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Charlie Baum has devoted much of the last 35 years to facilitating organization change by applying a simple and timeless philosophy that he’s found as relevant to native Alaskan whalers and small construction crews as it is to big business. He’s built a following that reaches deep, and has touched Project Redwood in several ways.   He recently talked about his approach and its benefits.

You’ve worked with a variety of government, non-profit, and for-profit organizations. What’s the common thread?

The fundamental tenet is straightforward. Most major change initiatives, despite compelling visions and imperatives, do not realize their aims. They take too long to deliver impact, make unrealistic demands on participants, are overly complex, and focus largely on activities (studies, analyses, training, awareness building) and not on urgent performance results. Instead, I start by helping people quickly articulate the overall challenges they face, and then achieve performance successes against compelling goals in short, 100-day timeframes. The notion is let’s create some credibility, see what we learn, and establish meaningful momentum in the context of a “from-to” vision. Based on that initial clarity and momentum, much more potential becomes possible to realize – and the odds of reaching it are substantially increased.

Real successes against tough imperatives are more rewarding, and ultimately more productive, than feeling skeptical and hopeless in the face of major change.

What are some examples of successful implementations?

The state of Connecticut was a winner, for example, when officials there scrapped plans for a nine-month study of the causes of violence in a state mental hospital and instead focused on reducing incidents in two wards over the course of just two months – when nobody thought improvement was possible. Lessons learned from that pilot ultimately produced big results; violence in the state system fell by 40%.  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration cut the time to remedy a major class of workplace hazards by 75% with a comparable approach. And, a community of native Alaskans learned to digest long-term, difficult government budget cuts by first focusing on small-scale changes. That bred confidence in their ability to make larger transformations while preserving their culture and long-established relationships dating back centuries.

We use a similar approach with media organizations in a program at the Columbia Journalism School, where senior media executives grapple with the blistering pace of change in news gathering and reporting. The participants – for-profit and non-profit, legacy and start-up — largely understand the from-to challenges facing their organizations. The issue is how to reduce the time and increase the odds of success in moving to that new vision.

How did you get interested in this kind of work?

I got interested in organization change at a ridiculously young age.

I was a teenager not particularly excited by my summer job as a cook at Six Flags Over Mid-America, when a mentor gave me a copy of Work in America, a report published by the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It documented fulfilling work as a fundamental human need, indicted the harsh monotony of many American jobs, and advocated for more individual responsibility and autonomy.

It wasn’t exactly on the standard reading list for seventeen-year-olds, but it resonated with me and my own experience in high school sports and student government.

That inspired me to devise my own concentration, Psychology and Economics, as an undergraduate at Harvard, and to focus on organization behavior and public management courses at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Funny to remember, but I was the only first-year student to exempt Organization Behavior!

When we were at Stanford, Tom Peters and Bob Waterman were just publishing In Search of Excellence, which helped “mainstream” organization behavior. But the question still was, how can we put these concepts into practice in ways that consistently lead to successful performance improvement and change?

After a brief stumble post-graduate school with a strategy consulting firm, I was introduced to a firm that took a very different approach to organization change. The firm did not “study” organizations and make recommendations that would often sit on executives’ shelves. Instead, it focused directly on performance results, and helped clients use early, small scale, important wins to realize performance results at much higher levels. I knew I’d struck pay-dirt; for me, that was the elusive, missing link between organizational change and business outcomes.

Since then, first with Schaffer Consulting, later through an association with McKinsey & Company and my long time colleague Doug Smith (co-author of The Wisdom of Teams), and now in my own practice, I’ve seen many organizations successfully overcome obstacles and resistance to change by building confidence and credibility through repeated cycles of success. I call my business Starting Point because I act as an early catalyst in major change initiatives.

You’ve devoted many years to business consulting, but have you ever been on the other side of the fence, responsible for on-going results after the consultants pack up their briefcases and leave?

In my thirties, I ran a division of a Newark-based construction business. It was a 120-person division; most employees were literally hired off the street. I learned a tremendous amount regarding how to translate corporate strategies into language that guys at the front line could relate to in the warehouse at 6:30 AM. We went from a tough, lower performing group to the company’s top performer. One win led to another, organically, which led to further insights and change, and we had a lot of fun along the way.  I could not do what I do today without that fundamental experience.

A few years later, I became the first non-forester to serve as Chief Operating Officer of the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. The department was undergoing a transition in its forestry from traditional clear cutting to managing ecosystems, while sustaining revenues to the state. It was the kind of double bottom line situation that I love. We needed to earn money to help fund school construction and county governments, but also had to fundamentally change the nature of forestry in line with environmental issues related to the Endangered Species Act, in a highly political context with many vested interests and threats to long-established ways of life. It was all about helping a proud organization with a long history generate momentum in response to a severe change in circumstances after the spotted owl court decision.

