About the Author

My thinking on this topic has been completely shaped – some surely would say twisted – by spending all of the past ten years (and most of the past fifteen) working in the midst of over a half-dozen major organizational transformation projects with clients like Lucent Technologies, The New York Times, Motorola and USA To-day. You might notice that each of these businesses is nearly wholly dependent on its knowledge capital: what they have narrowly defined as “intellectual property.” I work with a small band of career change agents in a small, yet widespread, virtual company called ChangeCraft Corporation. We all live the new organizational paradigm of working from home offices. We’re tightly connected electronically, and are, ourselves, dealers in both knowledge capital and techniques to capture and utilize that capital.

We formed ChangeCraft after concluding that nothing could be done to fix or renovate the old industrial model for organizations. ChangeCraft designs and installs processes that revolutionize our clients’ operations so their companies begin working for everyone who depends on them: customers, employees, owners, suppliers and other stakeholders. Our central focus is drawing out – and channeling – the spirit, inventiveness and initiative of employees throughout those organizations.

We are passionate about our work. We believe that ChangeCraft’s sponsored, non-hierarchical transformation approach is uniquely valuable. The practice of ChangeCraft has taught us to revere the awesome power that can be generated by small, diverse, self-managed teams of volunteers. We have discovered a way to supercharge the power of employee teams by providing them with skilled peer coaches who are disconnected from any traditional management or supervisory responsibility. Another key element of our craft – clearly-set boundaries for change work combined with blanket pre-approval to actually implement changes within those boundaries – channels the power and intelligence in employee change teams. Our one true trade secret is something we call Prescriptive Transformation Values; you will get a look at how those work as you read about the propositions of the last generation versus the propositions of the next generation of employees and organizations.