It’s funny to look back in a Monday morning armchair quarterback sort of way. If you were to sit in on any of our meetings or take a stroll through our offices in that dotcom you would have thought we were maxing on productivity, all pistons firing. Everyone was fully engaged, working hard and all hours. However, much of this was only transitioning.
Lewin’s View of the Change Process cites three Phases. Phase 1 is “Unfreezing†(recognizing the need for change), Phase 2 is “Changing†(the actual transformation) and Phase 3 is “Refreezing†(results assessment and needed modifications). This all happened so fast that Phase 1 was a week or two start-to-finish, and we never really got out of Phase 2 before ultimately the Chairman opted to shut down the company only a couple of months into the transition.
Change is difficult, costly and, no doubt about, most of us are naturally change resistant. On top of that, organizational change is not always considered by constituents as “for the better” and personally satisfying. This is the case in a majority of the M&A deals we consult on at Daily. Still, somehow, most of us who still had our jobs believed the change was necessary, “for the better,†and we were motivated, at least as far as I can figure in hindsight, by three key factors:
1. Job Security – we had just seen half of the staff fired. The fact that those of us who remained still had jobs was a relief, especially as jobs were also drying up. Many of us had also left more conservative jobs for the New Frontier, and those former employers who did not “make the leap†were not all keen on hiring us back.
2. Trailblazing – what got us into the dotcom madness was also what kept us excited at this point … we really were finding new ways to use technology, especially with the promise of this new business model, and that was exciting.
3. Upside – the other thing that prompted many of us to leave our comfortable desk jobs was the potential to make a lot of money off our stock options in the fabled IPO. I still have a document with 40,000 shares of stock that are worth less than the paper it’s printed on. I know I’m not far form alone in this particular Purple Heart. Anyone want to form a support group?
Posted by: Colin Mangham