#4

6 September 2011

Hello,

and we're already into Lesson 4.

Today's lesson started off with the video "Who moved my cheese?" I thought that the video's key message about adapting to change (and not just adapting, but also preempting change) was a good food for thought to kick start the lesson about the drivers of world change and change leadership.

I found it interestingly true that it is so very often competition that spurs development. Like the example Prof gave about the man in the moon. If not for the US government being determined to win the space race against the Soviet Union, we would not have the first man on the moon so quickly!

Another point that came up was how ultimately, it is the consumers who benefit the most from competition between companies. When companies try to gain competitive advantage over each other, they have to keep innovating and coming up with products each better than the last. Thus, companies are expected to change and innovate to keep up with changes and prevent themselves from being obsolete. So as consumers, we get to enjoy better technology! However, we too have to keep buying the latest product just to stay relevant as well. It has become a common situation whereby we buy the latest product, say iPhone 4, and then we hear news that iPhone 5 is coming out. It seems as though the technology just keeps evolving at a rapid speed, such that what was once considered new will be shoved aside in a twinkling of an eye and labelled 'obsolete'.

Ultimately, I think that the main point is that we always have to question and challenge the status quo. For example, I was reading up about Google, and it is interesting to note that one of their philosophy is "Great just isn’t good enough."

"We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious–but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do." -Google

Thus, like the quote by George Bernard Shaw that Prof shared, we have to be unreasonable, dissatisfied with the status quo and persist in changing the world. That is the only way for there to be progress.

In the second part of the lesson we talked about change leadership; responding to change, leading change and managing change.

"The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it" - Warren G. Bennis

The video of the dancing guy was really effective in conveying cool the concept of leadership.To be a leader you got to put yourself out there for public ridicule/criticism and step out of your own comfort zone. But being a leader, you also have to have followers. And from the video, we learnt the very importance of that first follower. I feel that first follower is also a leader in his or her own rights. I mean, not everyone would have the courage to be the first follower and face the possibility of being seen as a joke like the leader. There is so much risk and embarrassment involved that I feel that it is no easy task going out there and joining the leader to be the spark to the flint. The first follower would be the essential key in getting the second, third and so on, followers. I guess what I learnt from this is that, sometimes we have to be brave enough to have faith in the vision of another and take that leap of faith together with him. I think it is only with such a mentality that we can expect exciting things to happen, just like how the the dancing guy eventually had a crowd dancing along with him.

I rate this lesson a 8/10 because once again I felt that the topics covered during the lesson were really interesting and I loved the quotes that Prof shared because they were really apt in conveying the key essence of the themes that day.

Just to end off with a quote,

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

— Apple Computer Inc.