Internal Outsiders Transform Tradition-Bound Organizations more

Internal Outsiders Transform Tradition-Bound Organizations* By Ariane Berthoin Antal and Camilla Krebsbach-Gnath** (A revised version published in Reflections, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 2002:23-31) The casting agency must have made a mistake! Are they really serious? How could they have selected such a quiet guy to play the lead in this production, a German who joined the company as a trainee straight from the university? He has never even been posted abroad! How can such a person credibly fill the role of a CEO who will transform the diversified, bureaucratic, tradition-bound German company into a global player in biotechnology with network structure whose small head office is located in France? There can’t be a proper director at work here because he or she would surely have explained to the casting agency that they would have to find a man who could step onto the stage as a visionary leader, an expert and charismatic communicator. At the very least he would have to be a chemist with a track record in the lab, because it is inconceivable that someone with no scientific expertise should head a major German chemical-pharmaceutical company. All the leads before him had earned doctorates, of course, and they brought the authority that comes with the title of professor. “Just a Mr.”1 enough for this role. 1 is clearly not The research project on the transformation of Hoechst to Aventis was conducted by Ariane Berthoin Antal, Meinolf Dierkes (project leader), Camilla Krebsbach-Gnath and Ikujiro Nonaka. Kate Nattrass, Casey Teele, and Sari Yli-Kuahaluoma helped with desk research and data analysis. Patrick Reinmoeller and Ryoko Toyama assisted in conducting interviews in Japan. The research has been published as a two-part business school case study with full teaching notes and a video. These can be obtained from the European Case Clearing House (order numbers 302-031-1; 302-031-3; 302-031-8; and 302-032-1). ** Ariane Berthoin Antal is Program Leader for Organizational Learning and Culture at the Research Unit “Organization and Technology” of the Science Center Berlin (WZB), Professor at the Technical University of Berlin and Visiting Professor at Henley Management College (ABAntal@wz-berlin.de). Camilla Krebsbach-Gnath is partner of KG-D Management Consulting in Kronberg. (KGDKronberg@tonline.de). 1 Quotations are drawn from the research interviews, unless otherwise indicated. * 1 If there had been a proper director, he or she would never have permitted the lead role to start moving the stage around even before taking on the job. The corporate center is in Frankfurt, so the designated lead in the play certainly can’t shift a significant part of the action over to the U.S. But this is precisely what this man did, to the consternation of many people. A longstanding member of the German top team described the shift as a huge cultural change. “The traditional way of doing business in Hoechst was: Frankfurt is the central power and we are satellites around the world and we have to take good care of the satellites. The business people were used to going to their area of responsibility twice a year, first class, and visit their empires . . . After the merger things completely changed because people were, I think, forbidden from going to the United States and check out the U.S. operations. There was a huge cultural change. . . . The center of gravity, the center of power was no longer in Frankfurt for these activities, but it was in Dallas or Charlotte … German managers had to report in to Americans residing across the Atlantic in the US.” Who is crazy enough to transfer power from the head office over to a company acquired abroad? And that is the person who is supposed to play the role of CEO? A German company that had operated internationally for over 100 years was crazy enough to disregard the commonly accepted approach to achieving radical change. Instead of replacing its top management with people from the outside and engaging the support of armies of consultants in order to bring in fresh perspectives and revamp the organization, the transformation of Hoechst was conceived of and implemented by “internal outsiders.” Apparently, this tradition-bound company, often characterized as rigid nevertheless was home to a sufficient number of querdenker (non-mainstream thinkers, or more precisely, across-the-grain thinkers) to significantly change the culture, structure, and focus of the company within a mere six years. How were these people found and how did they work together to make such a transformation possible? What can be learned about the design and realization of dramatic organizational change from the experiences of this company?2 2 How to find “internal outsiders” in an organization In 1993 the Supervisory Board of Hoechst AG selected Juergen Dormann to succeed Professor Wolfgang Hilger as Chairman of the Management Board in 1994. At the time, Dormann was a member of the Management Board and responsible for finance. In other words, at first glance he was no outsider; quite the contrary, he had always been based in headquarters, and it was there that he had moved up the ranks. He had, however, gained