Chapter 10: "Prove it!"

"Prove it!"

Much like death, taxes and election rhetoric over both, resistance to change is inevitable. No matter how good your idea is or how clear to you the need is, someone (and probably several someones) is going to see it differently.

However, there is good news. Whether the resistance you encounter to your change effort is technical (“I can’t”), political (“I won’t”) or cultural (“I shouldn’t”), there are tactics for overcoming – or at least mitigating – it. In fact, looking once again to GE’s CAP model, there are three: data, demonstration and demand (no extra charge for the alliteration).

You know that woman who works in the cubicle in the corner whose nose is always buried in Excel spreadsheets? How about the CFO who can’t have a conversation without drawing a bar chart? These are people who live and breathe data. They can’t get enough of it. If you want to bring these folks over to your side, you have to be able to produce numbers, graphs and statistics that support your change effort.

Do you have benchmark or competitive data? How about financials? Maybe you’ve found some industry trend data in your research. Whatever it is, it’s data, and it’s often the key to overcoming resistance, especially for your more analytical stakeholders. Spend some time with your core project team to figure out what data you have that might sway resisters.

For some folks, though, data isn’t enough. They have to be able to see the success of the change before they can support it. I call these people Missourians because they practically scream, “Show me!” They need a demonstration.

For your Missourians, you’re going to need examples of similar change efforts that were successful, perhaps in admired organizations. Industry best practices can be powerful demonstrations, as can small pilots of the change or even testimonials from impressive figures or organizations. Your change team might have to do some homework to be able to demonstrate the value of your initiative, but it’ll be worth it when you encounter a “Show me!” among your key stakeholders.

However, even with all the demonstrable benefits and data proving the value of your change effort, you’re still going to encounter some resistant holdouts. For those folks, sometimes the most compelling influencer of all is a demand to change.

That’s right. In spite of our independent natures and freethinking tendencies, sometimes we just need to be told what to do. The demand might come from a respected leader. It might come from a customer. It might even come from the competition. Regardless of its source, a clear and compelling call that supports the change can really get results when data and demonstration fall short. In effect, it’s the influencing equivalent of a parent or teacher telling a child, “Because I said so.” And sometimes – especially where physical safety or financial solvency is in question – that’s the necessary and expedient approach.

The person who’s resisting on technical grounds is more likely to be convinced by data, but if that person also happens to have an aversion to pivot tables, you might need someone he respects to say, “Because I said so.” On the other hand, the cultural resister who won’t support your change simply because, “That’s not how we do things around here,” might be more moved by a case study of a competitor who tried something new and then left your company in the dust.

Unfortunately, you can’t just pick one of these three approaches to winning over your constituents. Different personalities and different types of resistance are going to require different tactics, so your project team needs to be prepared with all three.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 9: "I can't, I won't and I shouldn't"

"I can't, I won't and I shouldn't"

Resistance and influence in successful change

If you’ve ever been part of an unsuccessful change effort, it should come as no surprise to you that mobilizing commitment is one of the keys that actually drives successful change.

But, as we discussed last time, it’s pretty unrealistic to expect everyone to be your change initiative’s biggest fan. Some folks aren’t going to be as supportive as you need them to be, and some are going to be actively opposed to it. To get their commitment and support, you’re going to have to get smart.

Fortunately, that’s not as hard as it sounds. First, it helps to figure out what kind of resistance you’re dealing with. The GE change acceleration process (CAP) breaks it down into just three different kinds of resistance: technical, political and cultural.

Technical resistance usually has to do with concrete and tangible reasons why the change is a bad idea or won’t work. The person who resists your change effort on technical grounds will likely be concerned with the cost of the project, the abilities of people to deal with it or insufficient resources to do it right.

The person who resists on political grounds is concerned with issues of power and authority. Perhaps she’s worried that the new, post-change world will take away her control of the sales process. Maybe he thinks the change will make his group less powerful in the company. Whatever the specifics, the political resister needs to know that his or her position won’t be threatened by your initiative.

Cultural resistance arises out of concern for the prevailing mindsets, norms or habits of behavior and interaction in the organization. The familiar refrains of, “That’s not how we do things around here,” or “That’s just not our culture,” are warning signs of cultural resistance.

The bad news about all these kinds of resistance is that you can never hope to overcome them 100% with logic and reason. There’s a lot of emotion and irrationality tied up in change resistance, and some of it runs pretty deep.

