Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field
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| The Three Enemies Three enemies of change and flexibility must be countered head-on. The first and worst is the comfort zone People start doing or working at something and quickly become comfortable. They then resist any change, even positive change that requires them to do something new or different. Instead of learning, growing, and expanding their envelope of possibilities, they dig in their heels, justify and rationalize their resistance to change, and often sabotage the change efforts of others. In Warren Bennis’s book Leaders, he describes how the top people in his study resisted the pull of the comfort zone by setting bigger and bigger goals for themselves and their organizations, goals that would be impossible to achieve without major changes and improvements. In Peter Diamandis’s 2015 book, Bold, he urges mold breakers and earth shakers to set goals to achieve ten times or one hundred times their current levels of sales, income, and profitability in the years ahead. This size of goal, which seems overwhelming at first, soon leads to expanded thinking and new ideas to go where no man has ever gone before (Star Trek). F EAR H OLDS P EOPLE B ACK The second major obstacle to flexibility, to challenging and questioning the status quo, is fear of all kinds, but especially the fear of failure. What if we try something new and it doesn’t work?” According to the October 2013 Harvard Business Review, the major obstacles to business model innovation are fear and uncertainty. Eighty percent of corporate executives rank business model innovation ahead of the development of new products and services in terms of importance. But they don’t know how to do it, so they procrastinate and hope that the next generation of leaders will make the changes that will be necessary to survive and thrive. F EELING U NABLE TO C HANGE The third reason that people fear and resist change is learned helplessness The individuals responsible know that change is essential, but they feel that they are helpless, caught up in the complexities of the current situation and unable to change. Learned helplessness is expressed in the words I cantor We can’t.” What then follows is a litany of excuses in terms of not enough time, not enough money, not enough available talent, and other explanations for why change is not possible that involve a number of external pressures and internal limitations. But as Winston Churchill said, If you don’t fight when you have a chance of victory, you will soon have to fight when you have no chance at all The rule is to change when you cannot when you have to or have no other choice. Someone should have told this to the executives at Blockbuster, a company that dominated the market for video movies to be viewed at home. When Netflix came along, the people at Blockbuster dismissed it as a small company that could never challenge the dominance of Blockbuster in the national market. But customer tastes had changed, and within a few years Netflix was the biggest player in the delivery of movies, both by mail and online, and Blockbuster was bankrupt. Download 0.86 Mb. Share with your friends:
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