You know how when we go into Comet and we just love buying things, but when the salesperson comes over to speak to us we go rigid and walk out? That’s because we love buying but we can’t stand being sold to. This principle is the same with change, we love it if it’s something we do but hate it when it is done to us.
I had the senior team from a Swedish-based organisation gathered to look at the future shape of the business. They weren’t too pleased. Their collective view was that they were masters of change, they lived out change every day and they needed no-one to help them ‘manage change’. So it was difficult. I couldn’t get them to even admit that they themselves might have to change, so I gave each of them an envelope with their name on it. They were really suspicious and opened them carefully and inside were their redundancy notices.
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