The good news, though, is that successful change doesn’t require overcoming 100% of the resistance. You simply have to ease the concerns enough that the resister moves to where you need him or her to be on your stakeholder analysis matrix. Next time we chat, we’ll talk more specifically about three techniques to do just that.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 8: Don't be afraid of commitment

Don't Be Afraid of Commitment

How stakeholder analysis ensures success

You don’t have to wait until you’ve created a clear vision of your change to start mobilizing commitment for it, but it certainly helps. A shared vision for why the change is important and what it will accomplish (created with help from the tools we spoke about last week and the week before) will make it much easier to win friends and influence people.

However, if your business is like most businesses, you know that faster is better, and if you can accomplish things in parallel, so much the better. While you’re shaping a vision, there’s no reason not to pull your team together for a little stakeholder analysis.

If that phrase – stakeholder analysis – smacks of corporatespeak to you, feel free to ignore it. It’s really just a fancy term for figuring out where important or relevant people stand with respect to the change you’re leading, and it’s a good thing to do.

Sure, you can plow ahead with your initiative without paying attention to how other people feel about it, but it’ll probably bite you in the asparagus sooner or later. Every change involves and impacts people with titular or situational power in your organization, and if those folks aren’t as supportive as you need them to be, they’re likely to undermine the effort, either through active sabotage or through passive non-compliance. Either way, you’ll be stuck.

As a change leader, it’s your job to bring your key stakeholders along to where you need them to be, and in order to do that, you first have to know where they are. The table below is an example of a quick and dirty stakeholder analysis for a company rolling out a new product. Here’s how the project team used it.

First, the team got together with the blank matrix drawn on a flip chart. Only the column headings were filled in. The team then brainstormed all the key stakeholders, i.e. the people who were mostly directly impacted by or had the greatest ability to influence the success of the new product introduction, and tried to figure out how much support the effort needed from each of those stakeholders.

As you can see from the O’s on the chart, the new product intro doesn’t need the same level of support from everyone. While the team needs strong support from Martha and John in marketing and sales, it only needs moderate support from the CEO and CTO. Mere indifference is about all that is needed from the legal department. As long as Larry isn’t opposed, the project should succeed.

Once the team figured out where it needed folks to be, it had to figure out where those same folks stand today, in order to know whether they had work to do. This is the step where it’s tempting – but potentially fatal (project-wise) – to take shortcuts. Lots of project teams will simply give their best guesses here, but I wouldn’t recommend that. It might be OK as a first step, but to truly know your stakeholders opinions, you’re going to have to ask them. This is where it might be handy to have your vision shaped into an elevator pitch. Of course, our imaginary team did just that. They pitched the key elements of their change initiative (what it is, why it’s important now, how success will look and what’s needed from the stakeholder) and captured stakeholder responses.

After the stakeholder interviews were complete, the team reconvened and put X’s in the matrix to signify the stakeholders’ current positions. Where the team found the biggest gaps between current position and desired level of support, they documented the reasons why that person was resistant and then came up with influencing strategies to move each one along.

Next week, we’ll talk about three different influencing strategies, when to use them and how they work.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 7: Another tool for shaping a vision

Another Tool for Shaping a Vision

Last time, we talked about the power of the “more of/less of” brainstorming exercise to shape a vision of your changed world. Once you’ve got an extensive list of actions and behaviors that the group wants to see more of or less of in post-change paradise, you’re ready to pull the next tool out of the box. This one is called the "15-word flip chart," and it’s incredibly powerful.

For this exercise, give everyone present (probably the key stakeholders who are going to help make the change happen) his or her very own piece of flip chart paper and a nice fat-tipped marker. With your “more of/less of” brainstorm posted prominently, ask everyone in the room to write a vision statement of 15 words or less. To make it a little easier, you can assume that every statement starts with the words, "We will," and not count those as part of the 15.

Why 15 words? Well, it’s admittedly an arbitrary number, and the reason for it is to provide some constraints. Out of limitations, I like to think, comes creativity. If you don’t have some parameters, some folks won’t know what to write and will be overwhelmed by the blank page. Others will write treatises and manifestos. You don’t want either. Give folks some quiet time to do this, without discussing. The point is for each person to come up with his or her own vision statement. Discussion comes later.

