Re-Strategizing - Change is the Only Constant

Heraclitus made this statement about 2500 years ago in Greece. He perhaps could not have realized how true it would be even today.

“The Western Union Telegraph Company” or “The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company” as it was originally called, began operations in 1851 to provide telegraphic communications services in the United States. Western Union built the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861.

Alexander Graham Bell, the father of the first functional telephone, demonstrated a working model sometime in 1865. Not having enough funds to begin commercial operation, he offered the rights to Western Union for a paltry 100,000 US Dollars in 1876. “Guess What?” Western Union could not envision the change the telephone would bring about and refused to part with the money. Alexander Graham Bell went ahead and formed “The Bell Telephone Company” the next year in 1877. The rest is history. As a telegraph service provider, Western Union is no longer there.

As we see, change is happening constantly in the workplace, in society, in relationships, just about everywhere. Just because it is constantly happening does not mean it is comfortable. Just look at Western Union and imagine looking at a situation where they knew that the telegraph business was dying due to changes in the means of communication. Such change could have catastrophic effects.

Such changes are taking place constantly. Companies dealing in fixed line telephony had to adapt to the wireless or mobile telephony in a much shorter span. Such changes have the greatest effect on the manpower in these organizations. To ensure that organizations can effectively deal with Change, a planned approach, Change Management, is evolved to deal with the human aspect.

Organisational change management is the process of developing a planned approach to change in an organization. The objective is to maximize the collective benefits for all stakeholders involved in the change. Another objective is to minimize the risk of failure of implementing the change. The discipline of change management deals primarily with the human aspect of change.

Change management is important from the perspective that new technologies, new opportunities are constantly being thrown up. There is no consistency in the marketplace and the smart worker needs to constantly acquire new skills. There is no life long job. Today the situation requires constant adjustment.

Coming back to Western Union, we see that the story did not end in the late 1800’s. Western Union did learn about change and they constantly evolved their services using their strengths in the telegraph space to start financial services using money transfers. Today Western Union is one of the largest Financial service providers with about 250,000 agents throughout the world. The last point in the Western Union telegraph saga happened in around February 2006 when the last telegraph was officially delivered and it transformed itself from a telegraph company to a purely financial services company.

Even though change is inevitable, does not mean that it will be comfortable. If you approach change proactively, you can control how you reinvent yourself. To deal with change, just ensure that you follow new trends, keep learning and stay flexible.