Question: Do you feel the world is really changing more rapidly today, and if so, how can today’s leaders overcome resistance to change?

Dr. Reimann: Ddo you want to take an opening shot at this?

Speaker: I think the world I definitely changing more rapidly. I think the change is not in the immediate past, but it goes back for several decades. Air travel for example was probably the thing that made the world smaller the most of all, and now we are seeing huge breakthroughs in the capability to communicate. I think the world is becoming much stronger from that standpoint. Resistance to change is something that is quite normal for people I think, I think education helps to overcome of that resistance, I think leadership, as we have already talked about, helps overcome some of those resistances. If folks are empowered to do their jobs, whether their jobs are local jobs or whether they are worldwide, the capability of being successful is much more existent than if people are told to do things and doing only what they are told to do.

Dr. Reimann: Marie?

Speaker: Key words that I wrote down: yes the world is changing more rapidly, it is reality, and it’s a positive reality, so that it gives us in some ways the fresh approach that we can look at to take those lessons learned and that’s the key issue to take the lifelong learning, to take the lessons learned and to build upon that to seek the future direction. And I think leadership deals with that, through their own education, through the education of workforce, but through the synergy of different ideas which really goes back to the earlier diversity question. I think part of how we deal with change is to own it, and for me, please hear me, I say this lovingly, I train thousands of people, and you train engineers one way, and you train everybody else another way. So what I have found in leadership roles is to have as much of that as possible, together, the synergistic knowledge of all that helps us then own a vision to move forward. So I see the issue being lifelong learning and diversity.

Dr Reimann: Okay.

Speaker: Boy, you two made it hard to follow. But I will follow by building, Jessie, on what you said, in terms of the world shrinking. The first question is: is the world really changing more rapidly today? Well it seems like it, feels like it. But the way of change is one of shrinking enabled through travel breakthroughs, certainly through communications now, and as a result, the world is knitted together much more closely, and so, what that means for leaders is that there are different interdependencies, and to take a systemic view of the world now, or your environment, means that you are really looking at the whole world, the whole globe, and a gazillion different interdependencies back and forth. Whereas if we step back really in a short period of time, 100 years, 200 years, you know, in the life of people that is short, we step back that far and say, well for a leader to be effective, what is the relevant system? Well the relevant system 200 years ago was way way smaller than it is now for a leader of any kind of organization. So to me the root of the first part of this question is about what’s driving this feeling of more rapid change, and if it’s about the relevant system becoming different because the world is becoming smaller and more inclusive, that means that leaders . . . then to get to the second part, to overcome resistance to change, they have to first be more comfortable with understanding global diversity and what the drivers are and they have to help the people understand that as well and create experiences for the people so that they become comfortable with what these drivers are, and then that is one enabler for people to not feel resistant to change. My experience has been that people don’t feel so much resistance to change actually, they feel resistance to being changed where its an outside force changing them that they may not understand and they may feel that they are going to be worse off as a result of it. But if people participate in the change, if they help to make the change happen, set the change, then all of the sudden it looks different: it becomes a lot friendlier, becomes safer, and they can influence the outcome and so they are less concerned about whether they are going to end up in some kind of a worse position one way or the other as a result of the change. So the key of the resistance to change I think, particularly as the pace of change continues to feel anyways, like its going faster, is to help people get in touch with what the drivers are, and that means huge learning opportunities for them, and if they do that, that can enable with a few other ingredients that we will continue to talk about in the mix of leadership, but that can enable them to participate in change and actually help drive it from an empowerment point of view as Jessie was saying as opposed to them feeling like they are being changed, and that is they way I would look at this question.