John P. Kotter, in his latest book A Sense of Urgency [Harvard Business Press, 2008] cites two reasons why, by his calculation, 70% of Business change either fails to deliver or is never instigated in the first place. These two reasons are complacency and false urgency.
He believes that complacent people do not realise they are complacent and that they believe someone else is responsible for solving the challenges the business faces. Kotter goes on to describe complacent people as tending to avoid leading and trying to maintain the status quo. He describes false urgency as being created by people who are very active but not necessarily in meeting the challenges of their company. They tend to be stressed, tired and feeling the weight of too much expectation. They typically spend too much time in meetings where people are more interested in making themselves look good than in meeting new challenges.
Kotter describes true urgency as being fueled by the belief that the world contains great opportunity among the challenges.
If you, like me, are proactively seeking new challenges, have gut instinct and determination to take a challenge head on and win then I reccomend you read this book and find out how to remove complacent and false urgency from situations where urgency is required... How to find opportunity in a crisis.
We seem to be in a downward spiral. I hear people all around me firmly focused on short-term recessionary issues. How often have you heard a conversation that starts "I've never known it so tough. I have had to cut my cost base by 40%, lay 25% of my staff off and my pipeline has dried up"? Put two like-minded people together and it doesn't take much to get to the bottom a deep recessionary hole. Why do Managers, Directors, Financiers and the media feel it necessary to talk themselves into a recession?
I am taking a more positive approach. I firmly believe there is a future for businesses in the UK. You just have to be positive and stretch your view from the immediate to the medium term. The key factor that is helping my business grow in todays market is the strength and creativity of my team. We are working hard, looking for creative innovative ways to be more efficient and to strengthen our pipeline. We are constantly looking to hire strong sales and delivery people. We are also in accquisition mode as there are a number of firms that are struggling and are therefore under valued.
I m looking forward to riding the recovery wave.
Last week I had the pleasure of listening to Phil Gilbert, Lombardi Software's CTO at the Lombardi European Partner Conference in south-west France.
During his keynote, Phil quoted a VC friend as saying "We look for companies doing Oracle ERP installations because we know they will probably go bankrupt soon and then we can buy them on the cheap. As a VC, ERP installation projects are our pipeline".
Clearly we are in an uncertain world right now. So, if large ERP implementations are high risk and the level of volatility in the world is such that we have to do things differently, have we reached the time where pureplay BPM vendors like Lombardi are in the ascendance?
