Innovative strategy

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 423.

1. I – Interviewer, J K – Jeremy Keely

I – OK Jeremy, let me start by asking you, why do people resist change?

J K – Resistance to change is one of the most natural reactions and is based on

uncertainty and it's based on fear – fear of losing your job, fear of , perhaps, not

being able to cope with a new situation. It's based on lack of trust in the

decision-makers and it's based on a complete feeling of lack of control over the

situation. All of those are very natural reactions, and the way to manage

resistance is not to completely ignore it but actually to manage it as if it were

natural.

2. I – Interviewer, J K – Jeremy Keely

I – Can you think of an example where change was handled well?

G K – One of my favourite examples. I was working for a client a number of years

ago, and a new Chief Executive came on board and the client had to

significantly reduce its costs. It had been trying to compete with its major

competitor on a basis of volume and was trying to be cheaper. And its major

competitor was four or five times its size and there was just no way that could

happen. And the new Chief Executive came in and within three weeks had

published exactly what he was trying to achieve. And every single person in the

organization knew this chap's vision. They knew they were going to segment

the market – they were going to go for corporate, high spend, high profile

customers, and they were going to ignore the mass volume residential market

which was a lot bigger, and with much larger margins. And the company was

going to go for much more value-added.

And the Chief Executive made absolutely clear, right from the beginning,

exactly what he was going to do. He talked about the number of heads he was

going to have to take out of the organization. So he talked about the pain – he

was absolutely honest about it. But he also talked about the gains and explained

his vision in a lot of detail to everybody but in a number of face-to-face

communications and in a weekly letter that he wrote to everybody in the

organization. Every week a letter came out from this chief executive saying

exactly what progress had been made, exactly what he was still aiming to do –

what the next steps were. And this happened week after week after week.

He was a very effective manager. And the second thing he did was move very

quickly on the painful stuff. So he very quickly took out the people who didn't

fit. So sometimes the decisions were hard, but he made them and he made

them quickly.