The Power to Change

How to Harness Change to Make it Work for You

Campbell Macpherson

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789664980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Business Book Awards 2021 - Change & Sustainability Now, more than ever, how we work, the way we live, even how long we live are changing at rapid pace and only those who can embrace everything that's going on and reinvent themselves will survive and thrive. The Power to Change teaches you how to do just that. Yet change - even good change - is tough. Most of us feel utterly powerless when confronted by it. But it doesn't have to be this way. The Power to Change will help you harness difficult situations and see new opportunities. The Power to Change does more than simply enable you just to cope with change - it gives you the tools and approaches to embrace and celebrate change. Written by award-winning author, Campbell Macpherson, this book provides a genuinely unique approach to celebrating change that will resonate with readers, no matter what sort of change they have to confront. The Power to Change gives readers the permission to feel emotional and have doubts and fears about change. It provides a range of techniques to put change into perspective, and allows readers to embrace and prosper from the challenges it presents.

PART ONE

Our rapidly changing world

Change is inevitable; change is constant.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI¹

Disraeli obviously wasn’t the first public figure to speak of change. Far from it. Aristotle wrote about it constantly more than 2,000 years before him. ‘Change in all things is sweet’ was among the many comments he penned on the subject. Change was also central to many of Buddha’s thoughts and teachings: ‘Everything changes, nothing remains without change.’

But you don’t have to be a two-time British Prime Minister, the father of Ancient Greek philosophy or the very first Buddhist monk to know that change is inevitable. We all know this. We live it every day. Change is a fact of life that we all have no choice but to deal with. Those of us who are able to acknowledge this fact and cope with change will survive. Those who are able to seek out change – and actively embrace it – will thrive.

Disraeli, Aristotle and Buddha would have been blown away by the change we now witness today on a daily basis. What they couldn’t possibly have foreseen is the incredible rate at which the pace of change would accelerate in the 21st century.

The breadth of changes the world witnessed in the last half of the 20th century was breathtaking – from antibiotics to television, computers, putting a man on the moon and the internet. However, last century’s changes almost pale in comparison to the amount of change we have all adapted to during the first 20 years of this millennium.

But to quote the rock group, Bachman Turner Overdrive, ‘We ain’t seen nothin’ yet’.²

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, once said that we tend to over-estimate the impact of change that will occur over the next two to three years and under-estimate the change that we will experience over the next 10 years. This has never been truer: the most dramatic changes are yet to come. The way we work, the way we live, how long we live, the kind of societies we live in… will simply never be the same again. There is a tsunami of unprecedented change heading our way.

We simply have no choice but to get ready for it…

CHAPTER ONE

The technology revolution

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

THOMAS WATSON, FOUNDER OF IBM IN 1943

Technology is disrupting entire industries, decimating swathes of traditional jobs and creating brand new occupations at a speed that we have never seen before. Every industry, every business, every job and every one of us is being affected.

Technology is also enabling us to live longer – much longer. It may even help us to save the planet from the environmental destruction we have wreaked upon it. These changes are already starting to precipitate a crisis in both capitalism and government as the world’s leaders struggle with the challenges of how to fund a population that is living longer yet working less within societies that are becoming increasingly polarized. Each one of these momentous changes has already begun, and while some of them are more than a little worrying, they will also create new and exciting opportunities for those of us able to seek out and embrace the change.

To prepare for change, we first need to understand what is heading our way. Then we can start to analyse how we are likely to be affected – and what we can do to take full advantage of the opportunities.

Being forewarned is forearmed. So, let’s take a little peek at just some of the tech-induced developments that are changing our world forever.

The web we weave

Little more than a quarter of a century ago, in the 1990s, the internet escaped from the US military and was introduced to the world. People started to build web pages. The rest of us couldn’t understand why. Today, the internet is ubiquitous and it has been responsible for the birth and rebirth of some of the world’s largest corporations.

Eight of the world’s largest 10 companies are tech firms, the top four worth $5.5 trillion+, including Apple and Microsoft, who reinvented themselves upon the arrival of the world wide web and Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent, who owe their very existence to the commercialization of the internet. Together, these corporations have not only transformed the stock markets, they have transformed our lives.

Netflix, Amazon and Apple have destroyed the video industry and transformed film and television production worldwide. They have changed the way we consume films, documentaries and television forever.

Amazon has transformed retail throughout the West. Our shopping malls and Main Streets are struggling to adapt. Many never will.

Apple and Google have transformed the phone into the most powerful hand-held (and wearable) device we could have possibly imagined.

From its humble beginnings as a search engine, Google is changing the world.

Microsoft has miraculously reinvented itself twice in its 40-year history. It is now a cloud company competing with the likes of Amazon and Alibaba to provide the world’s largest companies with cloud-based storage and services.

Tencent and Alibaba are the Google and Amazon of China.

LinkedIn, purchased by Microsoft for a mere US $26 billion, has upended the recruitment industry. The comparative advantage of the head-hunting industry used to be their databases and network – recruiters knew the names and numbers of all the key people in a certain company. Today, anyone with a LinkedIn account can find this out in minutes via their phones.

The end of truth?

The truth has become subjective and elusive. We used to reach for the august tomes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica if we needed to discover the truth about a particular topic. Now we reach for our phones only to be bombarded by untold versions of the ‘truth’ from every possible angle and perspective. By making information available to everyone, the internet was supposed to have unleashed truth to the world. Unfortunately the truth has been lost among an avalanche of opinions. Elections are influenced by stealthy data manipulators such as Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ serving up blatant misinformation directly to our Facebook and Twitter feeds. The latest US President uses Twitter as his broadcast medium of choice, making an average of 22 untrue statements every single day.¹ On 26 April 2019, President Donald Trump’s tally of lies, untruths and distortion of facts since assuming office raced past the 10,000 mark. By mid 2020, that number had raced past 20,000. News agencies report his tweets, often without checking the facts, and the untruth takes on a life of its own. ‘If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.’² To be fair to the news agencies, the untruths come so thick and fast, there is almost no time to disprove the first one before the next dozen have landed!

