(This article is a condensed excerpt from the upcoming book Technology and the Agents of Change.)

Change happens. Everywhere and all of the time. Change goes so fast that many of us long for a stable place to rest.

So how do you feel about choosing a life of instability? About deciding to deal with change every day? About leaving any hope of calm in favor of an ongoing avalanche of opportunities and problems?

If you've chosen a career in or around technology, then you've made just those decisions. Congratulations!

Truths About Your World: Managing development and/or movement of technology is precisely the same as managing purposeful change. Think about that for a moment.

Movement of technology is every bit as important to the success of a technology and its developers as is creation of the technology.

All technology development is creation of change, from basic R&D to final manufacturing. All technology movement is creation of change, from delivery of technical papers to delivery of polished products.

Your job is that of change agent, whether you see it that way or not. Change-agent skills are as important to your career as are your technical discipline skills.

Moving Technologies: The ideas above come from my recent study on the movement of technology within Amoco, Chrysler, Corning, Fisher-Price, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Lucent (Bell Laboratories), Motorola, Texaco, and U S WEST. You know the flows:

• R&D to engineering to manufacturing
• R&D to customers in operations
• Technical services to company operations

I found paradigm shifting views on technology management processes, as reported in the next article in this series. We'll begin, however, with a focus on the nature of change within companies and the skills needed by people involved in change. We will use the terms "R&D" and "lab" for simplicity, yet our conclusions apply broadly to research, development, engineering, product development, manufacturing support, information services, and other technical services.

Let's begin by looking at change within Corning and Texaco.

Corning is a technology-based company that sees opportunities as the intersections of technical innovation and market demand. Their technology portfolio is managed to maximize the value of corporate opportunities.

Corning's technology moves from research to end customers along a value chain defined by:

Idea Generation: Creation and development of ideas about a technology area

Proof of Concept: Demonstration that the idea can be converted into a clean experiment

Reduction to Practice: Demonstration that results of the experiment can be manufactured

Scale Up: Pilot manufacturing studies to learn costs and set process specifications

Commercialization: Full manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and customer service

At each transition, cost and risk decisions are made based on:

• Progress -vs- milestones
• The plan going forward, including costs and required resources
• Project value in light of others in the portfolio and the fit between technical and business strategies

Technology, manufacturing, and marketing work together from the beginning. A cross-functional innovation team directs progress and performs evaluations at every stage.

Three key roles maintain momentum.

Team leader: Provides cross-functional management

Project champion: A high-level manager who drives project momentum in the face of competing opportunities

Sponsor: A Corning business manager who provides funding and links to top management

Cross-functional concurrence over time enables seamless technology movement. Once the innovation team is created, the only barrier to transition into manufacturing should be the relevance of the project to changes in market conditions and corporate strategies.

In practice, the process requires special skills. Team leaders enable people with diverse backgrounds and styles to work together. Team presentations influence management and the technology portfolio. Team focus and alignment on corporate goals improve the likelihood of making an impact.

Both creation and movement of technology at Corning depend on the abilities of people to learn together, communicate, and share responsibilities and commitments.

Texaco: In 1986, the price of oil collapsed, and oil companies worldwide began restructuring to the new cost regime. Industry R&D labs transitioned from having corporate funding and autonomy to funding and existence dependent on paying customers within the company.

Texaco's Exploration and Production Technology Department is a survivor. EPTD serves Texaco business units worldwide with core research and technical services. EPTD has made a dramatic evolution from an inward to an outwardly focused organization - a dramatic yet necessary transition to a new way of doing business.

The transition is less in technology creation than in technology movement. EPTD has learned how to build advance demand for its services through alignment, accountability, and communications.

Alignment: First, EPTD appointed two directors from technology and two from the business units. Understanding of R&D and technical services was balanced with clarity on business-unit issues.

Second, EPTD was strategically re-engineered to ensure that Texaco's investment would result in added value not available from other resources. R&D became a true strategy for corporate health and competitive advantage.

Third, portfolio managers were developed as the heart of EPTD's alignment on needs. Each manager handles 40-50 projects and is responsible for confirming goals, helping principle investigators orient projects on true customer needs, and managing budget.

Accountability: Projects themselves are defined by contracts between EPTD and one or more business units. Each contract specifies value added, deliverables, cost-time-resources, and progress review points.

Contracts are proposed by the business units, yet a director or portfolio manager won't sign off until satisfied that the project is aligned with business-unit needs; a champion for the project exists in one or more business units; and clear business unit demand exists to "pull" results quickly into operations.

