We've talked about getting out of your comfort zone. We've talked about the importance of curiosity and courage, and of course, open-mindedness, agility, and adaptability. But it does raise an interesting question which is, sometimes people don't change at all. Why don't people change when change is the only thing that will enable them to survive and thrive? For most people, and actually for most organizations for that matter. This is in the non super boss world for those of you that already taken course number 3 on super bosses that are all about building change into the culture of the organization. In the non-super boss world most of us only change when we have no choice. Even then it doesn't always happen and we proverbially, and hopefully not really but could die. Why? Well, there are a couple of parts to this answer. Sometimes we change when we have to, and this is promising. If you go back to when COVID hit In March of 2020 and obviously it's gone on for a long time, restaurants really struggled a lot. Here in Hanover and Hampshire where I live where Dartmouth College is, we have an old time diner restaurant much beloved by the community. It's called Lou's. It's been there for decades, and it's great. It's exactly the type of place you'd like to go for a great breakfast or a lunch, and COVID hit and Lou's almost went out of business. They loss over 70 percent of their revenue almost overnight because, you couldn't go to restaurants. Restaurants were essentially closed for anyone in-house and change was required and if change didn't happen Lou's would go out of business. The owner who was really entrepreneur great person, he knew he would lose his entire investment, and that would be obviously a disaster. Lou's adjusted. What did they do? Quite remarkably. The owner's name is Jared Burke. He decided that every single person on his staff, and they were over 30 people on his staff, cooks, waiters, assistant chefs, counter people, etc. If they wanted to stay employed by the company, he would keep them on the payroll as much as he possibly could, which is an unbelievable overhead to have when your revenue had been cut by 70 percent. But then they had to figure out together what they were going to do. They created a big delivery takeout and delivery service super fast where it was almost non-existent before. He experimentally a lot of ideas about people buying gift certificates that would pay off later, so they get some cash flow into the business. He started cooking family style dinners that you could order ahead of time that would bring in revenue, something he never did before. I'm not going to go through all the other details but many things that were done differently and as soon as possible really the first place in the whole town to open up outdoors under a big tent which has continued to this day, and so lots and lots of changes. He had no choice and he did it. We think, well, that's obvious, of course you're going to do it. But actually it doesn't always happen because sometimes we don't change even when we really should. The person who doesn't have a healthy lifestyle, maybe due to obesity or lack of exercise, for example, who doesn't alter his or her lifestyle. Of course, we've seen plenty of people like that. Unfortunately their lifestyle is literally killing them step by step, but they don't do anything about that, and we see that. Certainly lots of people that chose not to get the vaccine for COVID, you have to wonder about that. The data is overwhelming about what that impact would be and the people that were getting sick for a long period of time after the vaccines came out were overwhelmingly people that were not vaccinated, they had a chance to change, they had a chance to adapt, but they did not. Then also actually if you think about it from a company point of view, many companies that have been disrupted or are being disrupted as we speak, really out of existence. In the retail sector, lot of bankruptcies, companies that could not adapt universities with no compelling value proposition, that has become a big challenge especially in an era of of high-quality online education or Blockbuster even when Netflix showed up. It happens. We think change and challenge forces you to adapt and adjust, and hopefully it does, but sometimes you don't and it's a mystery. But human nature and maybe organizational nature as well. We must adapt or we die. This is the reality. In the face of it some adapt and some die. Why? There are personality differences to be sure, some people are just better able to shift and adapt. We know that's true, and other people cannot, but there's also differences in culture. Certainly in corporate culture, and sometimes those cultures don't help us fix our problems. This most commonly happens when an organization has evolved to really closely match the challenges and the situations that it finds itself in. But then the world changes. This tightly evolved in logical organization that you had to operate at a very high level under one set of circumstances is thrown out of kilter. Ironically, the tighter the fit to the old world, the more difficult the transition to the new one. I bet this happens to people as well. When you change jobs or where you live, the cities you live in, or even romantic partners. When these have been part of your life for a long time, getting used to a new life, a new way of doing things, it's just not easy. But we have no choice. We have to make these adjustments, we have to change. Can we change DNA of our own or in our own organization if you will, organizational DNA. Well, for an organization, we can at least physically change DNA by bringing in new leadership. That's certainly can happen. With different mindsets we are able to build coalitions of others that have a like-mind, and any of us, not just at the very top of an organization, but anyone of us within an organization can look for new hires that could bring in that new lifeblood. But for each of us as individuals, it's a little tougher. We cannot of course, change our own DNA, at least not yet until medical science progresses further, who knows what will happen, but right now we can't. Well, I say we can't, but there are some changes that can happen through this CRISPR technology that enable scientists to start to change specific genes. But that's a pretty as really breathtaking and path-breaking, but that's not changing the DNA of all of us as individuals. It changes one individual gene, but who knows what's coming. But the good news is, we know that our brains are plastic. That's a plasticity idea, which is to say that new connections among our neurons are constantly being formed as we do whatever it is that we do. In other words, we're able to learn same DNA, new learning. That's the target we should have. Changes is tough, changes is challenging and it's a mystery about why sometimes people change and sometimes organizations change, but we have no choice. In a moment I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do to change.
