Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World

Chapter 7. Ya Gotta Wanna

One of the most important challenges in this global economy is for executives to lead their companies through the process of becoming a responsive organization. As the saying goes, "Ya gotta wanna" or else "Ya ain't gonna." Organizations cannot grudgingly make small changes one at a time and expect to successfully transform themselves. The move from a centrally controlled hierarchy to a responsive real-time organization of autonomous operating units is a significant transformation for any organization to make.

Change is an evolutionary journey; it certainly does not happen all at once. When the process starts, there will be pauses; the pace of change can and must vary, but there can be no stopping. Since change happens anyway (as in we all get older whether we want to or not); the successful company takes the approach of working with change instead of letting a changing world pass it by.

WE ARE CAPABLE OF GREAT THINGS

People in many companies are quite willing to try something new. I see plenty of frustration and boredom when I walk through the "cube farms" of a typical corporate office. I see people sitting in small cubicles looking into computer screens. I see people doing repetitious tasks that often involve reviewing documents to find small errors and then fixing the same small errors and processing the same documents over and over again. This is not work that is challenging or rewarding. It does not exercise the full range of skills that most people possess. ...