How to Fire Up the Troops

Want to know how to rally the workforce and get people excited about following you into a tough battle against your business competition? Here’s the formula as demonstrated this week by Dell CEO Michael Dell:

• Write a memo to your workers about big changes you have in store for the company;
• Label it “Confidential” or “For Internal Use Only,” but find some way to get it leaked to a prominent business publication – preferably The Wall Street Journal;
• Be brutally reflective, even going so far as to challenge some of the basic business strategy of the company. For example, if you have built the businesses on marketing directly to consumers and users, perhaps write something like, “(We will) fix our Core Business to be competitive. The Direct Model has been a revolution, but is not a religion…We will continue to improve our business model, and go beyond it, to give our customers what they need.”
• Take a thinly-veiled swipe at one of your biggest competitors and energize employees with tough talk about how your new approach will be bigger, better, and radically different. Example: “We know our competitors drive complexity and needless cost into customers’ environments. These so-called ‘service divisions’ create a never-ending cycle of activity with unclear return on investment. We intend to break this cycle … and will help customers escape this complexity trap and unlock the true potential of technology.”
• Frame the memo as a call to arms, a manifesto for change, and most importantly, as “a defining moment in our history.”
• Be honest about the challenges ahead, but point to a better future (“the future looks great for Dell”) and the tough work ahead, but emphasize the Promised Land that lies ahead. For example, “we are up to the challenges that we’ll face on our journey — challenges that will test, teach, and ultimately strengthen us as a company and a team.”
• Thanks everyone for the hard work to come (“Thank you for transforming Dell with the customer in mind every day.”)

Will this work? Only time will tell. But when Starbucks’ Howard Schultz did something much like this a few weeks ago, it garnered quite a bit of press and some positive employee feedback. Clearly, the “leaked memo” does a great job of grabbing the attention of customers and the business community at large. And maybe, it will help Dell to buy time to get the new strategy put into place.