Change: Your Platform for Success

There was a recent person, whose name I cannot recall at this moment, who used "Change" as his major political platform to catapult him into the Presidency.  Obviously change is a powerful tool, but why did it work so well for him?  There are many Presidents or CEOs of major companies who get their job not because his or her predecessor stepped down and rode into the sunset, but because they did something wrong and the stockholders/USA citizens wanted someone new.

So why is it that some companies are so averse to change??  Is it because the ones at the top have the most to lose if the change works out(or if it does sometimes)??  It could be because they believe their business model is working and hold their hat on the old cliche, if it aint broke...  What the smarter companies are realizing is they need to see the change coming before it is too late.  Even if the system isn't broke it still may be about to lose value because of a new trend which could change the landscape which the company operates.

I was working for a company which had just been bought by another major company in the same field.  It took about 5-6 months before even the smallest changes took affect, such as integrating employees into the company that had been bought out.  A year and a half later the buyers changed the system of the old company to theirs.  No one took this very kindly because not only did they have to refigure out how to input their hours and other tasks that took little time before, they had to figure out the new employee benefits, go through hours of new online training and attend endless meetings to figure out how the changes would affect them.  The place I worked at luckily did not have very many layoffs but the atmosphere had still changed dramatically.  People were angry about the changes, which they believed didn't have much of a purpose on what the employees did every day for their job.  They believed that corporate was just shoving all of this new information down their throats so they can now be considered Company X employees instead of Company Y.

Change is never easy, but if done in the correct way at the correct time can have a tremendous positive impact on the people involved.  If done in either the incorrect way or time it can have a detrimental and sometimes even final effect on a company.  That is why so many companies are averse to change