Nice sentence, really nice sentence that reflects a very actual situation experienced with some companies. After years fighting against a complicated market I can firmly state that one of the most critical attitute of many managers and their staff is to fight against the change and defending old rules and processes with all their efforts.

It is quite common inside companies that have to speed up their change that many people are absolutely contrary to follow new management and consequently new rules and processes. This is a matter of fact.
Is quite easy to avoid new challenges while thinking that things are going properly and there is no need to spend time, resources and money in activities that apparently (for those people) don’t drive you anywhere.

Is the most critical and hard to eliminate evil inside an organization. Those who hold this “conservative and strategy blindness” views are more likely to be closed-minded, conformist and resistant to change.

I have been experiencing this situation many times in big and small companies, there is no difference. This kind of attitude persists in every place where you see worsened or really bad business results.

The only way to overcome this situation when you enter in a company with such problem, for my point of view, is to work closely to managers and “convince them” that the only way to make things going better is to change accordingly to the market requests, showing clearly and if necessary rudely their business results and their trend and the way to make the situation change.
It’s not an easy job because you are new and for existing staff you are not so trustable. Nothing personal but everybody is thinking that you never could understand their company and the relative business dinamics.
Then you should adopt the bottom up approach in addition to the top down in order to spread as much as possible the new philosophy that must be followed in the company.
It will take time, often too much time compared to the slot you have for showing results to owners, partners or investors but this is how we need to proceed.

In parallel to this process we can call “awareness and acceptance of the reality” you should deeply analize the organization and key employees to see how changes must be applyed.

One point I considered really important and reminds me last article I posted some months ago, is that who is responsible to this transformation program must maintain key people informed motivated and engaged. Everybody must be aware that changes in the company are effective and business trends are improving or at least are not getting worst.

Second point that is quite critical and is an argument that nowadays is one of the most discussed is workforce reduction that unfortunately is a process quite often unavoidable. I don’t want to go deeply into discussion because is very complicated and must be treated with the help of and expert HR manager, but also in this case informaton is the key. All the relevant parts, syndicates, managers and social organisms must be kept updated on the evolution of the company justifying as much as possible and with the help of concrete information why some decisions have been taken and the expected results.

Hope that this few words can help some friends or colleagues involved like me in this hard situation, hoping that in a near future we could discuss about better and more relaxing arguments.