Managing For Change
Today question from OPEN Adventures in Entrepreneurship is:
How do you manage change?
This is my second answer today. My first is here.
Being in business has always required the ability to adapt. Capitalism thrives because it allows the market to route around obstacles. Today, though, the pace of change confronting small business entrepreneurs is rapidly increasing. What’s an empty niche one day can be a battlefield of competition the next. It’s no longer possible to completely manage change.
Today, you have to manage for change. Luckily, it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur. The same factors that cause so much change make it so easy adjust. It’s amazingly easy to start a new a business today. All of the resources you need can be rented online, and their service expanded or dropped on a month’s notice.
Take the virtual office, for instance: even as little as a decade ago, to start a business you needed a real storefront or office somewhere. Today, you can start a business with a PayPal account, an Internet connection and someplace to rest your laptop. In an afternoon, you could setup your business’s entire facade.
It’s possible to rent electronic receptionist systems with toll-free numbers that will offer a complicated a tree of menu options and then route calls to your cell phones or too email delivered voicemail. Need one? Just Google for voicemail.
What about employees? Need one, or a dozen fast? Everyone know about Yahoo’s HotJobs, or your local Craiglist but what about an assistant? The Internet abounds with virtual assistance services, where someone will perform your duties from their location. Have an idea for a software application but no programming skills? Rent A Coder makes it easy to find and hire reliable software development staff.
If you’re going into business, you’ll need some business cards. Don’t bother making your own and printing them at the local Kinkos. That’s so 90s. Companies like SharpDots can make you amazing-looking, glossy, full color, business cards almost overnight for practically nothing.
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Our ancestors one hundred years ago did business basically the same as their ancestors one hundred year prior. But, the acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of the last century. Now our techniques and systems for doing business are changing so fast that we’re approaching the point of a business singularity where, in the blink of an eye, all of the previous rules governing how to do business will be thrown out. You can try prepare yourself for this eventuality, or you can keep your businesses flexible, but you can’t do nothing. Like the author Jim Collins likes to say: “Business is like mountain climbing: You can get killed if you don’t plan or killed by not learning to adjust.”
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The facilitator and bloggers for this event have been compensated for their time by OPEN from American Express.
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