What Works A Decade of Change at Champion International

Between 1986 and 1997, Champion International transformed from an underachieving, tradition-bound organization into a thriving, competitive, successful company. This work offers an insiders' account of this process, distilling its lessons into practical tools.

Once upon a time, Champion International, one of the largest players in the highly competitive paper products industry, struggled with a below-average physical plant, a traditionally managed workforce, adversarial union relations, and a reputation for poor financial performance. Over a period of ten years--while another industry player, Scott Paper, was being shred apart by Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap--Champion transformed itself into a Wall Street winner with exemplary employee practices. How did one company survive and thrive where another disintegrated?
Despite the rags-to-riches results, there was no magic behind Champion's success. Theirs is not a story of one man's heroic triumph or the application of quick-fixes or fads. Champion prevailed through an unwavering company-wide commitment to sustained, progressive change in the face of considerable criticism and setbacks. In What Works, three change leaders who saw the process through give a candid account of the corporation's experiences that will help executives and managers everywhere understand the complexities of large-scale change.
Unlike other top-down, executive-led transformations, Champion's comeback began with reform on the shop floor and grew over time to include every level of the hierarchy and every business activity. It matched major technological investments with a guiding sense of social values for a broad-based transfiguration that remained both profitable and humane.
The authors-writing with the perspective and authority their insider's positions afford them--detail how Champion managed its sweeping change effort, analyze its enormous success, and provide a set of principles that people at all organizational levels can apply to their own attempts to lead and manage change.


An Inside Account of One Company's Remarkable Transformation

Take a fascinating, decade-long journey to witness the remarkabletransformation of a mediocre company into a team-based topcompetitor. Your guides are a trio of participant/observers, allkey players in achieving this systemic change of classicproportion.

--Jerome M. Rosow, president, Work in America Institute, Inc.

Anyone in a leadership position today, union or management, shouldread this book. It tells the important story of howlabor/management partnerships can make a difference and provideworkable solutions to complex problems presented by today's globaleconomy.

--Boyd Young, international president, United PaperworkersInternational Union

A Cinderella story of perseverance and triumph, What Works is aninstructive guide to achieving success through cooperation,teamwork, and courage. It tells the tale of how ChampionInternational--one of America's oldest and largest industrial papercompanies--transformed itself from an underachieving,tradition-bound organization into a thriving Wall Street winnerover the course of eleven years. In answering the question of how acompany can change successfully over time while remaining bothhumane and profitable, this brisk, brutally honest, insiders'account offers a number of hard-won lessons and practical tools tomanagers and visionaries faced with the same daunting challenges.