Tag Archives: change

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Do You Have Days Where You Feel Like You’ve Been Dragged Through A Fiery Crucible?

“We live in the crucible between the promise of who we can become and the reality of who we’ve been.” Erwin McManus

I love this quote from McManus taken from his book The Artisan Soul: Crafting Your Life into a Work of Art

What McManus is saying is that in order to get from “who you are today” to your future potential or, the “promise of who you can become”, you will experience a lot of work, learning, change and pain. This journey is not comfortable but it is rewarding. It will stretch you in ways that you don’t want to stretch and it will break you down and then build you back up.

A crucible is defined as “a container of metal or refractory material employed for heating substances to high temperatures.” The crucible is used to break down substances at high temperatures or to refine and purify substances by burning or boiling off impurities.

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What Everybody Ought to Know About Certainty And How It Can Hurt You

“Certainty is one of the weakest positions in life. Curiosity is one of the most powerful. Certainty prohibits learning and curiosity fuels change.” Dr. Henry Cloud 

This quote is extremely powerful and should trigger some deep reflection in each of us.

How many times have we walked into a situation like a meeting, negotiation, conversation or argument with absolute certainty in our position? I know I am guilty of this way too often. How many of these situations resulted in unnecessary conflict or a solution that was not optimal?

What if you had entered these situations with an open mind, willing to understand other viewpoints and learn about the positions that others have on the topic? What if you were truly curious and open to solving the situation in the most productive way possible instead of simply bulldozing through to your solution?

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The Secret of Organizational Change Management

In the 2014 summer version of Strategy + Business magazine, there was an article entitled “10 Principles of Leading Change Management.”  This article ties nicely into one of my previous blog posts “The Protean Corporation” that was focused on what corporations need to do to deal with the continuous and explosive change that they are faced with everyday. That blog post was focused on the organizational structure and culture required for our changing environment while this post is focused on rolling out change within the organization itself.

The 10 guiding principles for change as described in the article are summarized below (with some of my commentary added);

1) Lead with the culture – when building your strategy for rolling out the change, take into account your organizations vision, mission, values and overall culture. Does the change align with the vision, mission, values and culture? How can you structure or position the change to leverage these things and make it easier for the organization to accept and embrace the change?

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What Everybody Can Learn About Business From Mountain Biking

I am an avid mountain biker and recently went on a ride that I have done many times in the past. It is a 28 mile single track ride in the Canadian Rockies that climbs and then descends over 4300 feet. In good weather I typically complete this trip in 3.5 hours. This time, however, it took me 5.5 hrs as I did not see the warning sign at the train head (picture above) until after I was finished! Due to significant flooding the previous year, the trail was literally destroyed in many places and required a lot of detours and carrying my bike while dealing with washouts, rock avalanches, mountains of debris and missing bridges.

Mountain biking 2

 

I could not help thinking about the parallels between mountain biking and business as I was fighting my way through these obstacles. I have listed some of them below;

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Protean Corporation

In his book The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation and What It Means for You, Michael S. Malone defines a new phenomenon in the corporate world which he calls the Protean Corporation (Protean means the ability to change into many different forms or to do many different things). The Protean Corporation is a new form of organization that is structured to handle the stresses and strains we see emerging in our marketplace today. Stresses ranging from the retiring baby boomers being replaced by Gen Xer’s, Gen Y’s and millennials to the rising Asian workforce, continuous Internet connectivity, the pace of technological change, dramatic increases in new consumers, the emerging nations and the rise in entrepreneurialism. These stresses and strains are unleashing an unprecedented rate of change into the marketplace, a rate of change that has never before been experienced and one that the organizations today struggle to handle successfully.

According to Malone, the Protean Corporation “must find a way to continuously and rapidly change almost everyone of their attributes – products, services, finances, physical plant, markets, customers, and both tactical and strategic goals – yet at the same time retain a core of values, customs, legends, and philosophy that will be little affected by the continuous and explosive changes taking place just beyond its edges.”

How can the Protean Corporation do this? By structuring itself into three distinct groups;