The Internet of Things

The award for the coolest title in the tech world today goes to the Internet of Things, or IOT. From lights and home heating you can switch on and off remotely from your iPhone, fridges that tell you when you are running out of milk, to machine parts that tell you when they need replacing – IOT is infiltrating every aspect of our lives. IOT is changing every industry. It is baked into buildings, roads, bridges, power stations, water treatment plants, council playgrounds, everything.

The ubiquity of IOT hit me when I was designing a ‘Leading Change’ programme for a ‘water supply and disposal’ company. Basically, they make pipes. In the planning call with the client, I asked what they thought were the biggest challenges in their industry and their instant reply was ‘digitalization’. I raised my eyebrows thinking that this was just a buzz word that they felt compelled to drag out, but then they explained what they meant. Pipes aren’t just pipes anymore. They are pieces of technological wizardry, infused with sensors to measure flow, temperature, pressure, acidity… and communications technology to relay the data back to the control centre. Pipe companies that simply supply pipes are so last millennium! If pipes need to be connected to the web, what next?

The benefits of IOT technology in business are obvious – the ability to spot problems before they happen, planning upgrades and enhancements ahead of time, preventative maintenance, accurate diagnosis, efficiency gains, making our lives better and easier.

The benefits in the home are sometimes less obvious, but that hasn’t stopped us adopting the technology with gusto and unfettered optimism. High-definition home security systems that are controlled from your smartphone are cheap and easy to install. A simple demonstration video doing the rounds on social media showed a delivery man ringing the doorbell of an empty home. The owner, answering the door via their smartphone from their desk at work, sees and speaks to the courier and explains that no-one is home. She then presses a button on her phone and opens the boot of the Tesla parked in the driveway and asks the delivery man to place the package in the boot of her car. He does so, she closes the boot, locks the car and the courier gets on with the rest of his day, slightly bemused.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud. Take Amazon’s Alexa, which lets us access the internet and control the things we have connected to it with our voices – a boon to the elderly and sofa-surfers alike! But to do this, it must listen to everything we say and do. In 2018, Alexa started laughing at random times in thousands of houses across the world. No-one is quite sure why. Your iPhone’s Siri does this too. (Listens, not laughs.) In fact, rumours abound that your Facebook feed will show you ads based upon what your iPhone has overheard, even if Facebook isn’t open. Facebook has strenuously denied this, but many remain unconvinced. The web is full of people describing how soon after they had been talking of getting a cat, they are presented with ads for cat food or of talking about needing an iPhone accessory and then receiving an ad for them only minutes later. These events could be coincidence and a heightened awareness of the subject matter you have been discussing, but could a company like Facebook listen in to your conversations? Technically, yes they could. Yes they can.

Security is another big risk when it comes to IOT. Now they are connected, your lights, heating, fridge, even your waste pipes (?) could all be hacked into and controlled by someone else. Cyber hackers could control every aspect of our lives – and the fact that all of this technology has been adopted so rapidly means that the whole shambolic network has been designed for users with little regard for how to keep it all secure. Disrupting conversations between your kettle and your TV is one thing. Disrupting communications between your office building and its security firm is quite another.

Why build when you can print?

What do human ears, model aeroplanes, car components, running shoes, pizza, guns, musical instruments, clothes, furniture and houses have in common? They can all be made using 3-D printing.

The applications for this technology appear to be endless. We can even print houses! Real, live houses. This feat was heralded back in 2016, when His Highness Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai unveiled the world’s first fully functional 3-D printed house. Only a few years later, the price of 3-D printing small houses or apartments has shrunk to as low as US $10,000.

This technology has the potential to streamline manufacturing and design processes across a plethora of industries, reduce costs and create a slew of new jobs in disciplines that we are yet to even categorize properly. In doing this, 3-D printing will follow the time-honoured tradition of new technologies and render many existing manufacturing jobs superfluous to requirements while creating brand new jobs in other parts of the economy.

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Table of contents

• About the author
• Preface: The pandemic that changed our world
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Our rapidly changing world
• 01 The technology revolution
• 02 The age of the centurian
• 03 Climate change: the dangerous power of denial
• 04 Boyan Slat and the Millennials
• 05 The way we work has changed forever
• Part Two The psychology of change
• 06 The power of the mind
• 07 All change is personal
• 08 All change is emotional
• Part Three How we react to different types of change
• 09 The Change Matrix
• 10 The ‘Burning Platform’ Change Curve
• 11 Personal reflections of reacting to Burning Platform change
• 12 The ‘Quantum Leap’ Change Curve
• 13 Life in the Quantum Leap Change Curve
• 14 Returning to The Matrix
• Part Four Overcoming the barriers we erect to change
• 15 Admitting denial
• 16 Harnessing our emotions
• 17 Confronting our fears
• 18 Finding good tribes
• 19 Reframing our identity
• 20 Testing our doubts
• 21 Detaching from our negative thoughts
• 22 The power of yoga
• Part Five Be your own Change Catalyst
• 23 Resilience
• 24 Creating favourable conditions for change
• 25 Finding the help you need
• 26 Helping others
• 27 My personal change plan
• 28 Be your own change leader
• Part Six The secrets to embracing change
• 29 The Embracing Change Checklist
• 30 The power to change
• Notes
• Index