Change

The right people are everywhere... they are all around you. Yet the statement is always heard among employers, "It is so hard to find the right people."

What they are really saying is, "It is so hard to find the right people at the cheap price I am willing to pay."

Justin Foster comments that if you find the right people, you don't need a process for everything. His terminology seems a little different than mine. He talks about people filling in the gaps when not having a process and I think of the gaps as the procedures of a process. I think that everything needs a process.

The challenge, though, is finding the right people. Although the people are all around, they aren't going to come to work for you based on your current tactical approach? continue reading...

I had a great comment on a previous post of mine about change and ROI. I received this comment from a new friend of mine and it was so good (much better than I probably could have written) that I thought I would just repost it here and treat it as a guest post. This is from Ken Stewart at Kearns Corp. (Hey, Ken, when you get your own blog... I'll link to you). Here were his comments: "I firmly believe change is hard, and people generally only want change because they are unsatisfied with the current situation, but is the grass really greener on the other side? Of course, this is a rhetorical question in the grander sense of this reply, but a question that should, nonetheless, be asked by those change agents within a business and really examined. It is my humble opinion that only two things should dictate change: 1) an internal desire to positively impact the business and 2) an external market pressure or development that dictates change to survive. People by their very nature are experiential. This is to say that they must generally experience a great deal of pain or pleasure to enable the catalysts for change to take root. It is my submission that change only occurs in any form of permanence with the former as it takes an increasing amount of pleasure to perpetuate lasting change (see economics 101: the law of diminishing returns). So in a nutshell, change for its own sake never succeeds, and you are dead-on in stating change can indeed be painful. However, it is that very vision of change from the leader given to the troops, and reinforced by line managers that keeps change on track - along with a good business plan of course! What I would submit, however, is that change management can be positive, and much quicker to realize ROI, and much less painful, even to the point of being positive, if you have spent the time building a culture that is high capacity and dedicated to the grander vision of a leader... You must consistently remind people why we are changing, but most importantly, as a technologist and business process improvement advocate, I have found that gaining not only C-level buy-in but grass roots buy-in to be the real key. This is why my number 1 metric is always long-term cultural adoption. Communistic you say? Not in the least. I have found that your associates can often tell you what is screwed up most in the business. Why is this? Because they are often closest to your customer... This is of course to say you have built a high-capacity team and that you have the right people on the bus -- and in the right seats on the bus (to use a line from Jim Collins). Culture is king and how change can be accomplished in both good and bad situations."

The political landscape right now it very interesting for me to watch. We have three candidates that all have the same core message. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all seem to have the core message of "change." Of course, each of them take a different spin on the idea of change. But, unmistakably, the attitude of the message is, "Vote for me and I'll make significant changes in the way we do things in our government." In my past, I was employed as a change agent. It was my job for nearly two years to instigate a significant amount of change in the way the company did business. From internal processes to our go to market strategy.... the goal was to make change. The most important thing that I learned through that process is that most people don't like change. Most people would prefer to maintain the status quo if it means to keep things the same. Moreover, people are very selective about the amount of change they are willing to endure. Most change is forsaken long before any benefits of that change is realize. Take a look at my change versus ROI graph. The fact is, change is hard. People don't like change. Personally, I think that whichever candidate is elected (I think I know who will win and it isn't the one I support) is setting himself up for failure. Promising change and delivering on change are two mutually exclusive things. The vision of change is always far more appealing than the change itself. If change is to succeed, the champion has to push through a significant amount of opposition and be willing to put it all on the line to prove that the change is worth the effort. Corey Smith Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free.