Posts Tagged ‘Change’

Before proceeding .. Please consider reading this Post from Seth Godin.

Tagged as: active garage, are you indispensable, Change, health, instinct, landmark, landmark education, linchpin, lizard brain, seth godin, the three laws of performance, vijay peduru, yoga

Our natural instinct is to fight change. We always want stability. Our ancestors in the jungle had to be extra cautious about any change in the surroundings  and that instinct still remains in our genes and we fear change. We imagine something bad is going to happen and that is why we fear change.

In the Industrial Revolution, change was slow..  People went to the same factory and almost did the same job and their day was almost the same the whole 40 years of their working life.

If we look at the current reality in our knowledge economy , Change is happening at lightning pace in the world. If we live in this ever changing world and if we fear change. we are stressed every moment. When we are stressed, the side effects are unhappiness and health problems.. Is there a way out.  Yes there is and… it is to learn to embrace change. Like any other skill this can be learnt and can become enjoyable.

There are three ways to learn to embrace change:

1. Accept that most of the time change cannot be anticipated and we will always live in uncertainties : If we look at it, we cannot stop the change happening in the world, so accept it. Seth Godin in his book “Survival is not enough” talks about the following article he read in the New york times. It explains why most of the time, we may not be able to anticipate change  The title was “What happens when the Jaguars die”

“Jaguars, as it turns out live is Mexico. Their favorite food is rabbits. And when jaguars die(due to encroachments on their habitat by people), the rabbits multiply like , well, rabbits. And when the number of rabbits dramatically increases, the grassland turns to desert. In other words, a small change in the status of one animal ( the jaguar) can lead to millions of acres becoming a desert.

The ecosystem is very responsive. kill off one crop and entire species that depend on it become extinct–Just like the ecosystem your business operates in. A small change– say the availability of competitive pricing data to your customer base– can have implications for the way your company must run all of its operations in order to succeed”

There are very few ecosystems which are stable but the majority of them are unstable. So accept that we cannot always anticipate change and will have to accept uncertainty.

2. Know that we are capable of embracing change: In our workplace or in any endeavor we don’t like, change appears as bad and threatening.. but you change the context – for example, lets say you are planning to go on a vacation… suddenly Change is fun, exploring is fun. mystery is fun. This indicates, that we are capable of embracing change if we decide to embrace it.
3. Embrace Change: The only way, species in our planet earth survived is by evolving themselves. Seth Godin recommends to to get into the habit of making frequent small changes first, then work your way to bigger and bigger things.  He calls it zooming .. Zooming is about constant change, for no particular reason, and with no particular goal.

Zooming is about stretching your limits by adapting to new ideas, opportunities, and challenges without triggering our inherent human change-avoidance reflex. Zooming is about adapting small changes over time. You can practice zooming in everyday life,  Seth Godin proposes the following five simple things to try in our daily lives.

1. For dinner tonight, eat a food that you’ve never tasted. Then try another one tomorrow night.
2. On your way to work tomorrow, listen to a CD from a musical genre that you hate or that’s new to you.
3. Once a week, meet with someone from outside your area of expertise. Go to a trade show on a topic in which you have no interest whatsoever.
4. Read a magazine you’ve never read before.
5. Change the layout of your office.

…or just do something for the first time, as often as possible. Once you master these five steps, you are much more likely to invent five more steps and gradually you will view every change as an opportunity. Companies that zoom do the same thing.

Keep Zooming…

—

Tagged as: active garage, Change, embrace, fear, seth godin, vijay peduru, zoom, zooming

Welcome to the penultimate post in this 12-part series on QUALITY, titled #QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture.

Here are the first ten posts, in case you would like to go back and take a look:

1. Quality #1: Quality is a long term differentiator
2. Quality #2: Cure Precedes Prevention
3. Quality #3: Great People + Good Processes = Great Quality
4. Quality #4: Simplifying Processes
5. Quality #5: Customers are your “Quality Partners”
6. Quality #6: Knowing what needs improvement
7. Quality #7: Productivity and Quality
8. Quality #8: Best Practices are Contextual
9. Quality #9: Quality of Relationship and Communication
10. Quality #10: Inspection can be a waste if…

#QUALITYtweet Critical question: Knowing that

people will change only if they want to, how do you

make sure they “want” to change?

Process Improvement is a “change” game and implementing change isn’t always easy. In case of process improvement, the challenge is to change habits and behaviors of your people. That makes it even more difficult.

People change, not by “force” but by their “intent”. With force, people may dispassionately comply with your processes, but for true involvement, their intent needs a direction. With this as a given, critical questions are:

• How do you make sure that you implement change by driving intent of people?
• How do you make sure that people are passionately involved in change?

