Blake’s experience running and turning around Promus Hotels and insurance giant USF&G, both multibillion-dollar corporations, gave him the edge over five other finalists. His mandate was to shepherd the USOC through a restructuring approved by the organization's 113 member board of directors. Blake’s reputation as a hard-driving, up-front turnaround expert was considered exactly what was needed to institute in the USOC many of the management disciplines common to efficiently managed corporations. The rationale behind Blake’s selection is not atypical - bringing in a change agent to lead a cultural transformation.

Even to the survivors of Blake’s staff reduction, his full-steam-ahead approach made many within the USOC administration feel disenfranchised. It is important to remember that Blake was following an action plan for which he was hired and mandated by the board. Despite this, his failure to marshal support, among the athletes, their parents, and their coaches chafed deeply. Feelings erupted six weeks later, at a mid-March meeting to approach Blake’s overall plan for restructuring the USOC.

... Jim Kilts realized that the culture of Gillette needed to be changed even before he walked in the door. From his external competitive review, detailed financial analysis, board interviews, and meetings with company executives, he saw that the company was underperforming. “When I asked the HR chief to take me through an overview of how we were rating our people,” he says, “I was told that seventy-three percent were rated as ‘exceeds expectations.’ I asked him how we could be exceeding expectations when we hadn’t grown the business for the past five years on either the top or the bottom line.

The positive energy that came out of my early days made some people - and me - think that we had that cultural issue fixed. The unfortunate fact, though, was that there was deep-seated resistance to change - a feeling of ‘This guy will be gone in three years and I’ve had my job for twenty, so why should I change?’ With three hundred thousand employees, the problem is inevitably in the middle. It was relatively easy to get to the top management in line - if not, I could fire them - but I couldn’t do that far into the organization. I couldn’t personally determine, for example, who in the tax or logistics department was obstructing progress.

As Lou Gerstner says, “Changing the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. You can’t simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You can’t mandate it, can’t engineer it.

“What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But at some point you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.