“I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”
Maybe this quote from Jimmy Dean is one of the best understandings of the Art of Change or the Change Management to be always prepared for internal and external changes.
Change is a law of nature; it is reflected in all aspects of human being’s life. And in the life of modern business, change is not an exception anymore; it became not only a rule, but more one of the basic conditions to survive in a very competitive global business environment.
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything”.
George Bernard Shaw
In many organizations, the employees still consider the change as a problem and mostly confront it with rejection bearing in mind that it represents a threat for their positions or they consider change as a criticism of their earlier work, and the way they performed their work.
The challenges for the organization are, firstly to build the conviction of the importance of change amongst the organizations employees, secondly to build and improve the employees’ ability to change. But this is hard to achieve in a context that is complex and rapidly changing, the only guarantee for success in this matter is to have the concept of change and a system to insure this ability, deeply established as a major character of the organizations culture. This requires that new knowledge is constantly obtained; nothing more can guarantee the achievement of this goal than implementing the concept of the Learning Organization.
One of the key points to success in changes is to change the focus on where it should be, many managers and employees spend too much time and energy on things they cannot do anything about, limitations, and the worst are these that they set by them self, they should instead learn to focus on possibilities rather than limitations.
"One should always bear in mind that nothing is more difficult to organize - more problematic to successfully implement - and more dangerous to realize - than introducing change."
(Machiavelli, 1532)