The Art of Change Leadership

Chapter 2Fast Changing World Needs Leaders Like You

If not you, who? If not now, when?

—Hillel

Cultures can be transformed. Leadership teams can and do evolve the mind-sets within a culture. Individuals, teams, and entire companies can adapt and prepare for the future. By studying what to change and how to do it, each learns to expand the mind in order to solve bigger challenges.

How is this accomplished? It is accomplished with exceptional leadership, with immense energy, and with tremendous skill and a willingness to lead self and others through change and to drive transformation forward.

Organizations that know they need to adapt during turbulent times—like now—cannot make change happen through purely technical approaches or by continually restructuring. Restructuring of the past has been simply changing departments and silos and moving people around or downsizing without any fundamental change to the leadership focus on people, the core goals and values that the company espouses. It is change for change's sake, which is not what we are talking about in this book. All people within the company must commit to the transformational change being described in this book to a new way of being and doing business that requires new skills and new attitudes. Organizations need a new kind of leadership capability to reframe issues, reinterpret situations, and transform operations.

An IBM study of CEOs in 2012 stated that one of the three areas that were of prime focus for the next decade ...