Story by Jon Stalnaker
AKA The Studebaker Dude
I googled the phrase “change agent” for a definition and found way more than I expected. I whittled it down to fit what I wanted to express and found a couple of definitions I’d like to share. Specifically, how the term relates to business. A Change Agent is a consultant hired to assist with implementing changes in an organization. You might say it is a person who takes an active role or produces a specified effect. As I reminisce about me during the 1980s, I like to think of myself as an individual who promoted and supported new ways of doing something within the company, that being the United States Postal Service. A gigantic semi-government entity with roots that go all the way back to Benjamin Franklin. An organization with a library full of rules and regulations and methods that, to an insignificant employee such as myself, seemed to be carved in stone. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be changed if they do not fit the current environment.
I was amused at the words that were listed as synonyms of the term Change Agent. The list was long, so I whittled some more, to narrow it down to the ones that got my attention. Activist or advocate, reformer, mover and shaker, innovator, leader, and change maker, all fit with how I saw my intentions. I met with resistance from managers who saw me more as an agitator or hot shot. One in particular said it to my face. My response to that was that it was because I cared. He seemed to accept that response as he was helpful in my movement up the ladder of success. Two other synonyms that I liked were Champion (if you know Studebakers, you know why I like that one) and Guru. Those two just tickled my funny bone.
I was reading through an old newsletter from December of 1985 that was published for the employees of the Stockton Management Sectional Center (MSC). The MSC covered postal employees from Lodi to Merced and the Sierra Nevada to Tracy. If you look that up on a map, you will see a large portion of Northern and Central California. I kept this old newsletter because I wrote a story called “My Day As a Mailman” about my not-yet 2-year-old son when he dressed up like a mailman for Halloween. (I actually gave my son the credit for writing it) I read the newsletter from cover to cover and realized that there were many articles describing other activities I was involved in during that period. It was a busy time in my career with lots of side activities that I was involved with. The MSC was building a large mail processing plant and I served on many committees for that project. EI/QWL was just being released and if you read last week’s story, I explained my involvement. It also mentioned the Safe “T” program which I had forgotten about. I thought it sounded vaguely familiar and then I saw a list of the program’s moderators, and there I was in the list of eight of us.
Things were changing in the old USPS, and I was excited to be able to participate in so many different ways. Opportunities abounded for creative ideas and I thoroughly enjoyed helping and being part of the dusting off of old regulations and forms. I was able to participate with a team of like-minded change agents to rewrite the letter carrier Handbooks that were originally penned when the USPS took over from the old United States Post Office Department. Upper management, the same guys that used to call me a pain in the butt, were now listening to me and implementing some of my ideas. Some still saw me as a pain, but they were unable to stop me. Guys like me called them dinosaurs and they all eventually retired or otherwise disappeared. Now I’m one of the dinosaurs that has retired. But, life goes on as I reminisce.
