Читать книгу How to Survive Change . . . You Didn't Ask for - M. J. Ryan - Страница 9

Change Is the One Thing You Can Count On

Only in growth . . . and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Christopher Hildreth owns a business installing high-end wood flooring. During the refinancing boom in this decade, his business grew to $4 million. As the economy has slowed, demand for his products has shrunk. Competitors are offering much lower prices and customers have less spare cash to choose the high-end option—if they can afford new floors at all. This development has taken him totally by surprise. In an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, he says, “[I] figured it would just roll along and I would do my estimates and the phone would ring. . . . I would have thought that by now I'd be riding the crest of a wave.”

Contrast that response to my client Al's. When I asked him, the CEO of a real estate development company in Las Vegas, how he was doing in the downturn, he confided, “I knew the real estate boom couldn't go on forever. So I created a rainy day fund. I'm not only using it to tide me over, but to buy out troubled developers around town.”

Smart man, Al. He knows intuitively there is only one sure thing in life—that things will change. How and when none of us know. But that everything will is absolutely guaranteed. The Buddha called this awareness the First Noble Truth—the fact that everything in life is impermanent. Fighting against that truth only causes us suffering, he taught, because it's fighting against reality. Accepting that truth diminishes our suffering because we're in alignment with the way life is. When we accept that the only thing constant is change, we aren't so taken by surprise when the change occurs. Night follows day, winter follows summer, the moon waxes and wanes. Change happens.

I empathize with Christopher Hildreth because I, too, learned this lesson the hard way. Riding the wave of a couple of bestsellers as a book publisher, I kept expanding my company and had just bought a big new house when the largest returns in the industry rolled back through my door, leaving a deficit the company never could recover from. No matter how many predictions of future sales based on past sales we created, they were wrong because the whole industry was going through a game-changing shift. I wish I had planned for the boom not continuing forever. It would have prevented a lot of sleepless nights.

Even though most of us can't know for sure when and how change will hit us, we can at least keep in our awareness the simple fact that it will. And at a more rapid pace than ever before in human history. Our work and personal lives will change—guaranteed—and we need to be ready with the appropriate attitudes and actions so that, like Al, we minimize the negative impacts and capitalize on the opportunities. When we are aware of change, we can see the signs earlier, so we're ahead of the wave. This gives us a distinct advantage in responding.

The Adaptability Advantage

“When the company I worked for merged with another,” said Miguel, “we suddenly had a new president. Up until then, ours had been run like a family-owned business—very casual—and people were kept on for years out of loyalty. This new person—who was very, very sharp, both in mind and in style—came in, and suddenly we were faced with demands of a very different corporate culture. We were held accountable for our quarterly bottom lines, and were expected to start showing up more at industry events to ‘fly the company flag.’ Those who saw the waves of change on the horizon in subtle elements like appearance adapted quickly. No more jeans, no more leggings, no more sneakers. Those that sharpened up were the ones that survived the merger. Those that didn't, like one guy who scoffed at the idea of having to wear a tie, got lost in the flood.”