment to change with him or her. It leads to a this too shall pass attitude that sabotages change efforts from then on. But even if the hammer is locked in and totally committed, there has to be a concentrated effort at rounding up buy-ins from managers at all levels and unofficial influence leaders.

There are numerous individuals within an organization who exercise influence without portfolio; they’re the old hands who have been around for years, maybe a few of the up and coming stars, or executive and administrative assistants plugged into a network of support people. Listen to what they are saying about the changes, sound out their advice, and then ask for help selling the program. This part of a major change effort, from my experience, is usually badly botched. The organization is told, not sold on, what’s going to happen. Tell people what benefits they will derive from the change.

Do you know why this sales job doesn’t happen? Answer number one: Often management doesn’t really know what the benefits will be. They have a rough idea, a good guess, but nobody wants to go out on a limb. That’s the problem with drastic change—and why I recommend avoiding it if you can—consequences are unpredictable. I’m not risk averse. I am failure averse. I want to know what the pitfalls are in advance. Then I want to know how we’ll get out of them in the event that we fall in. If I receive the L.A. shrug on that one, I’m nervous. Closing your eyes and jumping isn’t prudent risk taking—it’s a form of roulette the Russians wouldn’t even subscribe to. Maybe they would, but you get the point.

Answer number two: They know, and the news is not going to go down well with the troops. The whole process is permeated by dishonesty. Remember, if you can’t sell it, you have to force-feed it—and that’s an ugly way to do business. Force-feeding can be self-defeating. While it wipes out resistance, trust is also damaged.

But sometimes there’s no other way. Or so it seems.

The Worst Day of My Life

In 1994—get ready for ancient history—Xerox had its best year ever. The company launched a classy national advertising campaign and became a sponsor of the U.S. Olympic team. Profits soared, the stock prices rocketed upward, and it decided to lay off about ten thousand people.

As the district manager in Columbus, I was ordered to eliminate about 10 percent of the operation’s workforce. There was no consultation, discussion of options, or warning. I was given a list of names and told to pull the trigger. The carnage was the worst among the support staff, people who had worked hard for the district’s success without much recognition and with comparatively little financial reward.

The downsizing came as a special shock to all of us because Columbus, like Xerox itself, was having a spectacular year. Our performance, which had been near the bottom when I took over, was closing in on the number one position nationally. The reward for success came in the form of pink slips and a brutal downsizing. If I had it to do all over again—I wouldn’t. No, I’d be the first one out the door. I don’t like telling people who have done everything they were asked, and more, to clean out their desks and leave.

Corporate America, cheered on by Wall Street, has become entirely too casual about this kind of butchery. Strong medicine is needed to strengthen the company is the rationale that’s heard over and over. Okay, I’ll buy that. But before waking up one day and announcing an across-the-board cut of 10 percent, how about asking for 15 percent more productivity? Devise a turnaround plan, sell it corporationwide, and execute it instead of launching a sneak attack. A 10 percent cut in executive salaries—mine included—wouldn’t hurt, either.

Meat-ax downsizing is all about failure. It’s emblematic of poor leadership, bad management, contempt for people, and disdain for the customer.

Forced reductions happen to the best of operations. There are mistakes, miscalculations, and changing market conditions. But Xerox made a decision to take a shortcut back to the glory days of the 1960s and ’70s. It bought into the idea that the problem was people. Wrong P-word. The problem was—and still is—productivity. Roughly one-third of Xerox’s sales districts had been allowed to fail year after year, while one-third turned in so-so performances, and only one-third exceeded their goals. If Xerox was going to practice teamwork, which is what it has preached since it committed itself to the concepts of the Total Quality Movement, the right thing to do was make sure that all of its teams pulled their weight.

But there wasn’t time for that. There was only time for a bloodbath.

I’ve used variations on the phrase “no time for leadership” throughout this book, usually followed by the admonition—make time! If we don’t, we invite the kind of casual slaughter that occurred so frequently in the 1990s, accompanied by the applause of those who believe it is a necessary and altogether wholesome feature of the new economic paradigm.

Get a load of this hit list, showing layoffs as of May 1994—not halfway through the year:

Don’t expect me to total it up. It would make me vomit.¹

But not to worry, that was 1994. Downsizing is really old hat, or so I’ve been assured—not something that hip readers really care about anymore. Better start caring. As I write this, layoffs for the first half of 1999 are running 40 percent higher than the year before, which set a record high. Currently, there are about sixty thousand announced layoffs each month. The figure, though, is probably low because it only counts large companies that are required by law to report plant closings and massive job cuts. Silicon Valley and other startups are excluded from the mix.

