Ability to handle Change is a key competitive advantage

Value is built and destroyed in the Change.  Change in business and processes is not easy but it is an imperative companion.  So, either the your failure to cope puts a cost on you (and value is destroyed), or you can put a cost to your failure to cope (and value is created).

Very few businesses actually properly anticipate change in environment and go on the long journey of change in business and subsequent change in processes.  Most businesses see the changing environment and then start making changes at the lower levels – maybe tools.. maybe processes here and there… maybe even some strategies.  But the syncing of this is absent.  Response to Change has to be synced throughout the company!

Organizations don’t succeed because they are the “best’ but because they can Change!  When the company is at the top, if it can anticipate the future and deconstruct itself and then reconstruct itself to still lead the new world, then, in my view it is a successful company.  And in the history of the corporate world, perhaps no other company has demonstrated this ability for more than a century now as IBM has!  That too in an industry which is synonymous with Change (unlike Consumer Goods, where Unilever and P&G have also demonstrated the same trait).

It is not as if the top executives are not aware of this.  In fact in a survey, 80 percent of CEOs did point to the ability to change a competitive advantage.[1]  But is Change a strategic priority?  Its management and articulation of the value in a way that it can be driven to suucessful creation?

What is your take on Change and its management?

Reference Links:

1. Guy, G., & Beaman, K., Effecting change in business enterprises: Current trends in change management, The Conference Board, 2005.