Matt Peterson

This chart presents attributes associated with "open" organizations that are more likely to be agents of and/or respond to change in their environments:

Bob Dylan understood that significant change is disruptive to the established order and called out those who "stand in the doorway . . . block up the hall."

Leaders of the established institutions resist change by reinforcing the importance of traditional tribal virtues. Good members of social and business communities should be loyal, polite, supportive, positive, well-behaved, humble, etc. It all sounds nice and reasonable . . .

Thinking positively about ourselves, the members of our communities, and the policies of our institutions is highly regarded, and rightly so. Under normal circumstances, accentuating the positive is the path to success.

But what happens when significant change is required? I was struck by a statement attributed to Greg Helmstetter, CEO of myGoals.com: "If you don't identify the issues preventing you from reaching your goal, you won't be able to overcome them."

Enterprises are increasingly finding they cannot succeed without a true global perspective deeply embedded in the organization. Such enterprises, private or public sector, can only obtain this perspective if they recruit globally competent employees. I look for the following attributes of Global Competency when seeking out such people.

Entrepreneur turned activist Paul Hawken is advancing the idea of “Blessed Unrest”: a global, decentralized network of local organizations united by a common focus on what Hawken calls "the coming world". Absent from the excerpts of his list of over 130,000 such organizations are the baby-boomers' legacy change agents of the 20^th century: labor unions mired in post-WWII economic models, non-profits more focused on institutional buildout and donor gratifications than external outcomes, bureaucracy-bound government agencies and NGOs, universities fixated with the prowess of their athletic programs and the magnificence of their edifices, etc. Why?

"Open Innovation" author Henry Chesbrough makes a pointed distinction between the two terms. Invention is "the discovery of something new that we didn't know before", while innovation is "actually taking something into the marketplace and solving a real problem with it."

A Harvard Business Review piece advocates that change leaders "encourage resistors", rather than fight them head on. The author says that those encountering change resistors should strive "to accept them, to plan for them, and, indeed, to love them, for they often hold a value many firms never bother to tap."

Hear the complete segment by forwarding 17:30 into the podcast.

Economist Joseph A. Schumpter is known for "creative destruction", the idea that innovation is the process by which that new ideas, products, and organizations constantly replace the old ones. In a recent New York Times article, writer G. Pascal Zachary revealed a key inhibition to embracing innovation.

"Schumpeter brilliantly realized that innovation -- so often extolled as the purest expression of the human spirit -- has a dark, violent, even nasty side. Every innovator, in short, makes a declaration of war. And every successful innovation is a destroyer. To be sure, in these wars only technologies die, not the people who stand behind them. Yet people suffer nevertheless."