Quotes About Change

I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh. As the walls clear themselves of everything but transparency, the scent of carnations leaves with them. I am out in the open and above the windows have hinged into butterflies, sunlight glinting where they've intersected. They are going to some point true and unproven

If, at the end of the Atlantic, Columbus had found only an absence of water, this English tourist would have been there to capture that void with a wide-angle lens. Here, the wind blows from nowhere to nowhere across a plain transformed by salt into a vision of light. Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation. You start out with one thing, end up with another, and nothing's like it used to be, not even the future.

hypercompetition" to characterize markets in which a firm's competitive advantage would be quickly competed away.8

Without the assumption that an advantage will be long-lived, the urgency of an organization to move quickly increases.

Business model innovation was every bit as important as R&D or product innovation.17

career risk that often leads managers to cling to eroding businesses long after they should have moved on.

Two contradictory activities. From a company point of view, it makes perfect sense.

When competitive advantages don't last, or last for a much shorter time than they used to, the strategy playbook needs to change. Leaders

Deconstructing reward systems, processes, legacy programs, structures, networks, and other elements used to deliver to an old advantage is not going to happen by accident and calls for real leadership.

Although dynamism and rapid change are all around us, people are not very effective when facing extreme uncertainty—it tends to be paralyzing.

change how you run the assets that deliver expensive nonnegotiable attributes.

bewildering patchwork of technologies that are inefficient, hard to change, and rigid.

Think about it: the presumption of stability creates all the wrong reflexes. It allows for inertia and power to build up along

stretch, instability, and multidimensionality are crucial to keep a company from getting stuck.

What happened? A long track record of relatively stable success caused the ambition to hungrily search for new opportunities to atrophy.

The important point is that the competitive life of an asset may be different (and usually shorter) than its accounting life.

The goal is to understand how this period can be extended for as long as possible while simultaneously being mindful that it will eventually erode.

training people to be able to move from advantage to advantage becomes a cost of doing business. It's just as important a bill to pay as the one you pay to keep the lights on and the computers running. Investing in people's capacity to move around removes a tremendous barrier to change and suggests a redirection of emphasis from pure deployment to creating transition capability.

In a transient-advantage context, unlike a conventional one, disengaging is not confused with business failure.

aggressively and frequently change the management team, a pattern found by consultancy Accenture.2

benefited from the declining category by developing an innovative business model—insurance, rather than simply relying on manufacturing.

Moving from advantage to advantage is seen as quite normal, not exceptional. Clinging to older advantages is seen as potentially dangerous.

Prediction and being "right" will be less important than reacting quickly and taking corrective action.

If you can't raise consciousness at least raise hell