I just had an e-mail correspondence with a client in the financial industry who pointed out something interesting:
"I learned
about the difference between managing change and managing uncertainty...and I
can tell you there is an important difference that plays at all organisational
levels...."
For the past decade, most organizations have preached the virtues about "change" and looking at quaint phenomena that can be kept at arm's length. What ended up happening instead was that change became exponential in scope and struck with lightning speed. The return of the Web from 2001 onwards, for example, is about to cause a "bloodbath" in the media industry according to Clay Shirky. Says Shirky in an interview with The Guardian: "The great
misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for
such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a
deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be.
It's like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite
states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered
life before the Soviet Union - nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people
are like Russians, in a way."
"The
future of capitalism is here, and it’s not what any of us expected. With
breathtaking speed, in the autumn of 2008 the credit markets ceased functioning
normally, governments around the world began nationalizing financial systems and
considering bailouts of other troubled industries, and major independent US
investment banks disappeared or became bank holding companies. Meanwhile,
currency values, as well as oil and other commodity prices, lurched wildly,
while housing prices in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, and
elsewhere continued to slide."
I believe Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska gave some very good advice on finding inspiration in her 1996 Nobel lecture. What she said can used as management advice today:
"Whatever
inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know'."
