Riding Currents of Change (eBook)

Inspiration from the Chicago River Triumph

Jim Helfgott, Michael Laval-Lindley (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
222 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-4255-5 (ISBN)

Infos

If Chicago could change the flow of its' river to become one of the great cities of the world, couldn't you make your change happen? Read the story of how two perfect strangers with very different ways of doing things got together and made an amazing change happen in a company that didn't know how to change. This is both an interesting & unusual take on the topic of driving change. 'I didn't think change could be such a fun subject.' Jim and Michael invite you to come along for the ride of discovering how they made change happen in a multi-cultural company using one singular event in the human history of the world as a point of inspiration: the reversal of the flow of the Chicago River. It is a story that will entertain and inform the reader on how change can happen in their own career and life.

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Change. Everybody wants it, everybody resists it. Every change program in every corporation around the world is dreamed about, planned, organized, communicated and for the most part, fails. "e;Riding Currents of Change"e; is the story of a consultant, Michael, and his client, Jim, and how they rode currents of change in a transformation program that ended up succeeding. It is rare enough for operational consultants and clients to end up being friends and having a story they wanted to share. "e;Riding Currents of Change"e; is about all the forces within the people affected by the change program to both help and hinder the success of the project. Jim and Michael identified real forces: Purpose-driven thinking vs. letting serendipity opening minds; Intuitive vs Analytical thinking and how both have good and bad impacts on managing change; the styles of some managers as change happens based on what they hope is in it for themselves. All of this told through the story of a singular event in the history of mankind and our planet: when Chicago reversed the flow of the Chicago River because people could die every spring if there was flooding or abnormal rains. Jim and Michael compare how change programs, whether going against Mother Nature or just something that sounds as simple as eliminating hand-offs between departments can create the same excitement or fear as reversing the flow of a river. Robert Frost wrote of "e;The Road Not Taken"e; and that vision is used to explain how Michael had to discover in the managers why they had not taken the road that would make change happen. The roles that must be played by different actors in the change progress are described as they were used in their transformation story as a tool for others to consider when faced with major transformation projects. "e;Riding Currents of Change"e; even deals with the subject of how important the choices of words and labels can be in the chapter on Football vs Football, a whimsical yet serious look at how a rose isn't necessarily a rose by any other name, apologies to Will. "e;Riding Currents of Change"e; is written conversationally and, at times, like with whitewater rafting, goes all over the place, just like any change management program, so the reader can get a grasp of how all those forces can come into play. "e;Riding Currents of Change"e; should give the reader enough of an insight into how change happens to help make whatever they want to change in the future smooth sailing.

Textauszug

Football vs Football

Football ?

WTF ?

Wait, it gets better.....!

Start with some data. From the world of art.

All the music in the world is composed from 12 notes on 7 octaves.

12 notes on 7 octaves.

All the music. (John Cage an exception?)

On the planet.

Music is very organized, very mathematical, very structured: two clefs, 3 expressions of each note (natural, sharp or flat), roughly 7 tempos used all the time, Beats Per Minute for DJ’s, opuses, movements, themes, cadences, 2 keys (major minor), 3 scales (major, minor, whole note), it just goes on and on. But in Pop music, a musician can play nearly any pop song ever written just by playing combinations of cords 1, 6, 4, 5, 2, 5, 1 or Do, La, Fa, Sol, Re, Sol, Do or some combination thereof.

What does that have to do with football?

There are more types of football in history than there are notes in an octave.

Yes, there are 18 games of football created in history.

Back to the project for just a moment of pragmatism: one person’s hand-off is another person’s pain in the butt that makes them want to complain and maybe even quit their job. Different people hear the same thing and envision something different… like what “fixing a hand-off” might look like. Is that like, a tweak, a fix, a re-create, an eliminate? Is the hand-off really a problem? We have hand-offs ?

Wow.

Back to football.

Now, depending on where a person comes from, their answer to “What does a football look like?” is probably going to be its round, white and black and about the size of an adult human head.

If they didn’t give that answer, then they might say a football is brown like pigskin and is oblong with a big white seam in it.

So what does this have to do with the Chicago River flow reversal triumph and managing change?

Vocabulary. Words.

One man’s football is another man’s macho expression of controlled, man-to-man brutality with fits and starts.

Saying what is meant and meaning what is said is very crucial to transforming businesses of any nature. Creating fans of a project and win-wins are going to become a matter of words and perception before they are matters of reality.. Accuracy and precision of message matter. Don’t call it X if it is really Y. When a team calls it Y, Y needs to be the same thing for everyone. Clarity is imperative. When the game of the oblong-shaped football finally settled on its current name, those creators probably got it wrong. But here they are.

