A friend of mine asked me yesterday about a case of a successful change management. By reading this interview with Bruce Chizen, Adobe's CEO I think I just found yet another classical example of a great company which succeeded in shifting from a troubled situation to a successful position.

In short, in 1998 Adobe was in the position of not having the ability to understand how well the business was doing, having also to deal with a hostile takeover from Quark. As such, Chizen made a major organizational shift by focusing the company on doing just a few things well, then getting the organization aligned to this strategy and proper executing. While doing it two elements were very important: (i)leveraging their competency in as many constituents as possible for both focusing on new platforms and reaching new markets and customer bases and (ii)delivering on the promise and demostrating success so that employees felt they were part of an organization that was making an impact. Chizen summarized the challenges best:

"It was the potential that we had as an organization, the richness of technology and innovation, and our ability to direct that against real customer solution".