Survival is not enough

Companies aren't organised for change.They've never needed to be. Growing and profiting from stable times was a terrific strategy.Forced into an era of rapid change, the response of companies organised for a stable environment is to ask managers and employees to act as a buffer between the company and the changing outside world. Alas, it's not working.Are you working longer hours than you used to? Most people do.And along with the long days, it often feels as if your day is filled with one emergency after another.We spend so much time putting out fires and nervously anticipating the next crisis that there's almost no time left to do our real jobs.Your job shouldn't be to stand between your company's old rules and the new rules of the outside world.Instead, your company needs to change from the inside out. Your company needs to learn to zoom....Every company zoomed when it was young.But success has spoiled most organisations, and they're now too fat, too stuck and too afraid to zoom again.If your company is under stress, it only has two choices.Either it changes or it requires people like you to absorb the stress.The first is productive, energising and profitable. The second leads to an unhappy frenzy.Because the chaos we're facing came to us gradually, it's easy to believe that we can gradually adapt in the way we deal with it.It's not true.The way we used to do business — dependent on highly profitable physical goods and manageable cycles of change is over.