The WInter Coat

When I first arrived in the USA, my job was to standardize the computer systems in 14 countries for a global financial services firm. At 31 years old, I had no idea how to even scope out this task. I did realize I had absolutely no control over system owners and standardizing them would probably be the last thing on their priority lists.
Asia Pacific was the smallest region and had a great reputation for sound management and novel ideas. The VP there was about my age and close to me demographically. I would get no traction in his region without his help.
About three months after I met him, he called me up one day and asked if I could help arrange some flights to Canada so he could visit relatives during a business trip that fall.
I did and he was very grateful. During our conversation, he asked, mockingly, what the weather had been like in New York – being summer in Australia, it was 90o in March.
A week later I called him back. “Do you own a winter coat?” I asked him. He didn’t, saying in his part of Australia, there was no such thing since the temperature rarely got down to 40 o in the winter. I told him it would probably be freezing or below in early November in Montreal and offered to get a coat for him. He accepted my offer and I sent him the coat a couple of weeks later.
By August that year, I’d figured out a standardization strategy but it would have huge impacts, particularly on the smaller regions. I called my Australia contact one night and shared the strategy. He wasn’t well pleased at first – it might result in his job being eliminated, which I had realized already. Once I explained it to him, he understood what I was getting at and reluctantly agreed to be a prime mover for me in implementing this strategy.
Over the next two years, that VP worked hard to align his region with the strategy, convincing his business partners of the benefits and showing leadership to other regions of the world that they found hard to ignore.
I returned to England two years later. About the last thing I did before I left was to present a global IT reorganization strategy to the company president which he approved.
Without that winter coat, I don’t believe the strategy would have gotten off the ground. The VP in Australia wouldn’t have been willing to buy into the strategy; he wouldn’t have stepped up to lead into it; he wouldn’t have been prepared to give up his job and the global financial services provider would be left, today, with a jumbled bag of systems and databases in no fit state to support the service mission of the firm.
I had accomplished my goal by stepping outside of my role. I had gotten one-on-one with a key leader, bought (yes bought) his support with a personal favor then collected from him to further my strategy. In hindsight, this looks like the careful planning of a wise man. It wasn’t – it was a rookie’s luck but it sure gave me an influence model that worked beyond my wildest dreams.