Building Change into Your Life
ByWhen successful companies are too self satisfied, they ignore the laws of nature.
Complacency often accompanies happiness. Success is often accompanied by a fear of rocking the boat. If something is working, why would anyone want to change the formula?
It is understandable. I was in the real estate business for many years and it seemed prices would never stop increasing. Some of my friends built real estate portfolios that would carry them through their retirement years and fund their children’s lives.
How could something as remote as a wall street firm leveraging mortgage backed securities destroy financing for new mortgages and cause banks, insurance, companies, security firms to face failure and then destroy a global economy?
Chaos Theory and Quantum Physics explain how the Universe really works. The smallest components of matter are gluons and quarks. They operate in chaos but create new order with changes we don’t perceive. Nature is continuously involved in creative destruction.
The human body, society, and business are also affected by positive and negative feedback loops of Chaos. The butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause the tornado in Texas. Life is unpredictable. Change is all that you can count on.
The computer industry has been doubling capacity every few years. This innovation creates change just like ripples from a boat wake. Just when a company is enjoying its greatest success, someone else is aiming at their vulnerabilities and market share. Someone else is going for broke to create a whole new paradigm and steal the show.
Look how fast access to the internet went mobile. Look how fast computer sales were replaced with tablets. Who buys a nice inexpensive cell phone? What happened to Blockbuster? Where did all the jobs go?
Seth Godin in his book “Survival is Not Enough” talks about survivors enjoy change. They build it into their daily routine. Once you start embracing change as a reality, you don’t fear it as the potential destroyer of your current calm.
Forward companies aggressively seek the innovations that will destroy what they do. They know that somewhere someone is plotting to get them. Even if that were not true, every change to the business, social, and natural environment ripples through to everything else.
What kinds of changes have Face Book and Twitter created within the business environment? So many traditional long line family industries never considered Social Media as a real business tool. How long did it take Relationship marketing to convince even the most resistant companies that Traditional marketing was dying? Who would have dreamed that the most powerful advertising and news delivery power of newspapers would be replaced by quicker more flexible online services?
Once again, the power of being mobile starts usurping all other traditional methods of information delivery. The power of remote access and the power of the “long tail” gives every savvy website developer the ability to be global even if they are located on a mountain top in Utah.
How do you gear yourself up to be more flexible? Eat different foods, listen to different music, change your daily routines, read material that never interested you, try new activities, meet people in different circles, do everything a little differently.
Change is fun. I happen to love doing, trying, reading, listening, and cooking new things. I am always experimenting. I am always pushing the envelope. I have visions for reaching new plateaus in several activities. I focus, but I build constant change into each area of pursuit.
As Seth says, some people are natural zoomers (changers) and some are hoping nothing changes until their life plan is completed and they retire. That hasn’t worked out to well for the Baby Boomers. Zoomers will leave companies that don’t allow for flexibility, innovation, experimentation, and risk.
My dad loved Oldsmobiles and my kids grew up with big box TVs. You could enter a fast moving river in a canoe and pull into a cove to avoid the rush, but how long can you stay there?
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Read “Survival is Not Enough” by Seth Godin
Read “Outliers, the Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell
Read “Bounce, the Secret of Success” by Matthew Syed
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