Blog about Leadership

Knowledge@Wharton

If you visit Knowledge@Wharton’s website (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu), by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, you may note the categories of articles listed on the left-hand side of the page. While there is great information in every category and one could spend hours reading and learning, I have always been struck by the category – Leadership and Change – and how it associates change with leadership.

Leadership and Change

Perhaps I could expound more on change and I have already written several articles about leadership and change, but for this post, I just want to share with you a viewpoint of change from Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor in AD 161-180, in his phenomenal work, Meditations:

“Is any man afraid of change? Why, what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And cast thou take a bath unless the wood undergoes a change? And canst thou be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Dost thou not see then that for thy self also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?”

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What people perceive is what people believe. That is why perception is a necessary consideration. Ask any sales person and they will tell you how true this statement is. When making a decision about a new server line for a data center, the decision is sometimes contemplated with facts, cost/benefit comparisons, and other substantiated factors. Too often, the decision is based on “this is what we’ve gone with, so this is what we’ll consider” or “we had a bad experience with this, so we’ll consider anything but this.”

Effective managers/leaders are consistent, but at the same time they are adaptive to conditions and often drive change. Some of the greatest leaders take the time to reflect and ponder if, where they are going and how they are going there, still line up with where they should be at and where they should be going.

A company that I have worked with changes (reorganizes) the core competencies every two to four years. To some, this change is perceived as just shaking things up and borders on erratic, jerky maneuvers. The problem is not the change itself, but rather the execution and communication of the change – not what was done, but how it was done.

Leaders need to be acutely aware of perception. What people perceive is what people believe regardless of what is actually the case.

This is what I call the ‘Perception Dynamic.’

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Does it make you feel old or young to know that the Walkman is 30 years old?

At any rate, the story of Sony’s Walkman is a valuable business lesson and I like the way Peter Drucker put it:
“Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.”

Wharton’s Knowledge Today has a good post about this: When the Walkman Roamed.

Change is a constant!

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