Once everyone has a 15-word flip chart completed, it’s time to turn them all into one statement that everyone can agree on and understand. Post the various papers on the wall so everyone can see. With a nice bright color, circle every word that occurs more than once. You can probably ignore articles (words like “a,” “an” and “the”), as well as conjunctions (like “and” and “but”), but circle everything else.

Your goal here is consensus. By starting with the words that occur more than once, you’re focusing on things on which at least two people in the room agree. From that point of concord, it’s easier to build agreement around the room. Put all those words on their own flip chart for the group to see and start working with those words to create a 15-word vision statement that everyone likes.

Once you’ve led your group through the 15-word flip chart and the more of/less of exercises, you’ll find you have a much sharper vision of your finish line, which will make it a lot easier to mobilize commitment throughout your organization to the change initiative. Leading people toward a finish line they can actually see is way easier than leading them through a dark, foggy night.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 6: If you want to shape a vision, get out your tools

If You Want to Shape a Vision, Get Out Your Tools

In our last conversation, we talked about the absolute need to shape a vision for the future that everyone can agree upon and understand. We talked about needing to be able to truly see that future state so that we’re all sure we’re headed toward the same grassy knoll of successful change.

But that isn’t easy, is it? After all, words like, “We will be a world-class customer service organization” just sound so impressive and inspirational and business-y. Who’d want to muddy them up with more words?

Well, while slogans like that one are fine to put on posters or business cards, they just aren’t specific enough to allow us to chart a course to make them real, and they definitely aren’t specific enough for us to know when they have truly become reality.

So the bad news is you’ve got to get specific. The good news is I’ve got some really simple tools to help you get there.

The first tool is a simple brainstorming framework that helps key stakeholders envision the actions and behaviors that will turn the vision into reality. For simplicity’s sake, I just call it “more of/less of.”

Draw a line down the middle of a flip chart from top to bottom to create two columns. At the top of one column write: “More of.” At the top of the other, write (you guessed it, didn’t you?): “Less of.” Now gather the folks who are going to help you make your change happen and start brainstorming actions and behaviors that you’ll see or hear when the change is successfully completed.

Now, that sounds deceptively easy, but the fact is that we’re all so used to thinking conceptually that it’s sometimes hard to boil our grandiose visions down to mundane, quotidian actions and behaviors. Mark my words: you’ll gather everyone together and ask what actions or behaviors they expect to see more of or less of in the changed world, and they’ll say things like, “Going the extra mile,” or “Accountability,” or “Can-do attitudes.” The trouble is you can’t really see those things very clearly, can you?

To help with this challenge, here’s a good test. If you couldn’t capture the action or behavior with a video camera or a tape recorder (does anyone even have those anymore?), then it doesn’t count, and it doesn’t go on the flip chart. Don’t reject it out of hand, however. Simply ask, “What would that look (or sound) like?” You’ll get there. Allow the group at least 30 minutes for this.

The “more of/less of” brainstorming exercise will take you a long way toward being able to visualize what the world will look like when your change is implemented. When you can picture folks running around your office, acting and behaving in accordance with that big list, you’ll have a great yardstick against which to measure the success of your change effort. But you’ll still need to boil this down into some simple words that everyone can easily communicate and understand. Next time, I’ll give you another simple tool that will get you there.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 5: Threats and opportunities

Threats and opportunities: Itchy feet make for successful change

When last we met, we talked about the fact that successful change efforts require the creation of a compelling need for change. This need has to be strong enough to overcome our natural tendency to revel in the complacency of the status quo.

One of the simplest ways I know of to create a compelling need for change – the need that overcomes our preternatural to keep things just the way they are – is to brainstorm threats and opportunities.

If you’re familiar with a SWOT analysis, you’ll recognize threats and opportunities as the T and O of that acronym (strengths and weaknesses are the S and W, incidentally). If you’re not, don’t sweat it. It’s a simple concept.

Threats are the bad things that will happen to us if we don’t change. For example, if I don’t change my socks, maybe the pair I’m wearing will wear out. Maybe my significant other will leave me, repulsed by the odor. Maybe I’ll develop some horrible toenail fungus. Or maybe my feet will just itch so badly that I won’t be able to stand it.

Those are threats.

Opportunities, on the other hand, are the good things that will happen to us if we implement the change in question. If I start changing my socks, they’ll last longer. I might discover that some socks are more comfortable than the ones I’ve been wearing. I might be able to get that pedicure I’ve always wanted.

Those are opportunities.

