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![]() Leadership and Change
Growth and change are necessary elements in any business. While both can be satisfying, painful and memorable experiences in business they are often the success or failure of a business. Good planning and follow-through are the keys to success. History provides us with numerous successes and failures that have been experienced by all levels of people and from them many lessons to be learned.
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January 31, 1829 To: President Jackson
...As you may well know, Mr. President, “railroad” carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by “engines” which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.
Martin Van Buren
Governor of New York (Quoted in “No Growth,” The American Spectator, Jan. 1984) The future is advancing at breakneck speed. In 1829 it came fifteen miles per hour. Today it rushes toward us in quantum leaps. With that future comes changes of unheard of proportions in how we do whatever we do. The smart players, are far as leadership is concerned, are completely rethinking the nature of organizations and the nature of leadership for the world of tomorrow. Today workers are demanding to participate in decisions that are affecting their lives. A different kind of workforce fills our ranks. There appears to be more of a trend toward flat organizations. Fewer people believe the centralized institutional approaches have the necessary wisdom or capability to spawn progress. No longer are employees willing to just blindly accept whatever comes down from the top. The democratization of companies is threatening the very survival of many more traditional organizations. This democratization is forcing us to reevaluate our very understanding of the role of leaders and leadership, and how we structure organizations.
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Leaders as Dreamers Leaders are paid to be dreamers, or should be. The higher you go in leadership, the more your work is about the future. As a leader, you have very little influence on what is going to happen in your organization over the next six months, but you can make daily decisions that could have a profound impact on the company one and five years down the road. Some may be thinking, “How can I drain the swamp- how can I plan for the future- when I’m up to my neck in alligators?” The oppression of the urgent always fights against our planning and thinking time, but if we don’t make the time to plan for the future we will be its victims. A style of reactionary leadership will eventually develop, but what is needed is proactive leadership that anticipates the future. Leadership must always be devoting itself to the issue of goals and strategies. It is the manager who asks how, and leaders ask where and why? Walt Disney was a visionary leader. Here is a portion of his portrayal of the future just before ground was broken for Disneyland in Anaheim: “Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys and hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our lives.” (B. Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Tradition, 1976:246) Now that is dreaming! A man was running in his neighborhood recently and told me the story about a square marble stone with a brass marker in someone’s front yard. It caught his eye as unusual so he stopped to investigate and on the marker were these words: On this spot in 1897 Nothing Happened. There is probably some truth in that marker. Some truth for our organizations if we were to die today. What would the stone read if placed in front of your business with today’s date on it? Whether we like it or not, we are in the middle of a paradigm revolution. Things are changing dramatically on the economic front. If we don’t flex in response to the changes external to us, we will become obsolete. In the mid 1970s the Swiss watch industry made 85 percent of all watches sold in the world. By the mid 1980s they had laid off 25,000 watchmakers and were down to 15 percent of the world market. The quartz movement, invented by a Swiss watchmaker but rejected by his superiors, redefined what the world thinks and expects of watches. Only Seiko of Japan and Texas Instruments of Dallas saw the future and now lead the industry. The business world is full of examples such as this. What can we do to keep the pace with change? Here is some concrete advice to help leaders embrace and address change:
Set aside time
Perform a “vision audit”
Create a vision statement
Set short- and long-term goals
Concentrate and eliminate
Expect great things, attempt great things We are moving faster than 15 miles per hour so we need to think faster. By dreaming and planning, a good leader can take his or her organization above the chaos of change. Don’t be stuck in tradition of the past 50 to 100 years. The labor pool you are hiring from wants excitement and movement. They want to be part of a winning team.
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