Change is Your Competitive Advantage by Karl G. Schoemer

Author:Karl G. Schoemer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Adams Business, an imprint of Adams Media, Inc.
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

07

BUILDING A CHANGE-

ADAPTIVE CULTURE

So far we’ve been looking at change from a close-up and personal perspective. We’ve looked at a range of different individual behaviors, reactions, and communication styles in an effort to understand how change works in an organization.

But if you really want to get your organization solidly on the path to success in this New Business Reality, you also need to take a step back and look at it from a broader, organization-wide perspective. After all, we’re really interested in where “the rubber meets the road.” You need to understand what happens when all of these individual dynamics come together in the workplace—with dozens if not hundreds of people working together and sharing their experiences of change, for better or worse, with their own individual fears, insecurities, and styles brought together in one effort.

I know, sometimes it’s hard to understand how any work gets done in the workplace environment, much less how any change happens! Asking for coordinated and effective change seems to be setting the bar pretty high!

And it is. But that’s where we are today. The increasing demands made on you by information, communication, and customers mean that it’s not okay just to keep doing things the way you’ve always done them. Not only do you have to raise the bar on your expectations for yourself, but you also have to figure out how to raise the bar on the performance of your entire organization.

After all, while you may have to manage individuals, and these individual perspectives will come in handy in that context, no one’s going to thank you for developing a few enthusiastic advocates for change in your area if your department as a whole isn’t pulling its weight in the company-wide change initiative.

So while the first part of the book concerned itself with the local effects of change on individuals, and what to do about it, this part is going to be about change in the organization. It doesn’t matter how good you are at change if you’re the only person who’s changing.

Developing an organization-wide perspective on how change works and what you can do to accelerate it is absolutely crucial, because this is where an organization can gain a large part of its competitive advantage in today’s chaotic and ever-changing business environment.

This is one of the central ideas of my thinking about change. In today’s marketplace, an organization gains competitive advantage by getting to be good at change—by creating a truly “change adaptive” culture that can adjust quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

Let’s be absolutely clear about this. Creating a change-adaptive culture is very different from changing the culture. “Changing the culture” implies a single event in response to a single problem— changing the culture from plan A to plan B.

But we’ve already seen that this is a luxury we no longer have in the changing marketplace. Probably, you never again will face something as simple as a single change with a discrete starting point and finish line.

If only it were as simple as

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