Change and future-readiness

There is no doubt that transformation and change management have moved to the top of the leadership agenda. Professional consulting companies have set up “transformation practice” consultants. Even I have fallen prey to the trend, and have recently co-authored a book on the subject.
 

There is a surfeit of writings, courses, and seminars about the tectonic changes faced by companies and leaders. However, it is right to ask the questions: What is new? Has not change always been occurring? Yes, of course, but “it is the frenetic pace of change, stupid”, to adapt a Clinton quote about the economy in the 1990s.
 

Noted historian Ian Mortimer has researched this subject in his interesting and much acclaimed book Centuries of Change. He has traced change over the last ten centuries, 1000-2000 CE, and tried to figure out which century experienced the greatest change. No prizes for guessing the answer — it all depends!
 

Change is always perceived as tectonic at the time of its occurrence. The woes of the horsewhip industry when automobiles arrived in the early 1900s, the challenges for the fountain pen industry when ball pens became available in the 1940s, the death knell of comptometers and Facit machines when I began my career in EDP (electronic data processing, for the new generation), and the extinction of the steel trunk when wheeled suitcases entered our lives in the 1980s — these are all part of history.  Of relevance were three factors: First, technological and societal advances; second, the bewildering tools for people to cope with those advances; and third, the adaptation gap that each generation had faced.
 

In my experience, the third factor is the most notable, viz it is not the pace of change but the adaptation gap that is crucial. In fact, I wonder whether the adaptation gap is constant, while both the changes and the tools to manage rise exponentially in a somewhat parallel manner. It is the adaptation gap that causes an older generation to feel threatened by change, while the new generation takes to those changes like a fish to water… until the new generation becomes the old generation!
 

But here is the “brahma mantra” of change. Irrespective of the century, impactful leaders adapt without forsaking core values.  The symptoms of values and the accoutrements of change vary, but not the core. The Ten Commandments and the essence of Vedanta are still recalled and treasured. Were it not so, those philosophical ideas would have died.
 

Applied to enterprise leadership, Vedantic philosophies adumbrate four principles: Be self-aware, protect the resources that facilitate your business, serve others before self, and execute firm decisions but compassionately. These four apparently simple and ancient concepts cover all our contemporary mumbo-jumbo: Compassion, stakeholders, sustainability, humanism, you name it. The more modern expression is — harness innovation for the public good, put people at the centre, spread economic opportunity, engage in new alliances, be performance-driven in everything, practise superior governance, and pursue purpose beyond profits (Profits with Principles, Ira Jackson & Jane Nelson).
 

A prosaic debate often arises on whether more profits and more growth are valid ends in themselves. Personally, I don’t think so unless the actions are circumscribed by values and purpose. Consider an analogy.
 

Humans breathe to get oxygen, which is present in the air to the extent of 21 per cent. Seventy-eight per cent of the air is inert nitrogen, which is breathed in and out unchanged. One per cent are trace gases. If a human can live in an environment of pure oxygen, is it healthy? My medical friends tell me that an excess of oxygen “will overwhelm the blood, disrupt the central nervous system, and damage the lungs, heart, and brain”.
 

Profits and growth are the oxygen of business. It is possible to get “too much” and damage the enterprise irreparably. Just as 78 per cent nitrogen is essential for human well-being, immutable values must always accompany profits. It is important to appreciate that a surfeit of profits and wealth is damaging. It is essential to design an enterprise for profits to be always accompanied by values, like air with both oxygen and nitrogen.

The writer’s new book, Embrace the Future: The Soft Science of Business Transformation, was published in February  rgopal@themindworks.me