Part II of Our Exclusive Interview with Hans Finzel

Author of Change Is Like a Slinky—30 Strategies for Promoting and Surviving Change in Your Organization.

By Shari Lifland

For many managers, “change” is a four-letter word. The problem is that although today’s organizations need to evolve to survive, most people prefer life in the comfort zone. In the introduction to his provocative new book, Change is Like a Slinky—30 Strategies for Promoting and Surviving Change in Your Organization, leadership training expert Hans Finzel borrows a 1532 quote from Niccolo Machiavelli to illustrate the challenge change poses to contemporary leaders:

“There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful of success, than to step up as a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.”

Here’s Part II of Shari Lifland's interview with Dr. Finzel. Click here to read Part I.

AMA: In Change Is Like a Slinky you write, “One way I’ve tried to prepare my four children for life is to teach them that fast-and-done is better than thorough-and-never-turned in.” This attitude contradicts the traditional formulas for succes—-that slow and steady wins the race, haste makes waste, do it right or do it over, etc. Can you comment further?

Finzel: We have to think leaps, not tweaks. Speed is increasingly the most critical factor in getting into the marketplace with your new product or service. I am a German perfectionist, but I have had to learn that working too long on solutions is a killer. By the time I have the answer, the question has changed. Leaders have a choice on how to approach change: safe evolution or chaotic revolution. Most people prefer the slow and steady perfection of evolution, but you might just go out of business trying not to rock the boat. In today's dramatically changing business climate, gradual evolutionary change just doesn't cut it. To quote Nickolas Negraponti, who heads MIT's Media Lab, “Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.”

AMA: In a similar vein, you continue, “The longer it takes to make a decision, the less likely it will be a good one.” Wow, that sounds almost revolutionary, given the snail-like pace at which most organizations make decisions.

Finzel: Today's problems were yesterday's solutions. Because of the pace of change and global competition, we just cannot afford to take the slow approach to solutions and business plans that our forefathers did. The snail pace approach to change is putting people out of business every day. That is exactly my point. Business competition is fiercer today than at any time in history, because we now compete not just with the business down the street, but with businesses across the globe. With the advent of the Internet, e-mail and ease of global shipping, your competition is only eight seconds away; the world has moved to your neighborhood. We can no longer afford the luxury of old slow organizational structures and decision-making.

AMA: What should today's leaders be doing right now to prepare for a changed future?

Finzel: Leaders need to work at becoming futurists. It is our job to anticipate what is around the next curve and just over the horizon. Here are a few concrete action plans that I suggest to help in the journey:

• Read outside your area of expertise—books and magazines that are future-oriented (i.e., Fast Company, Wired, Business 2.0, Entrepreneur, even if they're not publications you would normally read.)
• Brainstorm about the future with your leadership team. Come up with 100 wild ideas about how to face the future in your organization. Include some young people and mavericks. Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel Prizes, said it best, “The best way to get good ideas is to get a lot of ideas.”
• Visit and study “best practices.” Copy those groups that are doing things right.
• Give yourself lots of “staring at the wall” time. Or, as Peter Drucker advises, spend 10 to 25% of your time as a leader staring out the window. Remind yourself that, especially in a leadership position, you don’t have to sit in front of a keyboard to be working. Take “thinking retreats”— time when your sole task is to contemplate the future.

AMA: One passage I particularly admire in your book is “Many enduring values and principles stand the test of time. Each generation has a responsibility to discern the enduring from the outdated in the whirlwind of today's world.” It seems to me that this is where true wisdom lies—knowing what to keep and what to toss out. Can you comment on this?

Finzel: As we embark on the journey of change, we have to be careful that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Too many people make the mistake of thinking that everything that is old is obsolete. We have to ask ourselves these key questions about things we are inclined to abandon:

• Form versus function: how can we be careful to keep the value of the function while changing the form?
• Are there principles here that have enduring value?
• Is this part of our core values that must not be compromised?
• Is this an ethic, value or core belief in our group that is not up for negotiation?
• Are we dealing with morals that should never be compromised?
• What is our core business that we should not abandon? What is it that we have always been and should remain best at? This is what Jim Collins calls the “hedgehog concept” in Good to Great.
• How can we change things and yet remain true to our original charter?
• Will our owners agree that these changes do not compromise our mission?

Click here to read Hans Finzel's Five Reasons Why Change Is Like a Slinky.

Click here to read Part I of Shari Lifland's exclusive interview with Hans Finzel.

Dr. Hans Finzel is president and CEO of CB International, headquartered in Littleton, Colorado. He spent 10 years in Vienna, Austria, providing leadership training in Eastern Europe for an aggressive training effort that eventually prepared over 5,000 leaders for the fall of communism and the unprecedented free enterprise opportunities that followed. Some of his other books include The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make (Cook) and Empowered Leaders (Word). Dr. Finzel can be reached at Hans@cbi.org.

To learn more about how to deal effectively with change, consider these AMA seminars:

• Planning and Managing Organizational Change
• How to Build Resilience in Your Staff and Yourself