19th February 2010
Don't change, but transform!
Those who give too much attention to trifling things become generally
incapable of great ones.
François duc de la Rochefoucauld
Today we are witnessing sweeping changes in the environment in which we live. The rate of change is steep. We need to keep pace with the rate of change. Organizations are taking a lot of efforts to bring about a change in the mindset of people working in the organizations. This change in mindset is necessitated in order to survive in the extremely competitive environment. In fact the interesting thing about change is the fact that change is a survival agenda.
However, one fact that is worrying many organizations is the acceptance level of change as well as the quantity and quality of change that have to be accomplished within the short time that is available to complete the change process. The agenda in front of the organizations is not merely a change of mindset, but a core transformation in the attitude of the people making the organization.
We have to transform from managing to leading, from customer satisfaction to customer delight, from product quality inspection to process quality installation, from behavioural manipulation to attitudinal alignment, from quality inspection to total quality management and so on. This is a major shift in the management of the change process.
This introduces an important agenda for us. We need to bring about a major shift inside us and look at our job in a new perspective. We need to take change as a personal agenda and not an organization induced process. This calls for a change not merely in our external actions, but in our very thinking process. We need to be thinking of a change on our values, attitude, feelings and emotions.
If we change at the external action level and not transform at our mind level, the change will be short lived and we will go back to our original behaviour. The change I am talking about is like the transformation from the caterpillar to the butterfly!
N C Sridharan
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