For years we had been threatened with a bogey man. “If we don’t do our job well enough, we’ll get taken over by the German Post Office”. The threat was taken some-what half-heartedly: we couldn’t imagine our-selves in postmen’s uniform. When the day arrived that our senior management announced that, indeed, we were now a division of the “Deutschepost”, we wondered what we had done so wrong, and how soon the new uniforms would be arriving.

I slipped into my new uniform quicker than I had expected. One January morning I was told to come along to the towering HQ in Bonn, and discuss a new role that was to be offered me. A new brand was to be implemented, communicating the capabilities of the new, bigger and better DHL to its employees and customers. The essential work, such as the choice of colours, font and creative stuff had already been done: all we now had to do was go around the European countries and implement it. Oh, and it would be good if this didn’t take more than three months, as that was what had been promised to the investment analysts.

There were, as I’m sure you will not find surprising, a few “challenges”. The two key ones were money and people. Or people and money: I can’t remember which one came first. Anyway, the point was, the “Rebranding” exercise was a little ahead of the organizational design. The top level management teams had been appointed in the countries, but it was being left to them to sort out the carnage in the hierarchy below. This is so called “top down” implementation. I will not debate its merits and failings here, only to note that in the immediate none of the people who had to get the job done knew what their new job was. Arriving to talk about the new brand and the plan for its implementation, local staff wanted to debate with me what their role was.

Normally, just to annoy me, they brought up the subject of money first. “You want us to paint everything yellow? We haven’t got any money. Go back to Bonn and ask them to pay for it”. Well, by now I had donned the new uniform. I told them what I had been told to say: “There is no magic cow that [excretes] money” (apparently a translation of a German saying). I could look them straight in the eyes, a representative of the new powers, and tell them to get on with it. I would like to say that this made me feel guilty: brutalizing former and new colleagues, but in fact it was a little exhilarating. And somewhat justifiably I reckoned that some of this forcefulness had been lacking in our old organization, so cruelty was not the only source of pleasure, but a belief that powerful and clear direction from the centre was a new and positive change.

I think that the exercise achieved at least one key objective: to get the staff of the new merged companies talking together, faced with a relatively simple but highly visible task, of changing and communicating the new face of the company. This should also have been an optimistic and motivating message: we are bigger, we are stronger and we aim to be number one. Such promises are easy to say, but less so to deliver. There would be pain and setbacks along the way, but this discussion was not permitted at the “wedding party” we were throwing. That’s how it should be: there’s no point in being negative once the “nuptials” have begun, but after our “communications fiesta” we would need sober evaluation of all the promises that we had made and resilient determination not to disappoint our partners.
I shut such worries out of my head. I literally played the corporate song before each presentation, listened to the worries of the local staff about the new tune, and turned a sympathetic, but ultimately deaf, ear. The “money thing” was just a pretext to shove the project back in the face of HQ’s new foot soldier, and I dug in until local money could be found. The people, despite not being told explicitly what their responsibility was, did the job with great determination and professionalism; many would not have a job after the project was done.

Marriage, music and military: three positive metaphors for our hopes of partnership, harmony and discipline. I pulled my “new uniform” tightly around me and kept faith that it was the symbol of a new and prosperous future.

James Howe