Tuesday, June 15, 2010

June 15, 2010 2 of 2

This is the post I did yesterday to the MOR Associates web site. It might be of interest to some of you. It's about leading change and surviving change. I know right now I am surviving, but I am trying to model how to do it well, and I think that is a leadership activity.

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I'm sittin' here in rehab - having had an hour of physical therapy where I just started to learn to walk on new leg - and having spent time in the cafeteria after that with Newsweek as my company. This is the June 14 Newsweek issue and there is an an interview with John Chambers in the Business and Technology section. (Another interview with John Chambers). The question asked John by Richard M. Smith, interviewer, is: "You've moved into an area that's very new for Cisco, and that's consumer products. Did you have to teach your team to dance a little differently to anticipate the needs of this new market area?" And John's answer is, " I had to learn to dance differently". He goes on to talk about making decisions to get into new technology markets, but it is the "I" in his answer that really matters. I am learning to dance differently right now - to dance on a leg and foot composed of carbon fiber, titanium, and other materials. And learning to dance differently is a slow and thoughtful process for me right now.

I had a friend visit me this past week, another retired IT leader - a national leader in moving technology into the teaching and learning areas. We were talking about our careers, how we loved instigating change, bringing it about, and how hard it was when it happened to us - when we were the folks being asked to change. We also acknowledged that we had been down the path of personal/professional change many times in our careers and that our success was contingent on accepting some changes we did not relish, and moving on - or forward - doing something. Neither of us had mastered sitting still or simply letting things happen to us. And often, when we saw the need for change - either in the adoption of some new technology or system, or in the organization it meant we would have to change, we would have to do something different, we would have to model doing it differently.

So, Chamber's words meant a lot to me this morning. They brought me to reflect on that conversation from this past week, and they brought me to reflect on the walk I am taking right now (or the dance I plan to do, but that will be a little while). Gotta walk different. Will dance different. Will work to model doing this different stuff with elegance and grit.

As leaders, we lead change, and we change, and we model doing it differently with elegance and grit.

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