Part 1: Change Requires Action

An excerpt from the weekly newsletter I write for one of our clients:

It isn’t easy to change the way we think and it certainly isn’t easy to change the way others think.  Change of any kind takes time and can be overwhelming and scary, but it can also be very exciting.  Ford Motor Company had to make a choice: change the way they make and market automobiles or die.

In Bold Moves, the online documentary of Ford, Robert Shanks, Ford Motor Company’s Vice President and Controller says, “Before you start a journey, you have to recognize where you are coming from.  We are in trouble because we lost touch with our consumers.  If you don’t offer what your consumer wants, there are other alternatives.”  Seems like an obvious statement right?  Every day you are making purchasing decisions based on value, price, personal preference, convenience, emotional attachment, and so on.  If we know that we have to pay attention to our consumer and their wants, why is it so hard to change the way we think about our brand (or product)?

The simple answer is because change is hard.  So hard in fact that people would seemingly rather die than change.  While discussing the cost of healthcare in America at IBM’s “Global Innovation Outlook” conference, Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University stated, “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle.  And that’s been studied over and over and over again. And so we’re missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can’t.”

Change Requires Action