Comments on: “Change or Die”: Possibly my favorite business-magazine article ever.

By: Not logic, but culture. -- Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Not logic, but culture. -- Hoover’s Business Insight Zone — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:59:00 +0000

[...] change their actions unless they change their whole way of looking at things. It’s true of heart patients trying to live longer. It’s true of people who want to fix what’s broken in their lives. And it’s true [...]

By: Tim Walker

Tim Walker — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:14:08 +0000

Very good thoughts on underlying cognitive issues, guys. Much to ponder . . .

By: dblwyo

dblwyo — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:02:41 +0000

Tim – excellent post. I’ll have to track down, read and study/re-study it. Over the years of trying to start new efforts or re-factor existing ones this is a topic on which my collection of bloody arrows has gotten very large. Reading your post two interesting references, actually three…well a Monty Python moment. The first being Drucker’s famous dictum, “change your people….or change your people” – reinforced by Jim Collins “get the right people on the bus”..or for that matter Machiavelli who diagnosed the problem 500 years ago and whose dictum we posted around or workrooms. More immediately Sharon Begely has a great new book out on training your mind to change your brain:
http://tinyurl.com/25w7tg
Along with that Doug Finkelstein’s book on “Why Smart Executives Fail” did a pretty thorough study and found that the primary cause was not mis-understanding reality it was denying it:
http://tinyurl.com/ys9c27

Think about that for a minute as you look at the headlines – we’re surrounded by massive risk of serious business failures or problems and almost all of them are traceable to “cognitive dissonance” on the part of the responsible parties.

By: Dan Markovitz

Dan Markovitz — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:17:42 +0000

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey did wonderful work on this topic (the resistance to change), which they published in a book with a remarkably unwieldy title: “How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Think.” (They also published a short version of the book in the HBR.)

Essentially, they argue that people are masters at keeping themselves and their emotional commitments in equilibrium. So for every overt commitment to, say, exercising more, there’s a hidden commitment that keeps people from actually implementing it. That hidden commitment might be the fear of appearing lazy, or it might be a need to appear gainfully employed to one’s spouse, etc. The point is that we have to understand and change those hidden commitments if the desired change is to take hold.