Change is good and important. Change is difficult.
Change can mean growth, improvement and progress.
A lack of change, on the other hand, often means stagnation: the same mistakes happen again and again, you allow yourself to be overtaken by others, or you get stuck in old patterns just because you've "always done something that way."
Small business owners, on the other hand, should welcome progress with open arms (and switch to new project management software , for example ), without losing sight of the vision that made their company successful in the first place. Whole companies stand or fall on the knowledge of when and how changes should be made. And that brings us to our change management examples:
According to industry giant Prosci , companies with outstanding change management processes are six times more likely to achieve their goals than those with poor change management.
Small companies don't have much choice when it comes to change management: if change processes go wrong more than once, the company will, in the worst case, go bankrupt before it can make a second attempt.
Whether it is about moving to a new building, introducing a more modern project management system or welcoming a new team leader: effective change management is essential in all cases.
3 successful change management examples
We could tell many stories of companies that got change management wrong and got into serious trouble. Fortunately, there are also many positive change management practices that we can learn from.
The following three companies have done a lot right when it comes to change management.
1. Netflix relies on its digital strategy
Netflix
Netflix ( source )
Before the change: Netflix was launched in 1998 as a DVD mail-order service. Users made a list of films they wanted to watch and the company sent them the DVDs one by one to their homes - always after returning the previous DVD. This was a brilliant business model for the late 90s and early 2000s: Netflix gained hundreds of thousands of customers and went public in 2002.
But the entertainment industry was changing, and so were consumer expectations. If Netflix had continued to ship physical DVDs in envelopes, its growth would have soon stagnated, limited by external factors such as U.S. Postal Service shipping capabilities, the declining popularity of the DVD format, and physical inventory.
In 2006, Amazon began offering video streaming services, while Blockbuster, which remained focused on physical media (which had turned down an opportunity to acquire Netflix in 2000), was already in decline and grasping at straws.
Netflix was at a crossroads, and its long-term success depended on how it would navigate change on the path to a digital future.
Successful Change Management: We all know how the story ends. The number of Netflix subscribers has increased from 23 million in 2011 to 163 million in 2019 .
But change management was initially a bit bumpy for Netflix too: Customers were upset when Netflix announced it would charge separate fees for digital streaming and DVDs, and 800,000 of them left the service at the end of 2011. Within just four months, Netflix's stock fell by 77%.
But despite this initial turbulence, Netflix's management stuck to the path it had chosen. Management pulled together, did not let itself be dissuaded from its goals and continued to invest resources in digital streaming and its own programs. In 2017, Netflix already had more subscribers than the cable TV providers in the USA .
This is what we can learn for change management: Changes rarely go smoothly and, as with most projects, it often takes significantly longer than originally expected before real progress is seen.
That's why it's so important to stay on track and trust your plans - assuming, of course, that you already have a solid plan .
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings knew that DVDs were slowly but surely dying out and that his company would have to rethink and adapt to the digital future to survive. In February 2009, he told Bloomberg , "We have one goal: to succeed in streaming. If we can do that, we've already won."
Just like Hastings and Netflix, small businesses need to do their research, future-proof their business, and think through their plan. It might mean switching from a physical to a digital product, or it might just mean investing in new smartphones for their sales reps.
The most important thing is: Don't give up just because you encounter resistance or setbacks at the beginning.
apple
Apple: Think different. ( source )
Before the change: Today it is almost forgotten that Apple was originally belgium telegram data known for products other than the iPhone and MacBook and had to fight for its survival in the late 1990s.
But that's exactly what happened in 1997: Apple lost $56 million in a single quarter - the worst quarter in the company's history. And today? Today, Apple makes more than $60 billion a quarter.
At the time, the company, long known for its vision and innovation, was at a dead end. The 15-pound, $6,500 Mac Portable (1989), the half-baked Apple Newton (1993), the unpopular Apple Pippin video game system (1996), and other failures left Apple struggling to maintain credibility as it entered the 21st century.
But thanks to the return of a co-founder, a groundbreaking idea was to bring about major change.
Successful change management: In 1997, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who had left the company in 1985, returned to help Apple out of its misery. The maverick visionary helped Apple achieve almost a decade of groundbreaking successes, including the iMac (1998), the iBook/MacBook (1999) and the iPod (2001).