experience in the U.S. market while masterminding the acquisition of Celanese, and the business press reported that the success of that process was widely attributed to him (Der Spiegel, 1993, p. 105). He was nevertheless an unusual choice for the position of Chief Executive Officer in Hoechst. Unlike all his predecessors, he was not a chemist, but rather an economist with international financial expertise. So why was such a “very different kind of insider,” as a long-standing observer characterized him, chosen? It is likely that members of the Supervisory Board shared Dormann’s sense that the tradition-bound company, which he described as “German rooted, strongly science-based, not very market-oriented, very introverted, very academic,” needed to be shaken up. The catchy German phrase Dormann coined to convey his intentions, “entfrosten und entrosten” (unfreeze and unfetter), was soon to be heard from managers all around the world. The choice of a CEO with totally different qualifications than those of his predecessors was only the beginning of leadership changes in Hoechst. No top manager can single-handedly transform an organization. Dormann needed help, but where would he find people who bring in fresh ideas and perspectives in such a traditional company, whose culture was “very chemical driven, centralistic, when you wanted to make careers you had to stay in the center” as a senior German manager noted. The role of an internal outsider is not a comfortable one, and it is very likely that querdenker will be repressed in an organization. As Warren Bennis pointed out, “The fact that the organizational deviant, the individual who sees things differently, may be the institution’s vital and only link with some new, more apt paradigm does not make the organization value that person any more. Most organizations would rather risk obsolescence than make room for the nonconformists in their midst.“ (1989, p. 124). 3 Dormann immediately looked for allies, and he sought them first on the periphery of the organization. He looked in the international subsidiaries and among the foreign managers that Hoechst had brought in with the acquisitions abroad. Just before taking office in 1994, for example, he asked Claudio Sonder, who was responsible for Hoechst do Brazil, to join the new task force that he charged with developing a new structure and strategic orientation for the company. The two men had met back in 1974 in the central office. Claudio Sonder, like several other managers, had consciously chosen to pursue a career outside headquarters. He remembered vividly how Dormann had reached him by phone in Mexico with the question, ”’Look, I am going to form a task force. Do you want to be part of this? It’s going to be eight guys. You will have to be flexible; we need half of your time during half the year. And you can think and do what you want.’” That prospect excited Sonder and he agreed to come on board. Other examples of managers drawn in from the periphery were Ernie Drew and Bill Harris from the United States. Drew had been Group Vice President of Celanese when Dormann was negotiating the acquisition of the company, and the two men had worked closely together during that process. Drew then became President and Chief Operating Officer of the new company, Hoechst Celanese. He remembered how Dormann had invited him to chair the new task force. “He said I need you Ernie, I need you over here to help with change." Drew smiled wrily: “Dormann ‘conned’ me into it.” The other task force members recruited from the periphery were Germans, like Thomas Hofstaetter, who was running the pharma division in Japan at the time. Dormann also found some allies for his transformation process inside the corporate headquarters, people like Rainer Handte and Bernd Sassenrad, who knew the internal procedures and could find the right levers and channels in the company to communicate ideas and generate change. All the “internal outsiders” on the task force came from second and third level management. Dormann wanted to get the ideas and support generated at this level of the organization rather than limiting the strategic thinking to that of the very top. As diverse as the members were, they had one characteristic in common, as one of them remarked: “None of these people were narrow.” This combination of insiders from the periphery and insiders from the center 4 stimulated the development of ideas and plans and proved very effective for the implementation process. He chose only one real outsider to work with the team, Wilhelm Rall from McKinsey Germany. Everyone involved emphasized that this was a personal invitation, “It was not a McKinsey project . . . Rall was a member of the team that we could use as a sounding board . . . and he was very helpful in helping us understand some of the other German companies that had gone through some change.” Asked about what had driven his selection, Dormann responded simply, “I looked for complementarities.” Gradually, Dormann achieved a change of leadership at the very top of the organization, too. Little by little, he got “internal outsiders” onto the Hoechst Management Board. For example, Horst Waesche, who had sworn to himself that he would never work in