Session 4

Session 4 was about the Drivers of World Change, as well as Change Management and Change Leadership.

For the first part, we learnt about the different drivers of world change, the difference between Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change, and also Disruptive change, though I'm still not very sure what exactly is disruptive change.

“Disruptive change is an irreversible change in your expected future”

Is it a change that causes everything else to change so that the future that people expects will be different?

We then moved on to the diagram of the New Technological Adoption which shows how different groups of people react accordingly to new technology. I use to belong in the "Early majority pragmatists", wanted to own almost every new gadgets there are, and after using it for awhile, I will get tired of it, and then change to something else. However, because technology is moving too fast, I don't have the 'capabilities' to keep up with it... So I guess I'm under the "Late majority conservatives" category now.

For the 2nd part of the lesson, we talked about Change Management and Change Leadership.

People can have different ways to approach things. The Eagle, Ostrich and Do-Do bird approach.

Environment is often changing. If you are not smart and perceptive enough to change with it, or even change faster than it, you will become a dodo bird - extinct. There is also the pessimism-time curve, and also the models (Traditional and Modern).

I personally like the Pessimism-Time Curve concept a lot because it can really be applied to many different situation in lives, not only as a business.

What caught my attention during the lesson is when we were talking about leadership VS management. The manager’s job is to plan, organize and coordinate. The leader’s job is to set the vision, inspire and motivate. There is a difference between a leader and a manager.

I beg to differ. Other than inspiring and motivating others, a leader should also be involved in doing some of the work because all these inspiring and motivation thing seems to be just like all talk and no action. As for a manager, his job is to plan, organize and coordinate, he follows orders from the 'leader'. But in today's world, managers are required to make their own decision, in a sense, setting some sort of vision. So shouldn't a manager be considered a leader as well? This seems to be as though as the leader is the good guy, making everything seem so fluffy cotton candy-like, and the manager is the bad guy, destroying the cotton candy with reality because of the work that needs to be done. Isn't this a little unfair to them? Maybe, the only difference between a manager and a leader, is that a manager lacks some qualities that the leader has, but to differentiate them to such a extend, I think that it is unnecessary.

Rating: 7/10