Change is a critical part of business…

You do need to change, preferably before you have too, something we wished we’d done much earlier than our business transformation back in 2015.

What you’ve probably heard about resistance to change is also true. People hate it when you announce a transformation initiative.

When we transformed from retail stores selling printer cartridges to providing organisations with office technology solutions, it took years of perseverance to get the culture right.

And it’s not just small organisations like us who have issues implementing change.

Even people like the legendary GE CEO Jack Welch had his struggles.

In the late 70’s appliances were the mainstays of GE. As far as everyone in the business was concerned, GE was the market leader in major appliances, and it would be that way forever.

Then in 1978 Jack Welch was then appointed head of the Consumer Products Group. Where he found himself staring at an appliance business whose market share had been slipping for a few years and whose margins were sliding even faster.

Welch was worried, as the situation looked frighteningly like the television receiver and automotive businesses, where the Japanese were making tremendous inroads with higher-quality, lower cost products, whilst fat American companies sat by doing very little about the situation.

Welch made his case to GE Appliances’ business managers at their HQ in Louisville, Kentucky.

He showed them chart after chart illustrating Appliances’ eroding position. But, early buy-in was extremely minimal, and Welch had to try and force the cost-reduction program through.

Almost immediately the business managers came back with the two most common refrains people use in every cost reduction program ever launched:

‘We’ve already cut the fat, and now you’re asking us to cut to the bone’.

And. ‘The competitors are crazy. They’re giving away product. Just watch – they can’t keep it up’.

Fortunately for Welch, the head of business (Dick Donegan) saw the logic of the case and came to his aid and started to champion change at Appliances’.

Donegan’s leadership was vital to fixing things. He had been with Appliances’ his entire career, so he knew the players well, which helped him build a team of supporters around him and clean out hundreds of detractors over the following two years.

In the end, GE Appliances’ business went through drastic changes because it had to, although the fact wasn’t blindingly obvious in 1978, but it turned out the domestic competition was getting so tough, change had to happen.

For Welch having Donegan as an ally made the required changes happen, but without Donegan it would have been much harder and taken much longer.

Even for a small business like us, the same things apply.

Luckily, we had an ally too, in the form of our longest standing employee who the rest of the team looked up too and listened too.

Don’t get us wrong, making the change was still hard and has taken us years to get a settled team with the right culture and shared values.

…and our ally is now a valued and respected director of the business.