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When smart people resist change
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This saying captures the culture of many organizations these days as they struggle to reinvent themselves, stay competitive, or grow. Why, when organizations are filled with smart, successful people? Successful people got where they are because they were good at what they do. But the same skills that made them successful can also make them closed to learning new things and embracing change.
When technology drives change
Proposition: technology facilitates convergence and integration to achieve better, faster results. Executives nod and buy-in. They look to technology to drive change in their companies. After all, they’ve been making heavy financial investments in technology. Yet, for many, the expected business results aren’t materializing, especially with customer-facing applications like CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The reality is often unintended outcomes, such as…
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| High Concept, Low Tech: when ideas drive change
What drives change—technology, ideas, people, or all of the above? The great minds of the world have pondered this question for centuries. The debate often gets louder, particularly among social scientists, in times of chaos and confusion like we're facing today in America. Terrorism is an extremely effective application of "low tech, high concept." For those of us living in a high tech world, maybe we've gone too long underestimating the power of people and ideas to drive change, relying too much on technology to move our organizations. It's easy to understand why. Dealing with the people side of the equation has too much variability, too many emotions, too many exceptions to the rule.
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Managing the people side of technology implementation
Ask someone who has lived through the integration of new technology into their organization and you often hear how: "stressed out I got" "no one's communicating with each other" "the conversion was a nightmare" "it took far longer than we ever thought." Integrating new technology can send shivers done the spines of your staff members. So how can you avoid the predictable traps of any large system change? You need to weave people into your implementation plans—their buy-in, their reactions, their learning curve, their commitment to adopting the new system. And, you better have a good answer to the "WIIFM" test - What's In It For Me?
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