Revolutionizing Innovation: Insights from IBM on Harnessing Change as a Product

This is an adapted excerpt from the introduction to Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success by Phil Gilbert.

If ever there is a misnomer, it’s change management. It rarely causes change and it’s almost always mismanaged.

Why? The answer seems obvious to me: almost all leaders desiring change are businesspeople, but they never run their change initiatives like businesses.

Change should be regarded as a high-value-add product that deserves the same levels of resource support and operational rigor as any of your top-performing products. This means clear ownership, strategic leadership, and, above all, profit-and-loss accountability. Only when you treat change with this level of structure and discipline will you set it up for success.

In this model, change is your product, your organization is the marketplace, and its teams are your customers.

Change as a product must also be packaged and presented as a premium offering. No one values economy-class change. Only a platinum-tier solution will spark the excitement and customer demand required to drive widespread adoption of change, and have it stick.

That was my experience while leading IBM’s global transformation beginning in 2012, my colleagues and I helped thousands of interdisciplinary teams at IBM become more entrepreneurial, more agile, and more customer-focused.

For all those thousands of teams, we never had to mandate change, never had to beg anyone to join. In fact, we made the teams pay for our services. One-by-one, these IBM project teams utterly transformed their way of working because the entire design and execution of the program was based on delighting them and adding value at every touchpoint.

Those changes have stuck; they’ve become the cultural core for how IBM does business today.