Leadership in the Information Age: A Culture of Continual Change

The inventor Charles F. Kettering said, “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.”

Humankind has been wrestling with the nature of change for thousands of years. In corporate environments, change threatens the organization’s culture. The employees’ attachments to stories, rituals and the symbols that define their work environment can cause confusion, insecurity and anger when these artifacts are severed or changed. Leadership may unknowingly create barriers to change if strategies are installed that undermine the embedded guiding corporate values. Leaders are equally vulnerable to the cultural messages that suggest that change may disrupt their individual and collective safe havens within the corporate community. 

Along with internal forces, broad external conditions and societal trends influence the effectiveness of an organization. The external environment broadly includes technological, economic, legal, political, social, cultural and competitive elements. Senior leadership must thoughtfully establish and nourish a corporate culture where continuous monitoring and assessing of the mega-environment is integrated into mainstream strategic and operational activities.

A senior leader wears many hats, but an explicit duality exists in his or her role as both change enabler and change victim. Judgmental human bias can cause managers to buy into a shared vision that their organization is invincible and that continuous change is unnecessary. A very strong culture can thereby prevent an accurate assessment of the external environment. Leaders who are successfully embedded in and value the current corporate environment and culture may unconsciously resist change, though consciously leaders understand that change is inevitable.