The answer to these is “Change Leadership”. Leading a change means undertaking right initiatives, mobilizing resources, addressing soft aspects like motivation, overcoming hurdles and aligning the teams to make it happen. How can change leadership drive process improvement initiative? Here are a few pointers:

• Accurately define what needs a change: Apply 80:20 rule to identify what needs improvement. It is easy to align people when they know that they are improving the right areas that have maximum business/operational impact.
• Create a change time line: Humans work best when they work against a time line. We often tend to get complacent when there are no deadlines. Reasonable pressure helps us become more creative. Create a time line by when change will be implemented with a step-by-step action plan. This also creates a sense of urgency.
• Engage people: People tend to commit themselves to things they are involved in. Involve practitioners and managers in defining the change. They are the ones who will be impacted by the change. Engage them by explaining them the larger context, vision and business need. When they know the larger picture, they can align their actions accordingly. They also need to know the “What’s in it for me?” part. How will they become more effective? How will this change help them improve their performance? They want to know this.
• Review progress periodically: If you don’t monitor your people, you give them a reason to slow down. Have short and effective meetings (in group or one-on-one) with people involved in change. Take a stock of how things are going. Understand their problems. Help them do better. They get help and you get the broader picture. If you hit some roadblocks, you still have chance to re-align. Review early and often. This is also your opportunity to share progress and motivate people involved in improvement initiatives.
• Lead: Give them the context and set them free. Micromanagement on tasks can kill creativity and morale. Be there to help them, but let them do it on their own. People learn the most when they try to do it themselves. They will make mistakes. Help them overcome and share the lessons learned. Set right examples for them to follow.
• Share rewards: when you link participation with rewards, it will help you get voluntary participation from people. But after they have participated, it is only your leadership abilities that will keep them going. You will still have lot of people who will willingly participate.
• Keep rotating teams: Once a change cycle is implemented, induct new team members in the improvement team. You maximize the opportunities for everyone to get involved in defining improvements. Broader the participation, wider the acceptance of change.

Last but not the least, people engage when they see continuity of effort. If your improvement initiative is temporary or ad-hoc, people will not engage beyond the first cycle. When people see consistent results from a process improvement group, they willingly participate.

Process improvement is a journey and not a destination. Who you travel with matters a lot. Choose the right people and get them to swing into action. Your business will thank you for that!

—

Tagged as: behaviors, business, Change, comply, context, creativity, deadlines, effective, engage, force, habits, hurdles, intent, lead, Leadership, managers, micromanagement, mobilizing, morale, passion, practitioners, process improvement, progress, review, rewards, urgency, vision

A new entrepreneur almost always gets an idea and thinks it is the coolest and the greatest idea. He safeguards it and when someone asks him he would say we are in “stealth” mode.  He dreams of how he would be on the covers of Fortune, Fast Company and Inc when his idea clicks and takes off.  The truth is no one really knows whether the idea will click or not.   About 50%of venture backed firms fail.

So, how does an entrepreneur increase his chances of Success.  He needs to Accept Change as normal and Be willing to Evolve. Nobody can escape change… the way I see it – Either you will confront change OR change will confront you. You choose. The best way is to accept that change happens and take advantage of it rather than be bogged down by it. Humans and a lot of other species on this planet survived and thrived by evolving themselves as the surroundings changed. Similarly, the best companies can survive, if they can adapt with the surroundings and evolve.

We would not have heard about Google, Hotmail or Paypal  if they stuck to their initial Plan (Plan A).  The founders quickly evolved their companies. They tried a business model and if that didn’t work, they changed it immediately and tried another. For Paypal, Plan A to Plan F didn’t work. Plan G as we know today worked marvelously and the rest is history. Google grew and could introduce so many products because it encourages a culture of experimentation and Failure. All these and other successful companies evolved by looking for opportunities caused by change in the marketplace and encouraging change and experimentation within their business.

This can happen only if the team is willing to make mistakes, Learn from it and move on. Our school system has trained us not to make mistakes and view mistakes are failures. This view might prove useful for someone working in a large corporation which has lots of restrictions to change, but for an Entrepreneur, mistakes need to be learned from, quickly, and then move on from.

In the old days, when a missile is fired, it had a fixed destination.. “Ready, Aim , Fire” .  Nowadays, thanks to modern technology, a missile , can be fired and then it’s course can be corrected midway. Tom Peters has a saying that goes – “Ready, Fire! Aim”. It is the same with a business. When we start the business , the business model is different and if it does not work, we correct course as we move.

Get ready to “Ready, Fire! Aim”…

—

Tagged as: Accept change, active garage, bootstrapped, business, Change, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, evolve, failure, google, mistakes, paypal, Plan C, ready aim fire, ready fire aim, tom peters, venture, vijay peduru

“Every Successful enterprise requires three men:

a dreamer, a businessman, and a son of a bitch.”