headquarters again, let himself be talked into returning from Japan. Klaus Schmieder, who had been exposed to the financial analysts of Wall Street earlier than his German colleagues, was also brought on board. Drew became the first non-German member of the Management Board, although he spoke very little German and felt that many ways of doing things in Germany “were crazy.” Two years after Dormann took office, the Management Board had been completely revamped, thanks also to the window of opportunity created by the retirement of several of the older members. Dormann is also credited by the business press for having engineered a significant shift in the leadership at yet another level of Hoechst, the Supervisory Board. Traditionally, the former Chairman of the Management Board had moved up into the chair of the Supervisory Board. However, when Dormann became CEO, it was not his predecessor, Professor Hilger, but rather Eberhard Bouillon, a former Management Board member with many years of experience in human resources and industrial relations at Hoechst, who became the Chairman of the Supervisory Board. The strategic changes Dormann and his management team were to introduce in the coming years would require from the chairman of the Supervisory Board the ability to negotiate with multiple stakeholders. The fact that Bouillon was not a chemist like Hilger, also made it easier for the Supervisory Board to envisage a future for Hoechst in which chemicals would no longer play a central role. 5 What did Dormann and the managers he brought together have in common? They looked at the company and at developments in the market from a different perspective than the one that had dominated the Hoechst view in the past, and this made them very concerned about the company’s future. They were the kind of “internal outsider” that Art Kleiner aptly described as heretics, “someone who sees a truth that contradicts the conventional wisdom of the institution – and remains loyal to both entities, to the institution and the new truth. Heretics are not apostates; they do not want to leave the ‘church’. Instead they want the church to change, to meet the truths they have seen halfway” (1996, p. X). Dormann and his colleagues questioned old truths because they believed the company was endangered, and they were willing to take risks together to make changes happen. Dick Markham, another American manager Dormann had brought into Hoechst through an acquisition, described their approach quite simply, without the hubris characteristic of many top managers at the helm of major change processes: “It wasn’t some stroke of brilliance on our part; it was the way we grew up. We couldn’t understand why you would do it any other way.” As important as it is to find “internal outsiders” and to bring them on board, it is not enough to actually achieve change. Hoechst in such a short time? What did the querdenker do to transform How do “internal outsiders” transform an organization? 1. Name the problem and create a sense of urgency Dormann did not outline a brand new vision when he became CEO. Instead, he persuaded people that the company was facing problems and needed to undergo a radical transformation. Such change processes are usually initiated only after a crisis has already hit. But Dormann did not wait. He intended to avoid the crisis that he saw looming on the horizon. He gave a speech that shook up the company, and introduced a new German term to the Hoechst mangers around the world: “Aufbruch 94”, meaning “new beginnings.” Rall commented, “There was a huge feeling in the organization that they had to catch up again. Hoechst had been quite high-flying in the 1960s and 1970s, and then it went down. Somehow, change was overdue in the mid-1990s.” Dormann spoke of the need to grab the opportunity for change and 6 warned, “We have little time to lose. The opportunity can slip away too fast, and high expectations for change can rapidly turn into an even deeper feeling of disappointment.” When he outlined the key issues he intended to tackle, the clear and high goals were invigorating. “It was the first time that anybody in Hoechst had said that we had to be among the top three in whatever business we pursued,” reported a manager who heard the speech. Dormann signaled that he intended to achieve a radical change in norms, which one manager characterized as moving “away from optimizing the existing business towards the development of something completely new.” His message sent shock waves throughout Hoechst. A Japanese manager captured the feeling well when he said: "Since I entered Hoechst in Japan, for more than 30 years I have been told that general chemicals is the key to competitiveness. . . . When Mr. Dormann became president, he proclaimed that precisely the fact we were a general chemicals company was the symbol of weakness. . . .To be honest, that was a shock. This change in values took a long time for me to understand." 