Changing all the time

Most business people recognise that change fuels business growth and competitive advantage. Rather than something to be feared, change should be welcomed as bringing with it new potential and new horizons.

Despite this philosophical position, managing change within organisations is often very tough.

Historically, organisations have tended to embrace change incrementally. When market conditions shift, companies typically respond by implementing discrete solutions, often in the form of new processes or technologies, to improve the performance of specific business units.

After an often-bumpy transition to the new way of working or managing, it’s usually smooth sailing again – at least until the next change is required.

But the days of ‘‘stop and start’’ change are over. Today, companies must continuously adapt to a barrage of external challenges, including

• More demanding customers,
• Stronger competitors,
• More stringent regulations, and
• Shareholders who expect always-better and ever-faster results.

Organisations must develop a capacity to change within a permanent state of flux and be able to tackle change head on. Whether entering new markets, expanding product or service lines, merging with competitors or implementing technologies across the global enterprise, companies must be able to successfully launch fundamental transformations within their organisations. And they must do so without disrupting their ongoing business operations.

While a business may not have to totally reinvent itself very often, it must continually adjust to changing conditions. To do this a business must first have the structure and methodology in place to make ongoing adjustments effectively and efficiently with the absolute support of all staff. In the right situation, it can be as simple as changing gears.

Essentially, organisational change is the combination of business change and individual change. It is the crucial task of ensuring that the business methodology and resources are appropriately aligned and supported by individuals with a common understanding of how the business operates, and the ability to implement it.

Two fundamentally important steps for ensuring change is implemented smoothly, are

• The need to be brutally honest about where you are: a company will never figure out where it's going if it doesn't take a cold, hard look at where it's coming from.
• Having 20-20 foresight about where you want to go: any change effort that requires more than a one-page manifesto to articulate its goal is usually doomed to failure. If the point of the program is complex, people lose focus -- and eventually lose their way.

As a company grows, so does the complexity of its infrastructure. Implementing new systems inevitably requires connecting to a myriad of existing systems and platforms, and managing the flow of information among them. As complexity grows, implementation and maintenance costs rise. Complexity also constrains the ability to rapidly implement business change.

One change in the big wide world out there that business cannot afford to ignore, is blogs. Believe it or not, they are simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they may well have an impact on just about every business.

For the uninitiated, the word ‘blog’ is short for weblog. A weblog is an online journal that is frequently updated and intended for consumption by the general public. Blogs generally present the views and/or personality of the author. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger."

Of course, there is a small problem with blogs for business: most business people never visit them! But that does not mean they are not there.

At the beginning of 2006, it was estimated that here are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. But even if 99.9% of them are irrelevant to business, that leaves 40 new ones every day that can be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

If it's scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link to it in a flash. And here's the killer: blog posts linger on the web forever.

Yet not all the news about blogs is scary. Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

This is no time to be complacent.