But of course everyone also knows that Silicon Valley follows a new paradigm. How about these figures in that case: Between 1993 and 1998, the computer industry announced 273,000 job cuts, about the same as the old paradigmers defense and aerospace, which have been struggling since the end of the Cold War.

Last time I checked, the years from 1994 to 1998, and on to 1999, were part of the longest peacetime expansion of the American economy in history. Hmm. Logic suggests that firing people is really, really good business. And it is—for somebody else’s business.

The implication of these figures is that the initial bloodbaths of 1994 fertilized the new economy. Xerox and other large corporations dumped people who promptly got up, dusted themselves off, and went to work elsewhere or started their own companies. There was an infusion of motivated and recharged talent (“Okay, kick me out, but you can’t hold me down”).²

The big boys jumpstarted their own competition. They are still at it too. The Labor Department estimates that 50 million workers, or 40 percent of the labor force, changes jobs within a year. Check that. Fifty million people are so dissatisfied, restless, fed up, or bored that they leave the job after less than one year. That tells me that American business is doing an atrocious job at people-ology.

If I were reading this book, I’d throw it down and rush to rerecruit my best people right now! I’d also start worrying—as Silicon Valley should along with all the slick Internet startups—that my new paradigm is in danger of turning into the old paradigm. Thisisnotyourfathers.com? Guess again. People power and technology have been driving the new economy. But if people stop being an asset and start becoming disposable—á la Xerox and the other kings of downsizing—isn’t the Cinderella economy likely to turn itself into a pumpkin?

Maybe, maybe not. As a businessperson and someone who has to work for a living, my tendency is to go with maybe. And as an author, I hope that you take these figures as a serious warning. Can you afford to discard talent and stay in business? If you’re counting on Prince Charming to bail you out, you do believe in fairy tales.

As for me, I believe in leadership.

In 1994, the year of that horrifying lost of job cuts and the worst day of my life, and again in 1998 when there was another drastic downsizing—it’s not only vampires who develop a taste for human blood—aggressive leadership could have energized Xerox’s people to achieve the desired outcome. If I had been asked to deliver an extra 15 percent from the Columbus district, Xerox would have had its number without a single layoff. My teams would have delivered that on a platter, and had a ball doing it. But I wasn’t asked, I was told. I was managed, not led.

The same would have been true for the other top performing districts, and the same could have been true for the other two-thirds of the poor to middling operations—had there had been time for leadership. In those cases, some people would have lost their jobs or been moved out to other positions. But only because there had been no time for training, recruiting, a high-quality disciplined process, and the other requirements of leadership that had been sliding for years.

You’re probably sick of hearing my mantra—“What a great place to work!” Xerox was a great place to work and could be again one day if it is willing to take the time for leadership. And it would be so simple. What worries me, though, is that a more difficult feat is underway. First, let your technological edge slip away; a mission largely accomplished by 1985. Then, crush your greatest asset, the one that kept you from going belly up—people. That goal is now within reach. Finally, take a company founded on one of the most astounding inventions of the twentieth century and turn it into a me-too Internet clone in search of the next killer app.

Nice work.

Solve the People Problem

I know that most of my readers could care less about Xerox’s fate, and that really isn’t the point. I’m riffing on Xerox to explore a deeper theme: the need for people-ology. Xerox and many other great and small companies are faced with a real dilemma. They want to get rid of people, but they can’t do it and survive. To use Lincoln’s famous expression, it amounts to a half-slave, half-free mentality. The result is mood swings that range from mellow to maniacal and back again.

My suggestion to Xerox is to fire your best people. Get rid of them; they are more trouble than they are worth (to you). Go to Wall Street and the venture capitalists to raise money, which won’t be a problem, since your stock will zoom past Pluto when you really get serious about downsizing. Take the cash and bankroll the people you’ve just fired. Let them do the stuff you’re not interested in anymore. Go be an Internet company, lean, mean, and pony-tailed. Meanwhile, the business of selling copiers and printing technology, even manufacturing, can be profitably outsourced.