Regarding the “pack up and leave” issue, that is exactly why we don’t study, analyze, recommend, and walk away.  Rather, we help clients steadily build their capacity to lead major change through an escalating series of small-scale successes that lead to winning the larger game. By definition it takes the “report on the shelf” issue away.

How has your work impacted Project Redwood?

A lot of my work in the last decade and a half has focused on affordable housing and community development. A Project Redwood grant in 2008 funded a project of one of my coachees, Stacey Epperson, then of Frontier Housing.

I first met Stacey as part of the Achieving Excellence program for non-profits at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Stacey came to the program pondering a conundrum. Frontier had been constructing and rehabilitating homes for low-income families in Kentucky for more than 30 years, offering low-cost, quality products and affordable loans with reasonable interest rates. What she couldn’t figure out was why needy families were often choosing shoddily constructed pre-manufactured homes and usury financing over Frontier’s clearly superior offering and fair loan terms.

As she examined her competitors, Stacey realized that Frontier’s conventional stick-built construction approach more often than not was trumped by the ease of purchase and short delivery lead times for the manufactured homes. She took on an overall performance challenge to cut Frontier’s turn around time in half and to triple the number of customers served. This meant that she had to let loose the cherished belief that Frontier had to construct from scratch, and instead embrace manufactured housing.

Project Redwood’s Cycle 2 grant partially funded placement of Frontier’s first low-cost, energy-efficient, single-wide unit. In addition to providing a quality home for a low-income family who had been living in sub-standard conditions, the project supplied a model for scaling up at Frontier, and important learning for other area housing and financing agencies. It was a great example of Project Redwood’s leverage. Stacey now runs a national non-profit that sells higher quality manufactured housing, financed fairly, to affordable housing non-profits across the country. She is a leading spokesperson for upgrading the overall manufactured housing experience, and has worked with the Department of Energy to require manufactured housing to meet higher energy efficiency standards, a huge policy win.

Project Redwood’s grant helped at a critical time to help Stacey provide the right leadership, that ultimately will result in national impact on housing and energy consumption.

Achieving Excellence, the program Stacey was in when I met and coached her, is a transformation program for senior leaders designed by my colleague Doug Smith. While most programs like this have curriculum as the centerpiece, in the hope that people will actually have an impact back home, this program is different. It starts by requiring participants to commit to substantial organization performance challenge, and uses a handful of concepts, coaching, and peer experiences to help participants realize major results.

(Editor’s note:  Project Redwood Partner and current Co-Chair Ken Inadomi participated in Achieving Excellence back in 2012. For more on Ken’s experience using this approach, see his comments below.)

Given your hectic consultant’s schedule, how do you find free time? What do you do for fun outside of work?

My wife Debi, who is a clinical psychologist, and I adopted two children from Guatemala several years ago. My daughter Andrea is now 9 and my son Uli is 7. Debi is a serious rock climber and cyclist but I prefer sports that involve a ball. Uli is already joining me on the golf course, and Andrea’s drawing for years has beaten my “C” in 6th grade art class.

We live in Portland, Oregon, right near downtown; we love the recreation that the area offers. We’ll be visiting Mount Rainier and the Canadian Rockies this summer. But mostly as a guy late to fatherhood, I appreciate the little things that might seem mundane to others. I’m involved in the world of homework, play dates, and dying a thousand deaths as a Little League baseball father under the tutelage of classmate Linc Holland.

Editor’s note:

Project Redwood Partner and current Co-Chair Ken Inadomi has also adopted the results-based philosophy that his former classmate Charlie espouses. Ken’s visibility as head of the New York Mortgage Coalition (NYMC), a non-profit that helps low income families become first time home buyers, brought him to Achieving Excellence back in 2012.

For his performance challenge, Ken aimed to unify the field in affordable home ownership by finding ways for government agencies and local non-profits to work in collaboration, rather than in competition, with each other. “There were many competing agendas in place when I started with NYMC in 2008,” he says, “we did not have the cohesive unity that you need to work efficiently.” Small wins that he’s realized as a result of the program, like convincing other non-profits to co-host events, collaborate on projects, and submit joint funding proposals, have added up to improved efficiency and less duplication among New York area agencies.

Now, in a further step, NYMC is exploring a realignment with the Center for New York City Neighborhoods. If the two come together, it would put a full spectrum of services from pre-purchase counseling to post-purchase retention under one umbrella. “There would be a lot of programmatic synergy,” says Ken, “and funders wouldn’t have to be scratching their heads to figure out who to give to.”

Although Charlie was not directly involved in this project, Ken gives him a lot of credit. “He is one of the founding coaches of the program,” he says of Charlie’s involvement in Achieving Excellence, “and his impact on community development has been incredible.”

Click here to read Delivering Results, Developing Leaders, an article about expanding effectiveness, co-authored by Charlie. Also see his website startingpointconsulting.com for more about principles of performance-driven change.