Riding the bull or fighting the bear – competing in a world of change.

Change is fundamental to our being and therefore we should embrace it.

Change applies equally to the groups and teams we are a part of and the organisation, industry, nation, and global community in general. It is all a matter of scope.

There are four omnipotent laws that guide our lives in business and in general:

The Law of Impermanence:
This law is stated simply as “nothing lasts forever.” Life is flux and a necessary cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death is an inevitable consequence of life itself.

The Law of Uncertainty:
We never know what our fate will be and we can never predict anything with absolute certainty.

The Law of Centricity:
Life is balance – we experience joy as equally as we do suffering. Nature always seeks equilibrium or centeredness.

The Law of Active Participation:
Life learning and adaptation is not passive – we only maintain our currency and vigour through continued active participation in life by effort and activity, which leads to first-hand experience and ultimately wisdom.

I have tried to provide a balanced view of the forces that continually shape our life. While impermanence and uncertainty conjures “negative” sentiments (depending on your perspective of course), Centricity and Active Participation provides hope through external (centricity and natural equilibrium) and self-induced (active participation) transcendence.

These axioms combine to provide a number of significant insights that I would like to share with you:

1. If change is inevitable, we need to learn to deal with change as a fundamental and necessary part of our business environment and our careers.
2. The success of our enterprise is based on our ability to comprehend, predict, and adapt  to an ever-changing global business environment.
3. If our life and our career are transient and we don’t know how long either will last, we must make the most of each opportunity presented to us. Lost opportunity and wasted time detracts from our ability to reach our true personal and business potential.
4. If our managing and leading a modern enterprise is fraught with risk and uncertainty, then break-through innovation is based in accepting (and hoping for) the unexpected.
5. If our business and career strategy is not working, we need to go back to first principles and learn from our mistakes to avoid the systemic mistakes that keep placing us behind where our stakeholders believe we should be.

How does change impact on your business? How do you deal with it? And how do you overcome resistance?

In the next post, I will discuss why we often don’t like to embrace change and how we can improve on this situation – at both a personal and organisational level.