Change management I

Change management seminar, 25 November 2008
In my daily work, I get to deal a lot with hurdles that come with change. Trying to make SOA work, implementing business process management, working in projects, etc. has a whole lot to do with change. In my experience you cannot change people; at most you can help make people aware that changing their attitude or behavior is useful or necessary in these compelling and trying times in life. I decided to attend a series of seminars on the subject of change management. I like to read about and discuss this topic and with these seminars I would be able to hear experts speak about this, share views, or perhaps even get tips. The seminars are organized by Focus at Nijenrode Business University in Breukelen.
After every session I will share my experiences by posting a blog. This is the first of the series.

The first seminar started at Midday. I think there were more than 200 people attending. So, it was very busy at the registration desk. Introductory by Hans Schoen and opening speech by professor drs. Wessel Ganzevoort.
The first lecture about ‘the essence of leading, management and change’ was given by Wessel Ganzevoort. It was about great companies and what makes these companies great. A lot of what he told us, I have read in ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins.

He made statements like: ‘ Organizations are going from being factories and treating people as resources as in scientific management (Taylor) to organizations as ‘mental construct’ and people being the organization. Organizations will not longer try to bind and buy employees but empower them.. Professionals reinvent their jobs over and over again and smart people just need a critical minimum of specifications to do their job. They need autonomy. Professionals don’t do what the customer wants but look in-depth at the customers problem and solve this’. Very powerful stuff.

According to Wessel superb organizations are recognized by:
- A strong sense of purpose and a few value driven principles
- Use their core competencies (as meant by Hamel & Prahalad; not what HR has done with this); so do what their very good at, what makes them unique.
- They have deep respect for their customers
- Trust being much more important than control, process more important than structure and really learning from mistakes

Select people on who they are and if they fit in. Making peoples decisions quickly when needed, not as cost cutting device. Here Wessel explicitly referred to Good to Great: first get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off, the right people in the right seats and then decide where to drive.
- It is a great place to work because management is trustworthy, there is fairness, respect, camaraderie en pride
- Leaders are servant leaders, whom know and believe in their own vision, mission and values and act according to these (congruent), you really like to be near these people, they organize their feedback and steer on conditions rather on result.

Organizational change is feasible when taking what’s already there and what is good; when you plan only what is necessary and believe that is never going to be as you could think of in advance. A lot of wisdom!

The second lecture was given by Reynier van Bommel. He told us about the history of his family’s shoe factory from 1734 to the present. In that time there were more than 250 shoe factories. He presented a very informative and humorous story with old pictures of relatives and examples of challenges they faced during more than two and a half centuries. Van Bommel shoe factory is the only real shoe factory existing in the Netherlands today. They had to adapt to change a lot in order to survive.

After a half-hour break the third and last lecture was given by Professor Cham Kim about ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’.
A ‘Red Ocean Strategy’ is one engaging in a head to head competition, fighting rivals (blood flowing) in a shrinking profit pool. The Blue Ocean strategy suggests an approach which will lead to making competition irrelevant. Instead of striving to competitive advantage, defending market share and/or differentiation strategy, discover new market area’s In his book, which he wrote with his co-author Renée Mauborgne, he presents a framework and several strategic moves which will lead to blue ocean strategies.

Mr. Kim as Mrs. Mauborgne together, studied 150 strategic moves over 1 century in 30 industries and extracted 6 major principles:
- reconstruct market boundaries,
- focus on the big picture,
- reach beyond existing demand,
- get the strategic sequence right,
- overcome organizational hurdles, and
build execution into strategy.

As an example of this blue ocean strategy he showed us what makes the difference between the declining audiences for traditional classical music performances and football stadiums filled with people joining André Rieu’s pop-concert like, interactive music events. This was very humorous and enlightening. A good choice as well because of the Dutch ‘example’ of Blue Ocean Strategy.

This seminar gave me lot’s of things to reflect on. And it gives me energy to bring some, perhaps still out of the ordinary, actions in to practice to help realizing the changes that makes sense.