When you’re brainstorming threats and opportunities, pull together as many key stakeholders as you can, and remember conventional brainstorming rules and etiquette.. Quantity of ideas is more important than quality. Every idea gets captured. Even the most ludicrous idea gets air time, and no energy is wasted on shooting ideas down, even when they’re really, really stupid.

Once you’ve amassed a sizable list of threats and opportunities, there will probably be no doubt in the room that the change is necessary. However, before you move forward, you’ll want to prioritize your lists. After all, you’ll be using these to spread the need for change like a virus across the organization.

To create and communicate a vision of the future state, build commitment to the change, remove obstacles and build coalitions that will get it done, you’ll want to be carry your best ideas (i.e. the most compelling, most impacting and most likely to occur) forward. Those words can be woven into elevator pitches, rallying cries and inspirational anthems with three-part harmony.

In any project, extra effort invested at the beginning always pays dividends down the road. Put the work into creating a compelling imperative for change up front and you’ll find fewer hurdles, fewer resisters and fewer saboteurs of the effort down the road. Make your organization’s feet itch, and the rest will follow.

Chapter 4: Make their feet itch

Make Their Feet Itch

Creating a Compelling Need for Change

Whether you’re talking about changing your oil, changing your socks or changing the way your company sells IT solutions, one of the hardest things about it is getting everyone involved to agree that the change has to happen. After all, isn’t it easier to leave the oil in your car, wear the same socks today that you wore yesterday or sell in exactly the same way you always have?

Speaking for myself, in order to overcome my own laziness, I have to firmly believe that it matters whether I change my socks or not. I have to believe that the benefits of expending all that effort to change my socks outweigh my general aversion to change.

Let’s move outside of my shoes and contemplate organizational impacts of change. Most people you know would rather not deal with change, even when they know it’s good for them. Consciously or unconsciously – and regardless of our politics, socioeconomic backgrounds or levels of education – most of us would rather maintain the status quo than adapt to something new. That’s why people don’t lose weight, don’t floss and don’t stop cracking their knuckles. We don’t necessarily always resist change actively, but we usually don’t embrace it.

An organization is nothing more than a bunch of people, so organizations are also prone to preservation of the status quo. In fact, there might be even an exponentially increased resistance to change when you put more than one person into the equation. If you’ve ever tried to lead a change effort, you know how hard it is to get others to adopt and embrace what you think is a fantastic idea.

An absolutely key ingredient to successful change is everyone involved believing that the change is necessary. The GE CAP model calls this “creating a shared need.” John Kotter calls it “creating urgency.” I call it that moment when my feet get so itchy that NOT changing my socks is no longer an option.

One of the simplest ways I know of to create a compelling need for change – the need that overcomes our preternatural to keep things just the way they are – is to brainstorm threats and opportunities.

If you’re familiar with a SWOT analysis, you’ll recognize threats and opportunities as the T and O of that acronym (strengths and weaknesses are the S and W, incidentally). If you’re not, don’t sweat it. It’s a simple concept.

Threats are the bad things that will happen to us if we don’t change. For example, if I don’t change my socks, maybe the pair I’m wearing will wear out. Maybe my significant other will leave me, repulsed by the odor. Maybe I’ll develop some horrible toenail fungus.

Those are threats.

Opportunities, on the other hand, are the good things that will happen to us if we implement the change in question. If I start changing my socks, they’ll last longer. I might discover that some socks are more comfortable than the ones I’ve been wearing. I might be able to get that pedicure I’ve always wanted.

Those are opportunities.

When you’re brainstorming threats and opportunities, pull together as many key stakeholders as you can, and remember conventional brainstorming rules and etiquette. Quantity of ideas is more important than quality. Every idea gets captured. Even the most ludicrous idea gets air time, and no energy is wasted on shooting ideas down, even when they’re really, really stupid.

Once you’ve amassed a sizable list of threats and opportunities, there will probably be no doubt in the room that the change is necessary. However, before you move forward, you’ll want to prioritize your lists. After all, you’ll be using these to spread the need for change like a virus across the organization.

To create and communicate a vision of the future state, build commitment to the change, remove obstacles and build coalitions that will get it done, you’ll want to carry your best ideas (i.e. the most compelling, most impacting and most likely to occur) forward. Those words can be woven into elevator pitches, rallying cries and inspirational anthems with three-part harmony.

