Embrace the Change or Be Changed

Many big organization are having similar problems and are still living the classical, administrative way of management. I am a strong believer in an agile culture, because you need the agile framework to survive in a rapidly changing world. It’s the key to business success, try out things fast, gain experience and adopt quickly. The agile philosophy at that is very much connected to the natural selection mechanism of Charles Darwin.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

However, in your daily business people are often not open for your great ideas or resistant for change. Typically, I start a change process by asking stupid questions, like WHAT IF …

• … we would try out a new process
• … we would use a different kind of technology
• … we would just do it differently

Over the years, I received all kinds of reactions. People shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, some laughed at me and some even screamed at me. Furthermore, you should always be aware if people start to respond with phrases like, ...

• This will never change
• We always did it like that
• No, you are not allowed to do it

But as a leader you must become resilient to these disrespectful behaviors or hopeless people. If you really believe something is wrong and you have an idea to improve, then be brave and be a pain in the ass to those people by keep pushing. Because interestingly, if you do the change and you are successful, those kind of people are the first who will say: “Come on, it’s obvious. I had always said we should have done it this way but nobody listened to me!”
Just complaining without acting is easy but fighting for a dream or a solution and driving it to success is an art.

George Bernard Shaw said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”.

Lessons Learned (management attitudes):
I believe one of the most important attitudes of a leader’s mindset is to embrace change, by always looking what is the best for the organization and what is the necessary change. In my opinion it is the duty of every loyal employee to push the organization to the next level and to make it stronger for the upcoming challenges. Because if you don’t change your environment you get used to the weaknesses of your organization and by imitating the mistakes you become also weak. Finally, if many people are following your example your organization will just disappear. There are a lot of examples in history like Brockhaus, Kodak, BlackBerry, …

So it is very important to keep your beginners spirit. This means to stay curious, to be open for change and to be eager to learn new things.

Never be satisfied with your achievements, there is always a potential for improvement or for the next evolutionary step forward. Amazon has established a great company philosophy: “Every day is day one!”.