Is Aversion to Embracing Change Killing Your Business?

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin

Companies are faced with the challenge of growing their businesses in a world of complexity, a changing cultural landscape, and dynamic work mores. John Chambers, former Cisco CEO, said, “Disrupt yourself or risk being disrupted by the competition.” Chambers was reflecting on the rapid pace of change and its impact on the business world.

®    “In the next 10 years, 40% of the Fortune 500 companies will be gone,” according to an estimate in a study from the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University. How do you make sure your business will be among the survivors and one of the disruptors?

®    When businesses embrace change, they are set up to find and maintain their Disruptive Advantage. They’ll have the culture, ambitions, infrastructure, and processes in place to help their people find and develop new business models.

Aversion to change retards growth, impedes productivity, and diminishes the company’s value to the market place. How does one develop a collaborative culture of success?

1.       Leadership (“Real change requires a change of reality”)

Embracing change starts with leadership. Professional managers and entrepreneurial owners face a crisis of leadership. Change demands investment and risk. The ironies are prodigious. Risk aversion for professional managers, who do not want to put their positions on the line, or for owners who do not want to put their lifestyles on the line, is the first obstacle. Ironically, the decision not to make the changes necessary to be of value to their customers will lead to losing value. (I recently spoke at the Mountain Winery near the Silicon Valley for company CEO’s and executives that focused on how companies disappeared from the market place because their leadership just didn’t get it.)

2.      Target Marketing in a Digital World

How does the company develop new business opportunities in an age of digital transformation? The spectrum of the digital transformation revolution encompasses how companies embrace and execute the blending of the digital experience platform (DXP), mobile applications, and social media to push relevant and valuable content specific to individual personas. 

Adopting digital strategies is an element of both marketing and development. It becomes a key component of Target Mass Marketing to generate new business opportunities, as well as staying connected to existing customers. It is a way of creating compelling digital experiences for customers, partners, and employees; uniquely combining content with data/information, processes, and applications delivered across any channel to any device. (Target Marketing and Digital Experiences are components of my marketing slogan – Repetition pierces even the dullest of minds.)

3.      Your Organization is Required to Change its Sales Approach

In the end, the value for the channel is that people still buy from people. Just as technology changes, so must our approach to selling. It is not enough to ‘solution sell’ in today’s market place. Potential buyers can go on-line to do the research that was a critical element of our value proposition ten and twenty years ago. It is what they don’t know that provides an opening to bring value. Their fear is being unaware what is out there, what their competition may be utilizing, and they are not. What is it that will give their organization a competitive edge? The two factors of this sales approach are insight and financial selling. One – you must bring value by positioning business solutions your prospect and customer has not considered; and Two – you must help them sell your solution upstream. Near the end of the sales cycle, someone in the buying organization is going to balance your proposed solutions against other solutions. I am not just speaking about competitive solutions to your solution, but weighing the spend of other projects the company is considering. It is more than ROI. It is internal rate of return and the net present value one project brings versus another. Is your sales organization embracing this change?

4.      Recruiting, Training, and Professional Development (“Human beings, by change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

One of the 10 Commandments of Hypergrowth is “Train your people within an inch of their lives.” As I work with Companies, I find few provide viable training for both new employees and continuing education for existing employees. The inefficiency and the drain on productivity is mind boggling. The excuse is usually time. Going into one company, I debated with the owner of the value of training. His idea of training for new employees was a couple of days of orientation, followed by shadowing an existing employee for a couple of days. His company had been treading water for several years. We implemented a 3-week training program that included testing.

(Let’s not leave this section without touching on the need to bring in ‘new blood’ that augment the skill sets of your existing employee pool. New solutions or applications may require skill sets that do not exist inside your organization. There are also employees who cannot adapt to the changes required by the organization. Oh, by the way, do you have an employee professional and personal growth program?)

We provided refresher training for existing employees and developed a very tactical professional development plan for every employee. The process weeded out unproductive employees and allowed motivated employees to explore their potential and contribute to the company in new ways.

The result – the company experience organic growth from $40 million to $120 million in 24 months.

Introducing change and building a culture that embraces changes is not easy. There are makers of history and maintainers of history. If you ask, almost everyone says they want to be makers of history. In reality, they do not. Even entrepreneurs who start companies to make history, often fall into the trap of maintaining their ‘innovation,’ and lose their competitive edge. The rewards for your company and its employees who adopt a culture of change becomes immeasurable.

How does one develop a collaborative culture of success?

David Boim

Known as a business transformation executive, David Boim helps organizations address the challenge of embracing change and developing a collaborative culture of success by bringing an innovative approach to revenue generation and operational efficiencies – driving dramatic growth and profitability.