It
is a fact: we are immersed in ever more unpredictable
and accelerated
changes, which are increasingly pressing and require
all our effort to face up to. A variety of requests
are encountered on various fronts; they should be
tackled one by one but time and resources are limited
and daily activities need to go forward."
The key to success today is to manage the changes in technology,
the marketplace, and business, which affect companies and
individuals. But it is certainly not easy to face up to
rapidly developing economic conditions and contexts, plagued
by discontinuity, chaos and turbulence.
Companies must face a series of factors that can strongly
influence their ability to remain in the marketplace:
- A growing intensity of change
- A smaller redundancy of resources
- A growth in organizational objectives
- The geographic dispersion associated with the globalisation
of markets
- New structures of "networked" organizations
- A growing intensity of product/service competencies
- The ICT (Information Communication Technology) revolution
and the Internet
People play a truly important role in putting these
changes into action, in making innovation possible,
in generating significant transformations. What is
often forgotten is that the ability to change means
understanding, experimenting and adopting new skills
and ways of acting. It means learning something new
and different: change equals learning.
In order to revitalize and improve company performance
and results, today's companies cannot ignore that a
good part of their survival depends on the abilities
of their people, on their skill in knowing how to direct
and manage complex and sophisticated competencies,
in moving in ever larger circles, not limited only
to a world of membership.
1-Jeffrey M. Hyatt, Employee's Survival Guide to Change,
1999.