That is, project approval is not approval of an idea or process, but authorization to use science and engineering to solve problems and create opportunities for Texaco's business units. This is a huge redirection of motivations for an oil-industry R&D lab. It requires accountability of scientists and engineers to their customers as well as their management.

Communications: EPTD "creates awareness of needs." Maintaining technical leadership requires looking beyond what customers know they want to what they would want if such a thing were possible. When customers are not yet aware of their needs, EPTD helps them see the future. The lab takes the initiative to go out, open doors, listen to needs, and share visions.

This approach requires people skills, especially in the portfolio managers. Creating demand is a marketing task involving customer focus, listening, learning about customer needs, making presentations in customer language and context, and working together to reach viable contracts.

Agents of Change
Centralized R&D at Corning serves product development, while R&D at Texaco serves company operations. At Lockheed Martin, R&D is distributed to product areas, and at Lucent part is centralized and part is distributed. At Chrysler and Fisher-Price, R&D of suppliers is highly leveraged. At U S West, R&D is primarily a strategic planning tool.

A synthesis of these studies clearly shows that R&D is all about change and needs more than science, engineering, and project management to survive. Efficient technology and product development require innovation plus eight social skills. R&D needs conscious agents of change.

Innovation: Innovation is change by introduction of new ideas and methods. Important innovations add value, so important innovators contribute new and better ways to satisfy customers at a profit.

Innovators work on both results and processes. They target end-user satisfaction with persistent, optimistic, and aggressive hard work. Leveraging innovation requires these change-agent skills:

Vision: Sense the need for change. Envision a desired future and its many implications. Instill ownership of the vision in others to gain their commitment to renewal.

See tactical details and how to deal with the full complexity of a situation. Look beyond current practices to new alternatives, then constantly re-evaluate how to best achieve the vision.

Learning: Seek knowledge as an ongoing, open-minded, flexible adaptation to both vision and reality. Be willing to unlearn.
Look outside self-centered domains to find new ideas, methods, opportunities, and solutions. Synthesize knowledge to leverage the strengths of other learners.

Leadership: Facilitate ownership, validation, and enhancement of visions. Draw out the strengths and contributions of people and teams.

Find, enhance, and use all strengths, and create new strengths through synergies and teams. Integrate people with diverse skills into more powerful resources for positive change.

Coach, mentor, inspire, empower, encourage risk taking, and reward performance. Challenge convention, motivate out of complacency, and turn resistance into momentum.

Strategy: Set goals and choose strategies. Discover and evaluate options. Think outside current paradigms to gain competitive advantage. Without violating values, give up personal preference to best achieve goals.

Be a strategy! Be the best way to reach goals, the solution to problems, and the product or service that meets customer needs.

Marketing: Make and keep satisfied customers, at a profit, over time, in a competitive environment. Assess customer needs and design solutions that satisfy those needs. Create demand, build credibility, and gain product acceptance. Develop broad ownership of visions, innovations, and strategies. Support internal culture changes as well as external market changes.

Cooperation: Teaming - Build effective teams around core opportunities and problems. Build shared vision and sense of purpose, then empower decision making.

Concurrence - Work together in teams across disciplines and cultures within the company. Share responsibilities and rewards to achieve common goals.

Leveraging - Find, acknowledge, develop, and gain from the strengths of others. Contribute strengths for others to leverage.

Communication: Listen, learn from others, interact, and share knowledge, methods, experience, and learning. Focus on the value of what is offered or has been done.

Center communications on target audiences. See situations and products through audience eyes, then meet their needs, in their language, and on their terms.

Relationship Management: Initiate and sustain mutually beneficial connections to people and organizations. Be willing to go beyond cooperation to partnering and interdependence.

Look beyond immediate context and commit to extended, win-win interactions. Work at personal levels as well as task and strategy levels. See the personal issues in any change and deal effectively with those issues.

Every respondent in this study stressed the need for people skills like these. Skill presence determines whether we can learn what we need and make changes that are necessary. These skills can make or break projects, technologies, and even R&D as a corporate function.

So, you've chosen a career in technology. Congratulations. You are a change agent. Are you ready?

As a change agent, you will change what is possible by creating and moving technologies. If you don't have the required skills, you need to learn them. You must change yourself in order to initiate and sustain changes in your company.

There is no calm place any more in technology. Change is accelerating, and we will never again see change proceed as slowly as it does today. To survive and thrive, we will accept our roles as change agents and learn how to do the job well.

Think about that!