Protected: How April Writes a Book
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Relaunch of Engine-for-Change
Welcome to the new Engine-for-Change. After almost 12 years, it seemed time for an upgrade. This site started in December 2009 with a simple post “Welcome to Engine for Change.” I said: Welcome to Engine-For-Change.com, my new weblog and site for all things related to helping you drive the personal, community or workplace change you
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Fast Zebras Drive Change
In a Harvard Business Review blog post, Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan introduce us to the concept of a fast zebra: someone who, “can quickly absorb information, adapt to new challenges, and get people aligned in the right direction… They are the people who can skirt around or blast through the kind of gridlock found
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Let Your Little Light Shine
Mother Teresa told a story of a man in Melbourne she visited who had been, it seemed, forgotten by the world and himself. She asked to clean his room for him because she saw it was in a terrible state. He reluctantly agreed. When she cleaned she found an old, beautiful, unlit lamp covered in
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Take Your Shot at Mars
As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing nears, my thoughts have been drifting past the moon, to Mars. In 1962, when President Kennedy challenged the United States to go to the moon he said, We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon…We choose to go to the Moon in
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There’s No Competitive Advantage in Copying
Best-in-class sounds like a position to aspire to. It isn’t. To more accurately describe best-in-class, we could call it either forever-chasing-the-leaders or struggling-to-do-the-same-thing-the-other-laggards-are-struggling-to-do. When you’re the one defining best-in-class, then you’ll have competitive advantage. There’s no competitive advantage in copying. Take a lesson from the leaders: if you want to be the best, be yourself. Let the
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Change: What makes it run? What keeps it running?
Conventionally powered change runs on the force of driving people. It takes years, has a high failure rate (sources vary in the actual %, but individual experience can attest that it fails more often than we’d like) and leaves you depleted of funds, morale, and good will. Unconventional change runs
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Middle Managers: Life in the Diamond Zone
Middle Managers. That’s the most often given answer to the question, “Who most resists change in your organization?” It would be easy to go along with the crowd and turn middle managers into the villains of our change story, but something doesn’t seem right. It seems too easy to scapegoat them, individually and collectively. Instead,
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On Responsibility
Responsibility is a unique concept… You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you… If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the
How a Change Team Dies & How to Save Them
Sadly, I’ve watched many centralized change teams (e.g., Lean Offices, Agile Groups, Morale Committees) die organizational deaths. Much of the suffering prior to their demises has been at their own hands, though I doubt they would ever see it that way. Hence, I offer my perspective as another version of the story that may prompt
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