In any project, extra effort invested at the beginning always pays dividends down the road. Put the work into creating a compelling imperative for change up front and you’ll find fewer hurdles, fewer resisters and fewer saboteurs of the effort down the road. Make your organization’s feet itch, and the rest will follow.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 3: Picturing change

Picturing Change

Let’s be honest with each other, shall we? No matter how much it happens to us or we make it happen, change is never easy. Leaving the known and marching into the unknown can be stressful, difficult and taxing.

But you’re a leader, right? At the bare minimum, you’re a survivor. And to survive, you’ve got to be able to picture the change. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a visual person, visualizing how the change is going to work makes it a little less scary and puts you a little more in charge.

One of the easiest ways to visualize change is to use a model. Fortunately for you, some very smart people have already created some models that apply to almost any change initiative and will help you whether you’re leading or merely hoping to survive the change.

Back in the early 90s, the General Electric Company – a master of organizational change and transformation – found itself at a crossroads. It had successfully implemented a quick model for coming up with solutions to complex problems faced in the business and was on the verge of adopting further discipline and rigor in its business processes in the form of Six Sigma.

However, the company also realized the importance of the Q x A = E equation we discussed way back when and knew they had to improve the acceptance of its brilliant solutions if they were going to be effective.

GE then commissioned a team of consultants to figure out how successful change works, and then codify it for the company’s employees to learn and apply. The result of their work was the Change Acceleration Process (or CAP), a seven-element, not-strictly-linear view into the move from current state to future state:
• Create a shared need
• Shape a vision
• Mobilize commitment
• Make change last
• Monitor progress
• Lead change
• Change systems and structures

A few years later, in 1996, Harvard business professor John Kotter published his seminal work on the topic,Leading Change. Kotter’s eight-step change model echoed CAP’s approach to putting shape to the previously amorphous idea of change:
1. Create urgency
2. Form a powerful coalition
3. Create a vision for change
4. Communicate the vision
5. Remove obstacles
6. Create short-term wins
7. Build on the change
8. Anchor the changes in corporate culture

Even without knowing the details, I’m sure you can see that using these two powerful lenses will allow us to see change a whole lot more clearly. Notice that change doesn’t involve 31 flavors or a 12-step program. Picturing change – putting it into a model that allows us to make sense out of chaos and lemonade out of potato peels – just requires wrapping our brains around seven or eight clear concepts.

The next time we chat, we’ll dig into the details on creating a shared need or urgency for a verb change. This is the first thing you have to do if you want to get your change initiative out of the boardroom and onto the floor.

Until then, do me a favor. Take five minutes to think about the worst change you were ever part of. What went wrong? What could have been done differently to make the change successful?

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 2: Change is a process, not an event

Change Is a Process, Not an Event

Last time we met, it seemed like I couldn’t let go of the idea that change is both a noun and a verb. It’s a noun when it happens to you (e.g. “That change in the marketing funds program came out of nowhere!”), and it’s a verb when you’re doing it (e.g. “I’m finally going to change my socks!”).

Well, I stand by that assertion. It comes from a lot of research, pondering and experience. But I can’t help noticing that – whether it’s a noun or a verb – this way of looking at change makes it sound like an event, a moment in time after which things are different than they were before that moment.

While that’s fundamentally true, it masks a fact that is vital to anyone who wants to lead – or even survive – change effectively. The fact is that change is a process, and often a terrifically slow one. It’s a process that often precedes that event by weeks, months or years, depending on the scope of the change, and one that continues for weeks, months or years after that event. We hardly notice it because the capital-c Change is often the only part of the lower-case change that we can see, but it’s often the least important.

In order to understand this distinction between event and process, we have to acknowledge that there are multiple dimensions to any change effort, and these dimensions can be boiled down to two categories: technical and human. The technical category involves systems, technologies, policies, procedures and all sorts of other artifacts that enable (or stand in the way of) the change.

The human category, on the other hand, involves attitude, influence, emotion, instincts and all those other messy elements that make us people. It’s the soft stuff, and, as the cliché says, that’s the hard stuff.

Back in the late ’90s, an extremely smart guy by the name of John M. Fisher published “The Process of Transition,” in which he dissected the human experience of change and illustrated just how much of a process it is. He argued for the use of the word “transition” instead of the word “change” to acknowledge the importance of the process, and he observed eight emotional stages in that transition: anxiety, happiness, fear, threat, guilt, denial, depression, disillusionment, hostility and acceptance.

