Quotes About Change

Before you can implement radical change, you have to let go of the things that will destine your attempts for failure, and make letting go a vital part of your culture

THE REINVENTION KILLERS Yesterday's Breadwinners Every product or service has a natural life cycle that begins with an introduction, followed by growth, maturity, and inevitably a decline as it becomes yesterday's breadwinner. There are no exceptions

I undertook this project with the vague notion that reinvention was about moving a business from point A to point B. But that's not what I found. We discovered that in the process of moving from A to B these businesses developed new skill sets and values that allowed them to quickly progress to C, D, E, and beyond. They all became serial reinventors and embraced constant radical change.

Companies committed to growth make staying ahead of their customers' wants and needs a hallmark of their culture and accomplish that goal through constant radical change and reinvention.

Great companies [inevitably] develop a rowboat mentality," says Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony. They are "always looking behind to past successes" with awe and admiration as they row into the future.

As testament to the passion for change and reinvention that Apple embraces, more than half of the company's revenue comes from products that didn't exist four years ago.

We are working hard to avoid living in our past," he says. Stringer recognized that the real culprit standing in the way of progress at Sony was a tradition-bound mentality and began systematically letting go of the traditions and people that had hamstrung the company.

The ability of an organization to embrace radical change and reinvention is determined by the ego of the person in charge; substantive change is never initiated from the mid level or bottom ranks of an organization.

Companies that do the best job of embracing constant change, growth, and reinvention make it look easy, because they've systematized and scaled all the core business practices. Systematizing means determining the best way to do something (step-by-step), making certain everyone does his or her part the same way (without significant variation), and then using the system as a baseline for continual improvement.

Millner is just as excited about the culture of continuous improvement that is at the core of Cabela's. "Adaptation is critical. You've got to adapt. No matter how successful you are, the minute you can't do what you've done, you've got to let it go. If you don't continuously improve, you die.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it," when he added that those words are, in Powell's perspective, "a slogan for the complacent, the arrogant, or the scared." How can such a commonsense maxim be so insidious and disastrous? It's because of an immutable law of business: By the time you figure out it's broke, it's been broke for a very long time.

Until people are able to figure out how to deal with the natural tendency to hesitate and drag their feet because of their fear of the unknown, no meaningful reinvention will occur.

Decisions about who goes and who stays, who leads and who follows will determine any enterprise's ability to embrace constant change, growth, and reinvention.

The right people are those who take the initiative to get things done, who make things happen and whom you come to count on for ideas for constant change and improvement.

We had to figure out a way to come up with big innovations, embrace change, and invent new services and products that would differentiate us from our competition and would let us grow faster than our industry. We were waiting for big ideas instead of using a system to innovate.

The late Ken Iverson, credited with originally leading Nucor down the path to constant change and innovation, frequently used a saying still invoked daily at the company: "Anything worth doing is worth failing at.

When confronted with problems, most companies try to make small changes or Band-Aid fixes and hope things get better or that the problem goes away. This approach doesn't work and ensures that they'll waste vast amounts of time and energy.

CEOs and senior leaders who are thinking about leaving a company have effectively already left, and the biggest favor they can do the organization is to get out of the way and allow the business to change and grow.

A shared human condition is the desire to leave an organization on an even keel, with everyone sharing fond memories. Those desires are hardly the things that make risk taking, radical change, and reinvention possible.

The only guarantee in business is if you do nothing, nothing will happen. Also, as the school of hard knocks teaches, most good strategy is made by doing.

Companies with long histories of successfully embracing change and reinvention have a shared disdain for waste and indulgence, which probably comes from the fact that during their formative years they had to count on ingenuity instead of cash to maintain momentum and keep on creating better tomorrows for all the stakeholders.

The lesson is clear: Having too much money or too many resources can actually get in the way of successful reinvention.

The main job of the leader is to be a destination expert, to let everybody know where the company is going and make certain that everyone understands and is willing to embrace constant change in order to get there.

When companies haphazardly throw money at what they perceive their problems, challenges, and opportunities to be, the real answers that could solve the real problems or allow them to embrace radical change and take advantage of the real opportunities are seldom found.