Here’s How You Can Empower Change In Your Organization

In 1957, Ken Olsen founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) with his MIT classmate, Harlan Anderson, and by the 1960s, the company had pioneered the minicomputer revolution. Much cheaper than IBM mainframes, but still powerful enough to be useful, these machines helped make DEC one of the world’s leading technology companies.

Hailed as a visionary, Olson was named “America’s most successful entrepreneur” by Fortune magazine in 1986. Yet as AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, by that time the minicomputer industry was already being disrupted by PC’s and DEC would never recover. It was acquired by Compaq in 1998.

The truth is that everybody gets disrupted eventually, even a visionary entrepreneur like Olsen. What makes the difference is whether you are able to chart a new path. That takes more than merely being smart and ambitious, you need to empower change from within. It’s never easy, but there are some basic principles that can help you reinvent your organization.

Identify A Keystone Change

Much like DEC in the 80s, by the 1990s IBM had hit hard times. Squeezed between low cost PC’s made by firms like Compaq, Intel based servers and a software industry dominated by Microsoft, IBM was near bankruptcy. Many observers, both inside and outside the company, thought that it should be broken up.

Yet its incoming CEO, Lou Gerstner, saw things differently. As a former customer, he knew how…