About Change & Competition — Chapter 1
A series — for dummies — about learning how to face a needed change. Because you feel it, you know it, or you are told about it.
. . .
“If you don’t change, the competition will eat you up”.
This quote just looks like one of those marketing mantras everyone’s repeating, but no one’s doing. But it is the truth. It concerns every company and every individual in their daily shining life.
It is what today, in this exact moment, everyone should be thinking, should be elaborating on, to the right way to deal with these critical times and survive.
So how did it lose its powerful meaning? Well, because it’s been repeated so many times it lost its inherent attributes. And too many times no one gets it well enough.
Yes, of course, maybe you saw some successful examples and you read that they did not only change their way of thinking and behaving, but they utterly transformed it. They did so in a number of steps to attract success and — but no. No, wait. They surely had some kind of magic tricks, monetary incentives, or whatnot to build their way and be successful in the end. Definitely, their mummies helped them. Nah, it wasn’t their skills, their abilities to change and adapt. They definitely cheated.
Ok, chill. That can be possible. But the most possible option is that they decided to believe in this article’s initial assumption and applied the mantra’s teaching. That is changing means to change yourself at first, to improve yourself, to have a second chance — or a real first one — in your personal and professional life, or in your company’s.
No, it’s not the same if you wait for others to take the initiative just to follow up with them — in a sort of #metoo trend. There’s no competitive hedge in doing so. You’ll end up eating at a table too small for everyone.
I know, there are circumstances for which you change — or choose to change — only on the basis that belief can be risky. But changing because you’re forced to do so by exogenous conditions is the same as being discarded already. You’re basically losing any relevance you could’ve had.
I want to give you two interesting perspectives on why you should change. Try and do it every day, if not in your actions, at least in the way you think — even if this means redesigning your company’s strategy.
The first one:
What yesterday was an advantage, it will be soon replaced by trends of tomorrow evolving in a never-ending continuum — whether they’re rapidly brought by innovation or suddenly popping up because of a pandemic.
This doesn’t mean that you have to waste all your previous knowledge and skills. You just have to keep directing them towards new interests and goals, so as to “smell what new delicacy is in the oven” or to even bake it yourself.
Here, what you need is the ability of a critical thinker.
The second one:
Refusing to learn or improve means to slowly become redundant in the system you’re dealing with.
It’s a basic law of nature. The most important: the law of evolution and of life. In brief, the moment you stop improving yourself is the moment you grow old. All that’s left is to accept your end — even unconsciously.
In longer terms, a species that stops evolving won’t be able to undertake epochal challenges.
Here, what you need is the opportunity to challenge yourself and a method to train for it.
Mind that I’m not saying changing is easy. Again, let’s analyze the possible scenarios.
First scenario: explorers.
People (or organisations) who change spontaneously, suddenly, believe they have an inner drive, but rather, they move because of two main reasons: they are either running away or they’re heading over a goal. In both cases, they are fueled by fear or pain. They step in a risky environment made of uncertainty, but at least their motivations are stronger than the problems or the uncomfortable circumstances they’re already in. And this will save them — and you.
You go and search for new horizons where to compete, taken by the emotional excitement that suddenly drives you to live and spread out.
Second Scenario: planners.
People (or organisations, more often) who meditate on how to change, who plan a change, become self-aware of the conditions they have to change for. They carried inside the pain and the fear of being unable to move out of their comfort zone and will suffer for this choice, for what they left behind. But at least, they have a steady and clear plan ahead. And this will save them — and you.
You plan and choose the landscape where to compete after a slow elaboration of an emotional drive that made you self-conscious.
Third Scenario: panicked muddlers.
For those who remain, for those who choose to stay put in their comfort zone, both people and companies, changing is just sounding like a trap.
Why? Because they focus on how fast the environment is changing. Let’s take technology: people are misled by its speed. They focus only on the next big thing. They feel distressed, stretched to an extent where panic is very close. Thus, they don’t change. They are afraid to fail, to get stuck, to lose what they have.
For the latter, the most common and diffused category, my advice is not to try and define goals and ambitions in an attempt to capture the wind shift. Agility and flexibility are great skills only within a plan. But the plan can’t be just as agile and flexible.
In this case, your plan must be a list of what you have, what you are, and what you are doing and you should constantly update each of these.
In all of these three cases, the process to undertake — more or less consciously — is related to:
- Observing and listening;
- Reading and understanding;
- Imagining and planning;
- Relating and acting;
- Evolving.
So, if you don’t observe, understand, plan, act, and evolve, yes. You will be eaten by the competition. Sooner than later.
To conclude this first and introductive “About Change & Competition” pamphlet, I want to give you a couple of quotes from two very distant times but very similar in the meaning and in the message they convey:
In the early 20th century G.K. Chesterton wrote ”To the very last, every problem is a problem of will” and around 2009 Jacques Attali said “Humanity significantly evolves only when moved by true and deep fear”.
Today we can perhaps say that no will can exist or last without a sparkle of fear to light its fire.
To be continued…
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