To Change… or Not to Change

As an entrepreneurial minded type A, I have never been bothered by change. In fact, my wife says that I crave it. Sometimes I will drive a different route to work, even though the easiest and fastest way is about a two minute commute. I also wonder if I am ok with change because I am usually the one initiating it. Maybe. Either way, this is what I think I know. There are really only two things that we can truly change, what we do or what we say. I had an EO colleague from Alabama teach me this. He is an accountant and he knows his stuff. In analyzing businesses over his many years of owning a CPA firm, he has boldly declared just that, you can change what you do or change what you say. That’s it.

It is interesting that in our business we started talking about core values a lot. We needed to change what we did. We didn’t have any guidelines running our business. We needed that to change in a hurry. After working through and creating our core values in a strategy session, we thought we had it made. We now had core values. The only thing was, we didn’t live them. Some of you are probably ahead of me already, we needed change and we knew there was really only those two options. We could either change what we were saying (core values) or we could change what we were doing (living the core values). Easy peasy, except change is hard. And changing what we were doing was going to require some change in our action. That meant looking in the mirror for me. I think since I was already good with change that helped me realize that the only person I could really change was me. It was at that moment that our core values began taking on real meaning. And at that time the foundation for our business was being built for takeoff.