Hopes Alive in Change Management

Through our strategy workshops we try to unite people in action (build social capital).  We are able to do that, but we find it difficult to sustain the initiatives undertaken as part of the program (especially the customer visits and new market identification). People have

a tendency to relapse into their individualistic approach to jobs, and they remain operations focused than business focused.  We are very much aware that a poorly led change initiative can inflict disorder on a business unit or the entire company. Sluggish initiatives can breed sarcasm and damage the top management’s and our credibility, and can jeopardize future change initiatives. We are very concerned in preventing change failures. 

Failed initiatives have happened in some of our facilitation midway. As we are a research based consulting, we delved deep into the issues related to initiatives and improved our delivery systems to overcome the inertia of change. In the process of analyzing the cause for change-initiative failures, we also recognized that the business leader’s courage matters most in making the change successful.  There is no substitute for this ingredient, and we have to depend on the leadership level of the client company. Places where we have strong leadership at the top, our strategy facilitation is smoother.   Resilience, patience and trying out until the goal is reached, are the three attributes we expect or want from the top team to implement changes in business strategy.  We are constantly working on developing and nurturing these characteristics in our client’s team.  Even a small breakthrough in change management can give tremendous outcomes.  . We recognize that  leading initiatives is not easy,  but we have identified a few effective principles, that change initiatives stand to  survive the most common vulnerabilities. That is emerging as our strength. 

Contributed by Sasikanth R Prabhu, Marg Atreya

Focus and Strategy

From visits to various organisations, we have observed that many organisations are like alcoholics..... Alcoholics find it difficult to leave their drinking habits. Similarly, organisations too cannot leave their habits of clinging to operational silos. Daily urgencies and crisis are expected, attended and promoted than the important activities of business. Business connection is lost in many the organisations.  Operations are meant to drive business, but operations, in course of time, engulfs business and the very purpose of business is hijacked. We bring this anomaly to the notice of the key players of business. Even being aware of this predicament , the people in the organisation cannot get out of their habit of fighting daily urgencies and crisis.

Many say we need to form business strategy, but there is no time. they often say ... Let us finish this project and then we shall sit for forming business strategy. Most business owners and key players fail to take action on strategy but keep on continuing their operational routines.

Second factor that hinder the wished growth is the lack of clarity about overall strategy We have lost count of cases in which well-intentioned project managers waste their time and energy on initiatives that senior managers felt, this is not our priority, even when the same senior persons have approved the initiatives.

Still another observation is that ,  lot of good companies waste enormous amounts o resources on too many projects that had too little focus.

Our business facilitation workshops attempts to overcome these problems by establishing shared awareness and focus of the business.