2. Give the querdenker the space to work on the key strategic issues The fact that Dormann had created a task force to review the structure and strategy of the company was in itself not a particularly original step. However, the composition of the group and the broad scope of its remit were unusual. “This group had lots of space to analyze Hoechst and to develop a vision for the company,” recalled a member. The task force soon became known as the “Dream Team,” probably because it was given the freedom to dream of a different and better Hoechst. A member of the Supervisory Board speculated later that this openness would not have been possible earlier because “the other CEOs had all been chemists, and chemists don’t dream, do they?” Unlike jesters, who fulfill their role of challenging the traditional ways of seeing and doing things by playing at court, the Dream Team members fulfilled their role by traveling around the world. They broke a longstanding Hoechst norm by looking beyond the two large German chemical-pharmaceutical companies with which Hoechst had always compared itself, BASF and Bayer. Instead, they started benchmarking Hoechst with highly respected multinationals like General Electric, 7 ABB, Royal Dutch/Shell, Dow, and Ciba Geigy. They explored the structures and processes of these companies to find out what Hoechst could learn from them. Usually strategic task forces are quite closely monitored to ensure that they do not come up with undesirable results. But the Dream Team did not have to report on its work until the end of its six-month assignment. The communication style was very informal. “There was no reporting requirement,” said Dormann, “I am always available and some people feel that this is the more effective way of exchanging ideas.” It was typical of Dormann that he had not given the team a clear indication of what he wanted, other than to seek models for change. This leadership style leaves it up to people to work out their own ideas and take on responsibility for getting them to happen. As a close associate notes, “What you will notice when you talk with Dormann is that he leaves a lot of space for initiative. He does not tell people what to do.” 3. Make the querdenker deliver Two things were clear to the task force from the beginning: they would have to deliver their recommendations within six months, and they would then be held responsible for delivering the changes in the organization. “For life-long Hoechst employees, this was very exciting,” said a member of the team. “If we have ideas, they are going to be implemented. And so it was a new start. A new CEO, new opportunities, and the support of senior management in implementing changes.” But it was no easy task, and the responsibility for delivering on their recommendations entailed some very uncomfortable situations. For example, the new structure that was introduced based on the work of the Dream Team meant that some managers heading subsidiaries around the world would lose a great deal of their power. Sonder remembered how painful the job had been. “I was in charge of informing all the European subsidiaries of Hoechst that the country heads would essentially be administrative functions. You can imagine what this meant because I was considered the traitor, the guy who came from outside and I was changing and diluting the power of the country kings.” As the only non-German on the Management Board of such a typically Germanbased multinational company as Hoechst was at the time, Drew’s role as an internal outsider required a tricky balancing act. He had to learn about the Hoechst culture 8 while maintaining enough distance to change it. In order to contribute to policymaking and decision-making, he had come to grips with the German system of corporate governance, something he found very difficult. At the same time, it was a crucial part of his responsibility to challenge the traditional ways of seeing and doing things in order to instigate changes in the corporate culture. By drawing on his industry experience in the pace-setting U.S. market, he was supposed to help transform Hoechst management thinking and processes from those of a Germanbased culture into those of global players. A colleague commented on how this worked: “Drew became the bull in the china shop. Dormann flew him down to Frankfurt and had him wander everywhere in Hoechst with his elbows out, breaking things. Which is what he did. He questioned why things were done in a particular way. He insisted that people be held accountable for performance. He insisted that when they said that they were going to do something, that it was later looked at whether they had done it or not. And Dormann, rather than being as demanding a boss as I am sure he is capable of being, was able to be more statesman-like, because Drew was breaking all the china for him.” Dormann’s role was to provide the space and support for Drew to work against the grain of the corporate culture and bring in his ideas and techniques to achieve a market-driven focus, strategic orientation, and speed of action. 