Xerox would still control the brand and dictate the terms of the culture. There’d be strictly delineated agreements between the corporation and its vendors, backed up by a disciplined process to see to it that Xerox always gets its share of the revenue. But there’d be no limits, no ceiling on the independent operations that are supplying the talent. Xerox would go from being an unhappy, reluctant employer to a demanding, happy (or else!) customer that is on the receiving end of the kind of high-quality, service-based culture it once tried so hard to provide until deciding that the only suitable delivery vehicle—people—was too much trouble.

Forget about Xerox. Any company that doesn’t have time for leadership should do the same thing. Have a last fling. One humongous downsizing, get it out of your system. But don’t throw those people away. Set them up so that you become their customer. Perf! I’m not advocating a new form of corporate colonialism. These would be fully independent entities that serve as investment opportunities and suppliers of goods and services under the originator’s trademark and oversight. Somebody’s got to do it. Might as well be people who are willing to work hard, make money, have fun, and say, “What a great place to work!”

Inside the Women’s Locker Room

I’ve mentioned Megan McCallister a couple of times. She’s the assistant athletic director of the University of Dayton. I was impressed by her intelligence and leadership ability, but there was one question that she asked during our first meeting that still haunts me, and I think it always will. She’s a champion athlete, a former star on the U.S. national volleyball team. Her hero, by the way, is Diana Niade. When she chatted about that part of her life, the subject came around to the old complaint that women in business don’t share the same sports culture that men do, which puts them at a disadvantage, and, as a result, that culture should be toned down and made less combative.

Megan didn’t buy into that. “You should visit a women’s locker room sometime,” she said with a laugh. The only “break” Megan asked for was, “No limits…no ceiling.”

As I was getting ready to go, Megan finished a review of her impressive management accomplishments at the university, looked me in the eye, and said, “Frank, will I ever feel the rush again that I got from sports? You know, that feeling…”

She really brought me up short. I told her she would, and that it would be even better. I’ve been thinking about what I should have said ever since. Here it is:

Megan, you’ll feel the rush again, and it will be even better. I know because I have sought that same thing. I wanted to feel that powerful mixture of pride, exhilaration, gratitude, and fatigue. To be uplifted, to float in a bubble of triumph, to stand side by side with a band of brothers, happy together, satisfied that we’d done our very best. Megan, the rush in sports doesn’t compare with the rush you get in real life when you’re asked to do your very best—and you deliver. I used to say, it’s all about winning. No, it’s all about doing your best. That’s the real rush, the very best rush of all.

Family Is Forever

Publication of the The Force, David Dorsey’s nonfiction book based on the several months the author spent observing Xerox’s Cleveland district, confirmed the prediction I made on the first day I arrived to lead the operation that our success would be so spectacular that books would be written about us.

Dorsey’s portrait of us was what a book a reviewer might describe as “sharply etched.” To the point that if my wife ever gets hold of him, the outline of her foot will be etched permanently on a tender portion of his anatomy. David was out to write a new Death of a Salesman. The last line of the book comes at the end of party at my house to celebrate one team member’s promotion. It’s two o’clock in the morning, we’re in the kitchen standing shoulder to shoulder singing to a James Taylor record: “For a moment, no one is selling anything to anyone.”³

He didn’t get it. Not at all.

On the wall of my office at home, going on ten years later, is the only memento I have on display out of all the awards, certificates, and pictures that I’ve accumulated. It’s a corny poem that I got at my farewell party when I left Cleveland. While I hate to telegraph my punches, I’m going to end the book with that poem. My purpose is to break away from many of the themes that we’ve been dealing with in the later chapters like recruiting, training, teamwork, and so on. Those are all key parts of the whole, but that whole rests on people, leadership, process, and emotion. In its own way, the poem confirms that fact. If you were a real glutton for punishment, you could go back and reread the book from the beginning and assign specific lines of the poem to chapters and sections. The title itself reflects my passionate conviction that good, strong business families make for good, strong businesses and careers. It’s all there. The trust, the sincerity, the communications, the preparation, the expectations, the accountability. You probably know the list by now.

I was tough on those people. I made ’em dance. Most remain among my very best friends. Many hold down senior executive positions in Xerox and other corporations—No limits!—which just thrills me. They could have given me a fancy fountain pen or gift certificate. Instead, it was a poem that doesn’t scan too well as verse, but, if you read it slowly, you might hear the heartbeats:

They got it, and that’s what matters. Is it emotional? You bet it is.