Looking back at this week’s posts, I should mention that I have no regrets. It was a time and a place. Plus, I like a steep learning curve and this was at a point in my career when I was particularly keen on strengthening my skills and expanding my network, so this was all very interesting to me and great frontline experience to help me better collaborate with a lot of my fellow entrepreneur clients today.

I also think a lot of our team felt the same way. We were all relatively young, motivated for all the reasons stated in my last post. We were also a very cohesive group — I suppose partly due to the fireworks going off all around us. We enjoyed each other’s company, and usually did not mind working long and late hours. So the social interaction did support job satisfaction. That level of cohesiveness is what many companies are striving to achieve under the umbrella of employer brands and internal branding. But it’s certainly a steeper and slipperier slope today when the external lift of a veritable Gold Rush isn’t fueling the engine.

Posted by: Colin Mangham

It’s funny to look back in a Monday morning armchair quarterback sort of way. If you were to sit in on any of our meetings or take a stroll through our offices in that dotcom you would have thought we were maxing on productivity, all pistons firing. Everyone was fully engaged, working hard and all hours. However, much of this was only transitioning.

Lewin’s View of the Change Process cites three Phases. Phase 1 is “Unfreezing” (recognizing the need for change), Phase 2 is “Changing” (the actual transformation) and Phase 3 is “Refreezing” (results assessment and needed modifications). This all happened so fast that Phase 1 was a week or two start-to-finish, and we never really got out of Phase 2 before ultimately the Chairman opted to shut down the company only a couple of months into the transition.

Change is difficult, costly and, no doubt about, most of us are naturally change resistant. On top of that, organizational change is not always considered by constituents as “for the better” and personally satisfying. This is the case in a majority of the M&A deals we consult on at Daily. Still, somehow, most of us who still had our jobs believed the change was necessary, “for the better,” and we were motivated, at least as far as I can figure in hindsight, by three key factors:

1. Job Security – we had just seen half of the staff fired. The fact that those of us who remained still had jobs was a relief, especially as jobs were also drying up. Many of us had also left more conservative jobs for the New Frontier, and those former employers who did not “make the leap” were not all keen on hiring us back.
2. Trailblazing – what got us into the dotcom madness was also what kept us excited at this point … we really were finding new ways to use technology, especially with the promise of this new business model, and that was exciting.
3. Upside – the other thing that prompted many of us to leave our comfortable desk jobs was the potential to make a lot of money off our stock options in the fabled IPO. I still have a document with 40,000 shares of stock that are worth less than the paper it’s printed on. I know I’m not far form alone in this particular Purple Heart. Anyone want to form a support group?

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Most organizational changes are designed not to so much to transform the organization but to modify it in hopes of fixing its problems. After the company-wide strategic change was implemented, we had too many people whose skills and experience were no longer applicable to the business model. And even then we saw the writing on the wall and recognized that it faced a high improbability that it would actually get funded.

Remember all the new acronyms the dotcom vernacular spawned, including B2B and B2C? Well, we switched from a consumer-centric model to a business-to-business model focused on the development and implementation of tech-based channel distribution solutions for the apparel industry. Basically, we would shift from a B2C e-commerce engine and website to a supply chain support technologies provider for the same industry, but with support all the way through to the bricks-and-mortar retailers. In acronyms, it was now B2B2C.

In his master’s text exploring organizational behavior, Robert Vecchio states that “norms are the expectations for the behavior of the organization’s members, while values are preferences among activities and outcomes.” One of our leaders was the founder and Chairman, the other was the CEO he hired. They seemed to be aligned in views of the opportunity and what needed to be done, and I believe they communicated their values well.

I still hold respect for their positions and approach, although back then I wished I had known more about the company’s fate to be able to prepare my parachute (albeit decidedly not “golden”). The Chairman communicated his values through his actions, with nearly a million bucks of his own money into the venture. The CEO’s approach was more paternal, in a been-there-done-that sort of way, and he was a consummate storyteller, keeping us calm (if not wholly distracted) with his abilities to conjure up cheers and bear hugs in the locker room when we’re losing 65-0 at halftime.

However, what “norms” we had established were mostly no longer applicable — we were too young a company, only about seven months old, when the major shift occurred. You can imagine the underlying tension.

To be continued….

Posted by: Colin Mangham

*i.e., the pressure to change

In the spring of 2000, iWear Corporation, the short-lived but well staffed dotcom company I was working with (and that ultimately gave rise to my current company, The Daily Brand Group), dramatically changed its business model from e-commerce to supply chain management technologies. In basic terms, organizations tend to change primarily in response to external pressure rather than an actual internal desire or need to change. Ours was very much a case of external pressure. Everyone reading this remembers where they were and what they were doing when the dotcom boom spiraled downward to bust. When grossly over-inflated company valuations finally caught up to the stock market, the bottom fell out, and unfortunately the venture firms we were counting on to capitalize our dream scurried from sight.

We actually did well for a while, raising approximately $3.5 million and signing deals with 35 of the top 40 men’s apparel retailers before management began laying off people in all three offices. But we had what Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro (authors of “Unstuck”, a current favorite) identified as an “off-kilter” company with respect to organizational systems that are “stuck” and “out of balance”. We were a company that was high performing at the time but caught in a seismic shift in our industry. Our system was “aligned but aimed at the wrong task.”

For a Daily Story on this “Cradle to Grave” click here.

To be continued….

Posted by: Colin Mangham