I’ve run big research and development labs for large companies and federal bureaucracies for decades and served in corporate innovation and consultancy for over 20 years.

My experience working to change products, processes, and people has taught me that lasting, meaningful, change only happens in two ways: top-down and bottom-up.

Top-down transformation, reengineering, disruption, or whatever buzzword is in vogue, is what they teach in business schools. In the top-down model, a tenacious leader sets a clear vision for change and then aligns the organization to achieve that vision with personnel changes, incentives, new processes, reorganization, and sustained follow-through.

Personnel changes are the most important ingredient to top-down transformation, in my view, because it’s far easier to change people than to change minds. That’s what John Reed did when he revolutionized the banking business at First National City Bank: he brought in an entire team of automotive mass manufacturing experts to replace traditional green-eye shade bankers.

The dictum ‘changing people is easier than changing minds’ is also at the heart of the alternative, bottom-up approach to lasting organizational change, because it encapsulates the most important ingredient to meaningful change: motivation of the workforce.

Strong motivations for change
When workers down in the bowels of an organization already have strong motivations for change, that motivation can be harnessed and focused to move the entire organization in healthy new directions, even when, as is almost always the case, top........

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