Change Is the One Thing You Can Count On
If there’s one thing you can count on with your business it’s Change. Change can be positive, if it brings new opportunities to grow and innovate or it can be a negative if your business or your customers are disrupted. But any way you look at businesses of all types and sizes must develop a mechanism to predict and deal with changes to your business, markets, products and services.
Change and Innovation
By its very nature, innovation is about change. When you incrementally improve a product, process, service or business strategy, change is inevitable. Incremental innovation drives change internally with the ways your business operates and fulfills commitments to customers, as well as externally with customers, markets, suppliers and competitors. Managing positive change when your business is innovating incrementally can be a large challenge for most companies.
On the other hand disruptive innovation usually causes larger changes because these efforts are driven by creativity and risk taking. Developing a new value proposition that surrounds innovative new products or services that disrupt the markets a business serves and its competitors can make for dramatic changes. Disruptive innovations are typically big leaps forward and they require new massages to explain them to existing and future customers, as well as internally.
Managing Change
Rosebeth Moss Kanter, professor at Harvard Business School writes extensively about managing change in businesses. In her book Change Masters she coined one truth about change “Change is a threat when done to me, but an opportunity when done by me”, which compared innovation-friendly and innovation-stifling company cultures. She writes in the her blog https://blogs.hbr.org/kanter/2010/08/seven-truths-about-change-to-l.html about the Seven Truths About Change , in addition to the one above, these are:
- Change is a threat when done to me, but an opportunity when done by me
- A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step
- If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there
- Change is a campaign, not a decision
- When you come to a fork in the road, take it (Inspired by Yogi Berra)
- Everything can look like failure in the middle
- Be the change you seek to make in the world
Customers, Employees and Channels
Considering that change is inevitable no matter what road a business travels, let’s talk about techniques that can help manage change with customers, employees, supply chains, marketing channels, and your internal processes. All of these are important but let’s look at how change and disruption affect Customers, Employees and Channels and what your can do about it:
Customers: First, start with the truth hat Peter Drucker taught for so long, that the only purpose of a business is to create a customer. Be prepared to think from your customers perspective about change and explain how any new products or services solve real problems they experience. If you don’t your latest and greatest idea will likely fall on its face.
Employees: Changes driven by disruption or incremental innovation usually mean employees need to do things differently, which can create stress and wreak havoc internally. The rule is to Communicate, Communicate, Communicate and Communicate some more, how changes will affect employees and ultimately benefit them.
Channels: Innovative new products and services associated with them likely will disrupt and change your sales and distribution channels, which can cause problems for any company. Again, the Communication Rule is in play. The goal should be not to have a breakdown in sales and distribution channels, otherwise your new product will sit on the shelf.
Change truly is the one thing you can count on if your are committed to driving innovation and profitable growth. Dealing with change in a positive manner is a huge key to success.
Charlie Alter owns Bentbrook Advisors LLC based in Sylvania, Ohio. He specializes in Growth Strategy, Innovation and Coaching and can be reached at calter@me.com visit https://bentbrookadvisors.com/ for more information on his business advisory practice.
