(Today features a guest column by my Dad, Robert Gilbreath. If you like this, be sure to buy his new book, Compel).
I saw them
swept overboard, saw them drown on their way to their new world. They were
Hungarian Refugees, the time was 1956 and I was just a kid, watching all this
from the bridge where the ship's captain struggled to keep our overcrowded craft
afloat.
Fleeing
their soviet captors, thousands ran across the Iron curtain then. My father was
assigned the task of escorting them across the English Channel. A huge storm, boiling out of the North sea overtook our ferry as soon as it
departed Calais, France for Dover, England. These men and women, jammed onto a
small craft, held tightly to their possessions and their tools. They'd just
left their towns, farms and universities in panic. They'd left behind friends,
neighbors, positions, known environments, and roles that gave them respect and
dignity. Now they were humble refugees, restricted to one hand bag, on a
threatening sea. Everything was in chaos, everything was changing for them.
Inside those single bags, most brought tools of their trade, to ply their
uncertain futures. They held them tightly, abandoning all else.
Three Essential Tools
In his
classic rock anthem Refugee, Tom Petty sings "Somehow, somewhere somebody must've
kicked you around some." Most executives can relate to the sentiment,
having been buffeted by downsizing, mergers, razor-sharp cost cutting and
overwhelming technological change. I've found the ones who survive, who take
their organizations into new worlds with confidence and competence cling
tightly to three essential tools. They are not as tactile as traditional tools,
but they are quite real, and just as valuable.
* A Map. They begin with a fixed
destination in mind, usually expressed through a vision of some kind. An
aspirational, achievable picture of the future. Something that compels them and
their followers, pulling them into the new. But after the vision is achieved,
three more landscapes must be charted: the
decisions needed to carry it out, the actions
that result in real change, and the reinforcing, sustaining extension of change lessons that make a
company not only adapted to new circumstances, but adaptive--ready for
continuous change, flexible, adjustable, fit for the future.
* A Memory. When the pain of transformation is
being felt, when the goal seems to recede into abstraction, leaders need to
remember why they began the journey. They need to remind the group of the
inadequacies of the past, and the high cost of doing nothing. A good memory
helps fight the sag in the middle of most change efforts, when the price of
changing is real and the payoff is not. Reminding each other that the good old
days were not so good overcomes the allure of the past. Leaders make the future
alluring.
* A Moral Compass. Not all changes can be foreseen,
nor their consequences planned or anticipated. Judgment is constantly required,
along with course corrections and tough decisions like: Should we abandon the
quest? Should we sacrifice some aspect of the vision? Should we slow down,
consolidate, or forge ahead with renewed vigor? The consequences are often
immeasurable, they don't fit on spread sheets or lend themselves to
cost-benefit quantification. Decisions along the path of change are subjective,
ethical, moral. Without a moral compass we can easily go astray, doing what's easy
or economical, but what's wrong.
You Don't Have to Live Like a
Refugee
That's the
refrain from the Tom Petty song. It's a call for dignity and self-esteem, but
when facing change it's the wrong advice. Sometimes it pays to live, and think,
like a refugee. To remember those huddled masses embarking from the port of Calais, into the swirling sea of another
time. And to remember their prizes: the tools they chose to take with them.
Their value
and their necessity came to a small boy, squinting through the streaming glass
of a ship caught in a tempest. They are gifts of sorts, handed down through
time and circumstance by a group of courageous change masters--people moving
from the comfortable into the uncertain; facing the future with trepidation,
but also with hope and confidence in their ability to confront, and conquer
change; and clinging to the future they would build with their liberty, and
with their tools.
We should
follow them, learn of change, and master the tools it requires: a map to chart
the course, a memory to know why the journey is vital, and a moral compass to
guide us through the storm.
Postscript:
In a recent
survey of immigrant communities in the
Robert D.
Gilbreath



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Posted by: unich | November 16, 2011 at 04:00 AM