Copyright © 2015 by H. James Dallas. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Dallas, H. James, 1958-
Mastering the challenges of leading change: inspire the people and succeed where others fail / H. James Dallas.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-119-10220-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-119-10223-6 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-119-10221-2 (ePub)
1. Organizational change – Management. 2. Leadership. I. Title.
HD58.8.D337 2016
658.4′092 – dc23
2015022947
Cover Design: Paul McCarthy
Cover Image: istock / © kyoshino
Bill Hawkins
President and CEO, Immucor
Someone once said, “When the rate of external change exceeds the rate of internal change, the end is in sight.” That's a difficult reality for business today because the rate of external change in most industries is dizzyingly fast and accelerating still. Leaders need skills optimized to help people adapt, perform, and innovate in this turbulent environment.
Medtronic, the company where James Dallas and I worked together, operates in health care, by its nature a very dynamic environment. But there was probably no more dynamic period in the company's history than the period we worked together during which I was the CEO and James was the CIO. No situation could better prepare a leader to write a book on change, or even the book on change. James not only had a front-row seat, he was instrumental in helping us control our destiny and zig when everyone else was zagging.
Medtronic's culture is rooted in the five-point mission statement that our founder Earl Bakken wrote in 1960, focused on alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life through innovative medical products. People's lives were dependent on our judgment, our actions, and our values. It was the mission that guided us to do the right thing every day, whether it meant suspending shipment of our number-one product when it fell short of our own performance expectations or increasing our investment in R&D when others were cutting back due to the economic downturn.
James was hired in 2006 to lead an initiative to implement a company-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This was technically challenging on its own, but it also required overcoming one of the company's biggest leadership challenges: how to align an enterprise that was made up of many distinct businesses. The company had gone through a significant acquisition spree in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and each business was protective of its autonomy. To succeed in his mandate, James had to obtain extraordinary commitment from a lot of different people, across multiple businesses and geographies, many of whom didn't initially see the value of having a unified system. Even among those who saw the value, there were many who doubted it could ever be successfully implemented. It was a huge leadership challenge, and even more so because he started out as an outsider – some guy from Atlanta. What we didn't anticipate was the economic downturn in 2008 or the uncertainty in our industry caused by the Affordable Care Act. As another former CEO of Medtronic and now a professor at Harvard, Bill George recently said, “Never waste a good crisis.” James was not one to waste a crisis or to let external forces disrupt internal goals. He never wavered. He delivered.
