All about changes

Brief overview:

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

- Charles Robert Darwin

What can we learn from the quote? The world is changing and never should people get too specialized. People always need to keep responsive and flexible since societies, companies and technology are changing. If you fail to be adaptable, you are likely to get obsolete and falling behind. The world is changing every day as the matter of fact. But what drive these changes? There are many drivers in different aspects that can lead to world changes.

Now let’s look closer to changes. There are two types of changes: Revolutionary and evolutionary changes. In this week class, we focus on revolutionary changes. Revolutionary changes can range from simple innovations such as wheels… to more complex inventions. The most significant difference distinguishes these two kinds of changes is that revolutionary change is more disruptive. It means that disruptive changes change the way things are done permanently. For example, before emails are invented, delivery mails are indispensable in daily lives. But emails change the way people send information forever. As I read in a newspaper recently, United States Postal Service is nearing default as email has emerged and exploded and people no longer want to use postal service anymore.

Changes happen everywhere in every aspect of society. As a result, people must know how to Therefore, change management and change leadership are important skills to be successful in modern markets. People often mistaken between change management and change leadership. In fact, these are two different roles and can be distinguished by many features. Prof and reading materials suggest that change leaders are ones initiate original ideas, set up visions, dare to take risks and inspire other people while change managers are ones focusing on structures and systems in order to regulate changes. Change managers should be meticulous and have abilities to find and fix wrong things and also stabilize the system.

Key take-away points:

• Model “Proactively Managing Change – Understanding the Pessimism-Time Curve”

As we talk deeply about changes, we should mention how individuals manage change. Prof shows us “Proactively Managing Change – Understanding the Pessimism-Time Curve” model, which indicates four stages to proactively manage changes. The first stage is uninformed optimism in which individuals create new ideas and feel optimistic about the future of their ideas. The next two stages are informed pessimism and informed realism. When more information is taken into consideration, many difficulties and obstacles arise and make the ideas impractical. Despite difficulties, individuals should not give up and try to work out the reality.

• Management methods in modern world

In times of disruptive change your expected future is no longer valid.  Leaders need to think and act differently in order to chart a new course for the enterprise.

Doug Berger – The innovators

Now many countries has been changing from industrial economies into post-industrial economies, management method has to adjust to that fundamental change. In industrial economies, companies try to manage their employees to follow orders and work as hard as possible. However, in knowledge economy, the management task is much more difficult because managers have to deal with intellectual properties. Since employees work with more complicate issues, the management method in which employees strictly follow instructions is not effective anymore. In knowledge economies, employers want their employees to contribute new ideas, innovations to companies. Therefore, managers have to give employees incentives and opportunies to creats more values. Companies should empower their employees, give them responsibilities so that they can feel the sense of belonging and contribute more to companies.

Issues for further discussion:

What is the effective way that can motivate people to contribute their best to companies?

Personal rating:

I rate this week lesson 8/10