Author Rohit Agarwal | Copperberg
3 minute read
Some of you might perceive both quotes in the article cover as motivational, whilst others might not see a co-relation. In ‘The Change Management Series’, let’s ponder on what Change Management lessons can we learn from the two books as business leaders. I will compare and contrast various learning I have gotten from the book and feel free to comment with your views!
These are two books I read at the same time. The first one, Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hours rule, where you can master something if you spend 10,000 hours actively practising something. Think in terms of Messi practising his dribbles and shots since childhood or Bill Gates coding his first program at grade 8.
The other book, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything … Fast by Josh Kaufman teaches the hack to pick up a new skill quickly in a short amount of time by defining the specific realistic outcome and working towards it. Think about the first time you were trying to learn a new skill and just decided to overcome the learning curve by doing it for a few hours even though you didn’t understand much!
If you feel for the books and don’t care about change management, save your time and grab the books or find the summaries here: Outliers.. and The First 20 Hours…
What is Change Management and what is it not!
First and foremost, it is important to understand, Change management is a process, not an outcome. If you are planning to implement all changes in 2020 just because the year looks beautiful and get your company progressing in leaps and bounds, 99% of the time, the chances are you will fail. To be a successful organisation, continuously churning out innovations, adapting to the market as well as beating your competitors, what you need is to adopt the culture of change management.
‘Strategizing to Change’ and being ‘Open to Change’ are two completely different things, though they are often used synonymously. You can create a ‘Strategy to Change’ and force it upon your employees or you can build an Organisational Culture that is open to change and every employee works collaboratively to adapt to the changing scenarios.
As a business leader, all you can and must do is start the process, put forward the propositions and let your employees lead it through iterative experimentation, seeing what works best and what does not.
In the next article, we take a look at ‘how to start the process?’ and provide an example to illustrate it.