Peter McArthur, Photographer

History has shown that whenever the Presidents’ approval rating drops under 50%, the markets rally and the growth averages 9%. Sounds strange?

Change isn’t always popular and as a young COO running the operations of a $25 Million manufacturing company, I found myself being disappointed if at the end of the week I did not find any graffiti about myself on the notice boards of the plant restroom. I could not understand why I felt disappointed until one day it came to me … I was not active enough and I needed to take more risks that introduced change into the idling system. CHANGE is what causes popularity loss. Not the talk about change, but the actual change/shakeup of someone’s perceived state of “unruffled” comfort.

Note this sequence:

Popularity DOWN when CEO demanded –

• higher efficiency
• more overtime
• more output
• more sales effort

Popularity UP when CEO increased –

• increased benefits
• increased commissions
• increased paid time off programs

You can continue this list, but you see the trend.

The formula for business is: Profitability = Revenue – Costs.  Simple and obvious yet very complex at the same time. Every CEO must (and CEO performance is based on) driving revenues UP and driving cost DOWN so that they do not grow in the same proportion as the revenue. That will assure growth in Profitability.  Now compare this objective of every CEO with issues related to His/Her Popularity. In most cases, when one strives for Popularity, this will increase the cost of running the business and will stagnate revenue growth.

For example, Steve Jobs, a dreamer, a businessman, and most unpopular CEO (to insiders) of Apple, created an unprecedented business success story for a company that was about to collapse.  While he strived to create a new type of industry and product lines for Apple, there were still stories about people trying to avoid at any cost getting in the same elevator with him. Today the results are outstanding and those who benefited on the share price growth are happy, but most of them still do not like the CEO who introduced the CHANGE, got them all to work hard and sacrifice a lot of personal comfort in the process.

Leadership is tough on popularity and likability. Executives and managers who strive for popularity, friendship, and for “being liked” by their peers and employees will become less effective and as a result, often impede their progress to succeed in the marketplace.

Let’s take it to my favorite examples with our kids. There is always this dreadful moment when your 5 year old suddenly in frustration tells you: “I hate you …”. What just happened? Your popularity rating just dropped to the bottom … but most likely this was after you got him to do what you wanted as most of the time these words come after your insistence on doing something they do not want to do on their own. If you let them have their way and drop your demands … well, you know, you will get a smile and “I love you” and a kiss. It is hard to demand and insist … but it builds character and eventually respect; after recognizing that your demands were reasonable and fair and that after performing as requested, you gave them candy or something they wanted so much.

Lets just substitute the striving for “love and popularity” with striving for respect and you may hit the perfect balance.

So here are two magic life rules for a better balance that will lead to respect and efficiency:

• Always demand performance, but be reasonable and fair and adjust these demands to the person you are asking to perform these requests.
• Always acknowledge the effort of the implementation even if the result is not 100% to your expectation, but do not hesitate to ask and insist on another solution if the result is unacceptable.

General Patton was known to demand performance and would not take any excuses, for that many called him “the most respected SOB” in the forces.

–

Yakov Soloveychik is a business advisor, mentor and a personal coach to CEO’s and business owners. Yakov’s professional and entrepreneurial career includes VP,  COO, CEO positions and service on board of directors with a number of technology based companies in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley

Tagged as: active garage, business, Business Management, CEO, Change, Entrepreneurship, Identity, leaders, Leadership, management, Patton, respect, Return on Investment, ROI, SOB, Strategy, www.activegarage.com

Ever wonder:

1. Why some people are satisfied doing the same thing day in day out and continue to live in their ‘comfort zones’.

2. Why some people resist change as if it’s the last thing they would want to happen to and around them?

3. Why some people keep finding themselves in situations where they keep coping?

It’s called Inertia.

For your reference, here is the dictionary meaning of inertia: “a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force“.

Luckily for us, the mechanism of life ensures there are always external forces in our environment that affect our tranquil states. Yet, most of us continue to ignore them or just pretend they do not exist… until, we encounter a big force, that lifts us off the ground and displaces us to a new unfamiliar place, thus calling for action on our part. This is the force people experience when they suddenly find themselves in a situation where they need to cope. This is the force people experience when a major change happens in their organization that impacts them.

This force exists. Period.

You can choose to:

• Ignore it (not for long)
• Avoid it (not for long, again)
• ANTICIPATE & ACT or … in other words – Get rid of your “Inertia Man”!

Tagged as: Act, active garage, Anticipate, business, Change, cope, Entrepreneurship, http://activegarage.com, Inertia, Leadership