Beoz

Just a bit of a rant here. I come up against this on a daily basis. Trying to implement change for the good, only to have my time wasted by people who hate change. In my opinion, change is good, change must occur all the time, change keeps things interesting, without change we remain stagnate.

Are you a change hater or a change lover?

GarryP

Making change happen is about delivering something that people want, and will grab hold of. If you have that, a positive change, then you have no real trouble making change happen. There are some tricks as to getting past initial cynicism in how you present it - but if you are smart it will happen to over 50% of users without effort.

The problem comes when there is no benefit to people, when it's a bad change, but that management try to push through anyway (often so there's no traceability as to their ineffectual uselessness). Top down imposition is always hard - mainly because they are often bad ideas and the staff have been around the block enough to know they won't stick and will be replaced within a year or two.

Real question should be; is this a good change than improves things, or a bad change that protects the guilty and makes things worse.

It's kind of noticeable, as he tries to justify avoiding open standards, how he says 'change' (to a proprietary standard) is all about making money from customers - not providing tools to users.

Beoz

I posted the Steve Jobs example not to get into the tech detail, but to examine how someone understood that change was required and how to get there. That speech was from 97.

The guy who asked the question was focussing on the now (97) and how things can remain the same. Steve Jobs was looking at 2007. And remarkably what he said he would do he did.

Change also comes in other forms. Moving country, changing careers, etc. Some people fear it. Some people love it.

I find those who fear it ultimately have a fear of failure. Steve Jobs had already failed once by 97. I guess if you take that first failure, the fear of a second or third is not so hard to stomach.

GarryP

If you listen, the change he was talking about was canning OpenDoc and sacking the developers. Since having apps 'work together' has been a perennial deficiency in apple (particularly the iphone) it was probably a duff move.

OpenDoc - Apple Wiki - Wikia

If you don't have at least some fear, you're probably daft, and liable to end in a mess. Fear is rational, paralysis due to fear is not. However, even though nature favours the moving target, it's by no means certain that being fearless will result in the best outcome.

vikingsail

I think you know where I stand on this from my tagline. Change has always been resisted by some. Try working in an organization that is proud to self describe as moving at 'glacial speed.'

Amazulu

Depends

Change to achieve new goals is good, unavoidable actually

Change for change's sake? I'm not so sure - Australia changed from a proper government to an Australia-hating socialist one in 2007 because many people wanted a 'change'. As we now know, the result was disastrous and set Australia back by years and we are still dealing with the fallout

Wol

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>>Are you a change hater or a change lover?

Beoz

I love change.

Bix

Saw many cases of that with my UK company. Predominantly from new bosses coming into the company and wanting to impose "purist" ideas. Invariably we had to revert to the old ways.

We did things the way we did them for tried and trusted reasons and achieved acceptable outcomes with limited resources. That's a balancing act they failed to comprehend.

That said we did embrace change as a company over the years and the large majority of successful change came as a result of workforce inclusion.

GarryP

One of my jobs has been creating large scale change, and as I suggest, you can do it if you act sneaky. The trick is realising that nothing every works well in companies; so the desire for change is there, if you can bypass the cynicism.

Forget the books, you need practically learnt battle wounds to do this.

Wol

>>Are you a change hater or a change lover?

astera

Good change is good, bad change is bad.

Instead of concentrating on the change aspect try and focus on the positives it will bring about. Otherwise you cannot blame people for not wanting change.

fish.01

Yes, Steve Jobs famously often looked into the future and embraced new tech dragging others kicking and screaming after him...

astera

You have to understand that Jobs was both the biggest accelerator and simultaneously the biggest hand-brake in Apple's history.

He moved the company forward to a certain place, but after that he refused to consider further changes that appeared natural to everyone else. If he was still around there would be one iPhone size, one iPad size, etc.

fish.01

Jobs was already onboard before his death and involved in increasing the screen size.