4. Change the parameters for decisions Dormann had observed an effective assessment procedure in Celanese that he wanted Drew to introduce into Hoechst as a means of implementing the recommendations of the task force and achieve the thorough transformation of Hoechst management processes. He established a committee to introduce the Strategic Management Process under the shared leadership of Drew and Günter Metz. Metz was a long-standing Hoechst manager with extensive experience in head office, a German who could handle the delicate task of building a bridge between the cultures and the generations during the transformation. The results of the first round of reviews with the strategic management process were even worse than expected. One of the senior managers recalled, “We went through the whole analysis. We discovered that a lot of the businesses were not up to speed, too small, not enough technology, not enough critical mass, the cost base was too high. We had done a lot 9 of things. We had stretched ourselves too much in the past, so we were mediocre in a lot of things but not good or top in even a few things.” It was a painful process because the Hoechst managers realized that they had to make some tough decisions. It would not be possible to invest in all the businesses in order to bring them up to the desired level, so some would have to be sold. “In the processes we essentially defined which were the core businesses and which were more on the periphery,” Schmieder explained. Managers with experience in the United States advised “focus, focus, focus!” It was not too difficult to give up the cosmetics businesses because they were relatively new and peripheral to Hoechst. The decision not to pursue the fibers business was much more painful, because some of the senior managers had dedicated much of their professional life to developing successful products like Trevira. The most dramatic step of all was the decision to sell the bulk chemicals business, because dyes had been the company’s first product in 1863 and several generations of employees’ families had identified with it. The impact of this decision was huge. When the Swiss company, Clariant, bought the business, it took with it a quarter of the Hoechst employees in Germany. 5. Create a new knowledge base A new strategy cannot be based solely on the identification of core activities and the separation from those designated as “non-core.” The organization has to build the competences and especially the knowledge base required for leadership in its chosen field. Hoechst needed new outsiders to help do this, and decided in 1995 to acquire Marion Merrell Dow not only in order to strengthen its position in the U.S. but also in order to bring in new skills that Hoechst lacked. Dormann had set his sights on two senior managers in that company, Dick Markham and Dr. Frank Douglas, in whom he saw a strong tandem to develop a new knowledge base and working methods in the pharmaceutical division of Hoechst. He asked Markham to head the pharmaceuticals business and he put Douglas in charge of the corporate research and development function. The two men introduced significant structural and cultural changes in order to generate new knowledge and skills in the organization. They established an interdisciplinary project structure in research, doing away with the old functional silos 10 separating chemists from biologists and toxicologists. “The role of function is to supply the best technologies, the best people, the best expertise to support teams”, Douglas explained. And they shifted from a regional to a global structure, assigning a significantly larger role to the labs in Bridgewater, New Jersey, where a competence in biotech research had been established. Both Markham and Douglas sought to introduce a strong sense for the market into the business, all the way into the research labs. When the two American managers arrived in Frankfurt, they found that “people were very focused on science. They were focused on doing experiments. But they were not focused on asking the question ‘will this experiment tell me whether this compound or this project is likely to lead to a drug?’” Douglas renamed the function from “Research and Development” to “Drug Innovation and Approval” to reflect the orientation he sought to instill. He explained, “I wanted to get the people to understand that we wanted them to operate differently. We are in research to innovate drugs”, and he also wanted to provoke the researchers “to start the dialogue”. Douglas recognized that knowledge creation is more a matter of dialogue than of technology. “If indeed the competitive advantage is being able to share knowledge rapidly, sensibly integrate new technologies, where better do that but in a team that has a clear problem, a clear project or a clear focus? . . . In a team that is a community of practice. . . . We want them to talk together and to get the tacit knowledge out.” Douglas encountered enormous resistance at the outset. The researchers even went out and demonstrated publicly in front of the Hoechst gates. But Douglas did not break off the dialogue. Several factors contributed to the success of his approach. Support from top management was one of the keys. “If Mr. Dormann and Mr. Waesche did not support what I was trying to do, did not believe in what I was trying to do, this was not going to be possible.” A second crucial factor in achieving change was Douglas’ leadership style, including his ability to walk the talk about change itself. He realized that “I was going to be asking my colleagues to change the way they did things and to do things differently and to do some things that were difficult for them. Therefore, I needed to show them that I was prepared to do something that is normally considered difficult for Americans. So I said ‘I am going to learn German and I’ll do it very publicly and openly. Perhaps I will succeed, perhaps not, but you will see me trying.’ We had a lot of laughs along the way. After a few months I went 11 to a two-week intensive, in-depth course, and suddenly it clicked. In about nine months, I was fluent.” Douglas chose a surprising metaphor to explain a further key concept in his leadership philosophy, namely the ability to maintain his sense of direction while listening to others. “When you are trying to implement change,” he explained, “you are going to hear a lot of noise, a lot of complaints. What a leader has to do is to be calm enough and still enough to hear the birds chirping. . . When the birds are no longer chirping, it’s like in the coal mines, there’s danger. And you are dead. So, listen to the birds chirping. They are the ones who will lead you to the success, and not to the noise.” Douglas leads as an “internal outsider” by placing himself on the sidelines: he provides a sense of direction and then enables others to establish selfmanaged processes in their project teams. And from the sidelines he listens for early warning signals so that he guide the members of the organization to adjust in time. 6. Treat change as constant Change processes in organizations rarely have a clear beginning or an end. The Hoechst employees had only just digested the integration of Marion Merrell Dow before they started hearing new rumors about further changes. The business press reported weekly about new international mergers and acquisitions. In order to remain one of the key players in the industry, companies had to keep growing rapidly. No company could grow fast enough on its own, so Hoechst, too, had to look around. In an environment dominated by the fear of “eat or be eaten” Hoechst faced the options of being gobbled up or of slipping down the ranks to the status of a medium-sized company. In December 1998 Hoechst announced its decision to pursue a “merger of equals” with the French multinational pharmaceutical company, Rhône Poulenc. The new company would be headquartered in the European city of Strasbourg and would take on the new name of Aventis. The merger would create a powerful life science company and position it at the top of list of pharmaceutical companies world wide and second in agro. (And just a few months later the merger of Glaxo SmithKline moved to the top of the rankings.) Dormann had made his approach to change explicit back in1993. He warned people not to seek to build palaces and recommended instead that they set up tents 12 because they can easily be taken down and put up elsewhere if need be. True to this metaphor, Hoechst was almost completely dismantled in 1999 and the new Aventis tent was set up quickly in Strasbourg. Then, in early 2001, the company announced another major organizational and strategic change: Agro would be moving out of the tent and Aventis would focus on the pharma business. Transformation remains an ongoing process. Who can learn from the transformation of Hoechst to Aventis? An enormous number of companies around the world have to undergo cultural and structural change in order to maintain their competitiveness in the globalized marketplace. Many, like Hoechst, have extensive international experience, but they have to reconfigure themselves significantly to operate as truly global players. Possibly the most positive message for these companies from the Hoechst experience is that the potential pool of heretics capable of conceiving of and leading change among their ranks is tremendous. If such a tradition-bound company as Hoechst can find enough internal outsiders to achieve a comprehensive transformation of the culture and structure of the organization within just a few years, then almost every other company must also be able to discover an equivalent potential among its managers. They are located in diverse functions, units, and levels of the organization. They may be in subsidiaries, headquarters, and recently acquired parts of the organization. It is just a matter of seeking them out and giving them the space and responsibility to envision and achieve change. Decisionmakers must dare to deviate from traditional profiles when filling positions, starting with those at the very top of the organization. The Hoechst transformation confirms the findings by Collins in the U.S., where “people generally assume that transforming companies from good to great requires larger-than-life leader – big personalities like Iacocca, Dunlap, Welch and Gault, who make headlines and become celebrities.” (2001, p. 68). Dormann and many of the internal outsiders he chose to lead the transformation in Hoechst shared the 13 paradoxical combination of features of “humility and fierce resolve” that Collins observed in his U.S. sample. The availability of internal outsiders is a necessary but not sufficient condition for effective transformation. A culture of cooperation is crucial because loners cannot put enough in motion to achieve truly significant change. A wide and diverse network provides the possibility for identifying allies and