Soccer is, at least according to Tom Rogan, far superior to football in its service to human fitness. After all, where non-round football players spend most of their time in static positions then takes chances on damaging their brains, soccer players are nearly always on the move.9

If asked what people like about football played with the oblong, non-spherical ball, they are probably going to get excited about the controlled violence and expressions of brute force during the game:

•sacking a quarterback

•tackling hard

•blocking a tackle

•goose-stepping to break a tackle

•an amazing field goal kick

•a catch just inbounds or a touchdown with the defender just missing an interception

•an interception and run back

•the hubris involved…. and

•the scoring: 6 points for a touchdown (a what ?), 3 points for a field goal, 2 points for a safety.

In the round-ball football, the sport the oblong football fans call soccer, the beauty of the game is the fluidity, the flow, the one-on-one, man-to-man non-violent gentlemanly skill required to both move the ball and the player without using their hands.

In the non-round football game, the amount of time the players on either team ever touch the ball with their feet is minimal. Nano seconds.

Let that sink in: in the oblong football game, the total time in any given match that the ball actually comes into contact with a foot is probably never more than 5 seconds. And the biggest points reward comes from carrying the ball with the hands, not the feet

Who the hell gave this game its name?

In the spherical football game, the players feet touch the ball every time the ball comes close to them and they get to it before their competitor.

What do fans of a game REALLY played with the feet, dribbling and kicking a spherical ball love about the game:

•it’s the beautiful game

•common working class geezers play like gentlemen

•the play stops only for penalties, injuries, video reviews, half-time

•the goal is almost always a one-on-one kicker-goalie affair

•a header into the goal is magic

•low scoring because a goal is incredibly difficult to achieve

•winning by 2 or more goals is a sign of pure dominance

•violence (on the pitch, anyway) is absolutely scorned

So why did they call the one game football if most players’ feet never touch the ball? And why not change it?

Ah, change! Everybody wants it. Everybody resists it. You’d think changing a name, sport or team would be less difficult than changing the flow of a river. Not for the fans in Washington, D.C.

Look at the resistance to changing the name of the professional football team in Washington, DC from Redskins, a pejorative name for some of the aboriginal population of North America, to something that would not be offensive to anyone but would create intimidation and fear in the other team, supposedly. There are Lions and Bengals, and Bears… oh my!

But Redskins? That’s REALLY scary, right? No one complained about the Chiefs. The Braves in the MLB are OK. The Blackhawks are fine.

But the name Redskins, an obvious racial slur to many, could not be changed. And for no other reason than to show everyone that, “by God, if we want to call a team a racial slur name we will, I don’t use it as a racial slur, and you are not going to do anything about it just because you suddenly found some political correctness to throw at me.” Apparently, calling the team the Justice, the Cheetahs, the Potomacs, the Hilltoppers, etc. would just NOT work. There is a risk. It would destroy ….

…what?

Life or death.

Changing the team name involves risks. On July 13, 2020, the team announced it would change its name. The name was decided but trademark issues had to be worked out before publicly announcing.

Why life or death? Because it took the death of one George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN under the knee of a policeman to raise enough awareness to the still widespread racial prejudices amongst some communities. When two major corporate sponsors told the Redskins change your name or lose us, it became a matter of life and death for the team. The horrifying killing of George Floyd, viewed around the world, was a tipping point death much like typhoid from the sewage in the river, although much more insidious due to the underlying issue of racism in America.

So why did it take so long? On the one hand, a reason not to was because its been fine since 1932 and they are the 5th most valuable team in the NFL. On the other hand, as with any other change, there needs to be a business case and a change owner who believes the change will grow the brand value. In this case, the business case was the life or death of the team. Today Forbes values the team at over $3 billion. That’s enough to cause pause in any discussion of changing the brand.

Any discussion about the name change such as, for example, the Washington Justice (here come the Judges!) had to consider impact on the value of the brand and the potential damage keeping the name or changing would have on that value. That was the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Once pressure was put on the team by the player’s association, investors and sellers of their team merch, forced a financial interest that saw the name as a problem within their organizations and that of the NFL. That current of change outside the marketing department inspired a ‘radical’ change. (Author’s note: at time of writing, the new name had not been announced. We still like the Washington Justice.)

Prior to this, there just weren’t enough loud voices for this to be changed so why bother ? We can’t please all the people all the time? Sheesh.

No business case, no change owner, no WIIFM… no change. But, a horrible death made formerly silent voices become very loud. And that brought change. Before, there was not a financial WIIFM, then, suddenly one appears and a change is made.

The mentality of stakeholders in particular, is about ownership of the motivation and the emotional cost of the change. If the key stakeholders (i.e. the NFL) believed in the value (financial and emotional) of the change, it would happen. Would the change add $1 billion to the team’s value? Hell yes to that!

The resistance to change to make other nonstakeholders...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.12.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-4255-0 / 1098342550
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-4255-5 / 9781098342555