Change is here to stay, do you resist it?

Change is here to stay. Do you resist it?
Years ago I heard a saying: “It is easy to change things. It is hard to change people”.
With today’s changing technology, changing faster than any of us imagined, resisting change is maybe the biggest obstacle that businesses have in order to be successful.
Let me give you a very well known example: In the early seventies, an adventurous engineer at Texas Instrument named Gary Boone had the bright, against conventional wisdom, idea for a full computer on a chip, better known today as the microprocessor.
After lots of work and persistence, he was able to secure a patent from the government but he wasn’t as successful in persuading his own peers, his colleagues that he was on to something bigger than any of them could imagine.
This guy may have had other faults, but lack of persistence wasn’t one of them. He screamed, hollered, insisted until finally he got it: A meeting with the top honcho at Texas Instrument. He calmly explained his idea for a computer on a chip.
Imagine the face of his boss when he heard what sounded like an expression right out of a patient in a mental hospital. His answer, fortunately recorded in history, was “young man, don’t you realize that computers are getting bigger, not smaller”?
I can’t stop laughing.
This man’s paradigm had to be anchored in big computers which, truthfully, at the time they were getting bigger. He simply, like so many business people today, they don’t look farther than the present, what is known and thought to be “true”.
The two Steve’s, Jobs and Wozniak tried to sell their revolutionary idea of personal computers at Atari, a company that no longer exists and at Hewlett-Packard now a successful company that must have changed along the way. They didn’t pay attention to them of course.
Since no one would listen to them, they decided to start Apple Computer in a garage in one of their homes.
That company that was started with little money is worth today billions of dollars and it has the reputation of being one of the most creative companies in the world. In fact, for the quarter ending on September 2010, Apple Inc had sales of over 20 billion dollars. Sorry to say that I got that information on my Blackberry, unfortunately, my I phone slipped out of my pocket on a flight to Las Vegas and “surprisingly” the cleaning crew never found it. I once forgot my tennis racket on the overhead bin and it wasn’t found either so I didn’t keep my fingers crossed in order to find my I phone.
How about Mark Zuckenberg and Eduardo Saverin from Chile, who started Face book and now it is worth billions? Some of you might have seen the movie Social Networks, so you know that Mark, through some legal maneuvers, separated Eduardo from the company but it is rumored that he sued and won a billion dollar settlement.
Eduardo, wherever you are, come and visit us in Puerto Rico. Wow, do we need your creativity and aggressiveness to help us get out of this comfort zone we are in.
Not all changes are good.
Do you remember the first Hispanic, a Cuban American chemist named Roberto Goizueta, that become President of Coca Cola when he, along with most talented entrepreneurs fled Cuba in the sixties?
Even though he was extremely successful and grew that company beyond everyone’s expectations, he did make a bad mistake: Substituting the regular Coke with a new flavor called the “new Coke”.
You could argue that not all changes are for the better. Hey, even I, a fanatic of change can accept that. But, even if a change is wrong or bad, it always teaches valuable lessons which sooner or later will prove valuable.
When the regular coke was taken off the shelves and the new coke replaced it, there was almost a revolt. The American public simply didn’t accept it and there were protests all over the country. People thought that their values were being attacked.
Well, the classic coke was re introduced and sales went up exponentially, so much that some people thought that Roberto did that on purpose. Hey, he was a brilliant guy, but not that brilliant. No one is that brilliant. Coca Cola did run focus and taste groups and for whatever reason, people liked it but when it came out, it seems they changed their minds.
During my career I have worked in industries that have seen remarkable change in the last thirty years.
Let’s take the office equipment industry. I was a witness to it when I spent a few years at Xerox Learning Systems, the training arm of Xerox. From one day to the next, our patents expired and a bunch of Japanese entrepreneurs stood outside the patent office in Washington D.C. and boughtthe patent for Xerography, Xerox’s secret to success. Yes, there is a law that says that after 17 years (it might have changed) your invention must go public.
The Japanese came back a year later with great machines at half the price. We had to re invent ourselves in a hurry and we did. Before giving up the patents, we had 77% of the world copier market, when the Japanese attacked, we got down to 12% more or less and after we adapted and embraced change, we got it back to 23% or so, again becoming the dominant company in the industry.
On a funny note, I was meeting with a couple of Xerox executives in Puerto Rico and we had a tremendous challenge in front of us: We had to sell 20 fax machines in the whole year.
How things change! Years later we sold more than 20 every day.
Now, the fax machine is an outdated piece of equipment. Now we are living in an increasingly paperless society: Email, the internet, the web, etc.
There are a few skills you need in order to survive an environment of change.
1. You must have vision. You must open your mind to new ideas and try to visualize what that idea will look like a few years later.
2. You must have thick skin because most people will attack you. Most people need to remain in their comfort zone and if you try to get them out of it, they will fight you and fight you hard.
3. Be willing to fail. I will never forget the speech given by James Cameron at TED.com; you might even be able to see it at their web site, when he said that he believed he had been successful because of curiosity, imagination and welcoming failure.
4. Be persistent. You can’t give up; you must try and try again until you start making progress.
5. Ask for help. No one can do it alone. No one can succeed alone. You need other people’s ideas, input, skills and advice from time to time.
We need change in our society if we are going to survive, let alone thrive, we must accept change.
Go back to your companies and ask a few questions:

1. Why are we doing it this way?
2. Could there be a better way?
3. What would happen if we start from scratch?
4. What is the up side?
5. What is the down side?
6. What if we stay put and don’t change, what could be the consequences?
7. Who in the team just doesn’t see it?At least you now have a little road map.