In career or in life - accept change!

If you remember only two words from this article, remember this: “MANAGE CHANGE.”   Or else. Or else change will manage you!  This opening encapsulates one of my favorite quotes that I recall daily, particularly in IT (Information Technology), where the rate and pace of change can be quite overwhelming. I always associate this quote very strongly with Jack Overacre, an IBM executive with infinite wisdom! Thus – manage change or change will manage you! Change is like gravity. You can fool yourself into thinking that you can avoid it, but you cannot.

An engineer who reported to me in one of my semiconductor assignments, Bill Corbin, would regularly say: “The only thing constant is change.”  Since I always loved calculus, which not-so-coincidentally is the study of continuous change, I have a personal appreciation for this saying. In integral calculus, as many of you recall, integration always returns a constant!  I have an appreciation for these word subtleties.

Let’s however go a bit deeper. All of us have one and only one guarantee. The guarantee at every moment of our lives and careers is that change is inevitable.  Yet, generally speaking, we struggle with changes that invariably come our way. 

I have three “must have” cornerstones for dealing with change effectively: acceptance, adaptability, and proactively making changes.

First of all, there is acceptance that change is guaranteed and inevitable. If you deny this fact, you will undoubtedly encounter unnecessary pain, suffering, and turmoil. Acceptance of change is a precursor to adaptation and managing change. I have been, at times, an insufferable sentimentalist, but realized that I was missing the moments of my children growing up by looking back towards the so-called "good old days."

Once you have accepted this fundamental inevitability, then you can focus on the other two cornerstones of change: adaptation and managing change. Charles Darwin famously said “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”  The ability to adapt to circumstances cannot be overstated in terms of its importance and consequence.  A similar concept is to realize that often you cannot control what others do or say, you can only control how you react. Adaptability, and its close cousin versatility.  Spend time reflecting on times in your life when you adapted quickly and well, and contrast them to others when you were reluctant to adapt. It is a key to happiness and well-being.  Managing change is also significantly important. Nick D’Onofrio, retired IBM executive, has been quoted as saying “If nothing changes, nothing changes.”   The implication of this simple yet powerful phrase is that one has to experiment with different actions to obtain different results. Put another way, one can’t try the same approach and expect a different result. This last thought was notably made famous by Einstein, who said “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Heraclitus famously said that “no man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and it’s not the same man.” With that I will conclude the article by summarizing the 3 main cornerstones of change management:

• ACCEPT that change is inevitable
• ADAPT to inevitable change
• MANAGE change  in your life and career to achieve your goals

My “call to action” is for you to personalize this message and to write out ways that you will become more accepting of change.  Mastery of this topic has served me well, and is a strong contributor to my personal happiness and my career successes.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article! ~ Alan Piciacchio