drawing them together for cooperative action. Every company must therefore check to see how it enables networks to develop across functional and business unit boundaries. Rotation programs, international postings, project teams, management development seminars with a diverse mix of participants are all ways of providing employees opportunities to get to know and appreciate each other. Such activities also permit employees to examine their organization critically from different perspectives, to discover useful connections and also possible dysfunctionalities (Berthoin Antal, 1991). Ideally, they can thereby identify problems early and act upon them in a timely manner. The example of Hoechst illustrates how important the combination of perspectives is. Managers from headquarters and those from the periphery of the organization bring together different ways of seeing the organization and of addressing its problems. The intimate knowledge of the organization and its (often very bureaucratic) systems that managers from the center have is essential to achieve change effectively. Dormann stressed that he did not shy away from using his ability to “play on the traditional keyboard” of Hoechst in order to create space for his new ideas. The inclusion of managers from the periphery of the organization is also simply a matter of clever power politics. When structural and cultural changes entail a loss of power in parts of the organization that have been relatively autonomous, it makes sense to draw some of the people in from the periphery to take new responsibilities for implementing the changes that they might otherwise use their power base to resist. An inclusive strategy that seeks to turn potential resistance fighters into allies can only work on the basis of trust and if all the participants believe that they are acting in the interest of the organization. Very few people are willing to support a self-serving querdenker. Many members of an organization may, however, be willing to sacrifice their short term interests if they see a significant positive effect for the community with which they identify. In order for querdenker to attract allies a deep-seated 14 commitment to the good of the organization must be perceived to be the central value and driving force for change. The credibility of leaders purporting to act in the interests of the community rather than for their own good depends largely on how they are seen to generate and distribute power. The central functions of Hoechst were dramatically reduced and their power was shared out across the organization. Not only Dorman, but also members of his leadership team consistently initiated processes and opened spaces for members of the organization to take ideas forward. The common buzzwords of “empowerment” and “delegation” do not adequately capture the essence of this process. Both terms are associated with a hierarchical view of power and organization: Bosses delegate downwards, they may – and, in modern management – should allow “their” employees to share in “their” power. Rather than conceiving of power as something that is “given” or “taken” in more or less explicit hierarchical processes, an alternative view of power is based on the assumption that power is something that can grow in different places across the organization. The possibilities and limits of such an approach to power have not been thoroughly tried in practice nor investigated by research, but seeds of it are to be found in Aventis and probably in a number of other organizations. Possibly the most important lesson to be drawn from the transformation of Hoechst to Aventis relates to the role of visions. Dormann did not have a clear and precise vision of the future of the company when he became CEO nor in the subsequent years. He did have a certain sense of direction and some consistent goals, but the route had yet to be worked out and it was altered several times in the transformation process. This contradicts the dominant view that managers should have a clear, long-term vision to which they can gain the enthusiastic commitment of their employees. Piers Ibbotson, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, comes closer than management scholars to capturing the nature of Dormann’s approach. He speaks of the importance of “misty vision,” a vision that must be clarified and worked out collaboratively over time, rather than being the outcome of one or a few top minds. Such a management approach requires many people in the organization to participate in interpreting the future and formulating the ways to get there. Maybe 15 there is a much greater similarity between what goes on in companies and what happens on stage than is generally assumed? References: Bennis, W. (1989): Why Leaders Can’t Lead (San Francisco: Jossey Bass). Berthoin Antal, A. (1991): "Gehör schaffen für Verrückte. Von Querdenkern lernen." gdi impuls 2: 3-11. Collins, J. (2001): "Level 5 Leadership – The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve." Harvard Business Review. 79, no. 1: 66-76. Der Spiegel (1993): "Feine Witterung", vol. 44, no. 24: 105. Kleiner, A. (1996): The Age of Heretics. Heroes, Outlaws and the Forerunners of Corporate Change. (New York: Currency Doubleday). 16