If that sounds a lot like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, that’s because it is. After all, as change (the noun) happens to us, we have to let go of the way things were before and find a way to get our bearings in a new world. It’s a painful, powerful process that can leave people harder, better, faster and stronger than they were before, when it’s handled well.

When it’s handled poorly, however, the transition process associated with change can leave people despondent, disillusioned and disengaged.

Whether you’re leading a verb change, responding to a noun change or somewhere in between, I don’t want you or your organization to end up tattered and torn. I want you to end up better than you were. And that means paying attention to both the technical and the human sides of change.

Next time, we’ll look at some models of the change process that will give you a roadmap for steering your organization – and yourself – through the rocky terrain of change so that you come out the other side with all four wheels still on the vehicle.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 1: Change is a verb

Change Is a Verb:

Making it happen instead of letting it happen

For most people, most of the time, change is a noun. It’s a thing that happens to us. Whether it’s a change in gas prices, a change in our waist size or a disruptive change in the IT distribution marketplace, it’s often the object of dread, of uncertainty and of disdain.

But change is also a verb. It’s an action we can take. We can change the kind of car we drive, change the food we eat and even change the way we approach a challenge. Heck, I’ve changed my mind a dozen times today and my clothes twice!

Whether it’s a noun that’s happening to you or a verb that you’re doing, change is always hard. It just is. As humans, we tend toward stasis – even at a biological level. Our bodies and our minds will go to great lengths to keep everything the same, in spite of external forces. In fact, that change in our waist size is an unfortunate byproduct of our body’s efforts to keep things static.

The fact remains, however, that we live in a quickly changing world, especially in the IT industry, and our survival depends our ability to respond effectively to it (when it’s a noun) and to lead others effectively through it (when it’s a verb).

In the upcoming series of articles, we’re going to give you some tools to do just that. Luckily for you (and us), some very smart people – like John Kotter, John Fisher and even General Electric – have done a lot of the work for you. Their observations about leading and responding to change provide a blueprint for success from which we’ll borrow liberally.

Come back next week, when we’ll talk about the difference between change and transition, and whether it really matters. We’ll then begin the scary stroll through the valley of the shadow of change. You will fear no evil.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 19: Faring Well in the New Age of IT Distribution

And so, dear readers and friends, we’ve reached the end of this particular journey together. Looking back, it’s immediately apparent that something tricky happened somewhere along the way. Step by step, little by little, we experienced a major paradigm shift, and we’ll never been the same.

It was a shift away from the notion that we’re in the IT distribution business – and toward the notion that we’re in the problem-solving business. From becoming an entangled consultant to using our brains to the Bass-O-Matic to asking questions and on back through resources, expertise, services and specialization, everything we focused on was about solving real business problems – for ourselves, for our upstream partners and for our customers.

This insight led us to the epiphany that all business problems can be boiled down to three words: better, faster, cheaper. We knew we’d have to get really good at helping our customers do business with higher quality (better), in less time (faster) and for lower cost (cheaper) if we wanted to survive the journey.

In order to lead our customers to the promised land of better-faster-cheaper, we knew we’d have to get smart and distinguish ourselves from the competition, and we knew we had to get comfortable with usingdata to diagnose and solve problems. Here, we were assisted by an able guide, Vilfredo Pareto, who showed us a simple way to zero in on the true causes of problems – and also helped me keep my shoes tied and get to work on time. What a guy!

Ultimately, however, we knew that data alone wouldn’t ensure our success. After all, in the end, work gets done by humans. Without humans, there is no RESS. They are our resources, and in them lies the expertise that helps us deliver services and specialize. To get the most out of those humans, we decided that we’d commit to communicating with them one-on-one – regularly, frequently and openly.

And here we are, at the end of it all, seeing the world of IT distribution – the world of business, in fact – through a very different lens. It’s a big change, and at this point, some of it is purely intellectual. It will take discipline, practice and patience to make it part of our lives. But we know it will pay off.

Change is not easy. When the landscape shifts – even when we’re the ones creating the change – it pushes buttons in our primitive brains that scare us, even when we know it’s going to be good for us.

And that’s why – as we leave this particular journey behind us – we’re looking forward to starting a new one soon. This one will be all about change – conceiving it, getting support for it and leading it. Borrowing ideas from one of the most successful companies in the world, we’ll explore some different ways to think about and DO change.

And there will probably be more fishing!

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant