Week 4

The 2 sub-topics for today's lesson are drivers of world change and change leadership and management. The former deals with many factors including technology that have been identified to be a force that will cause a major shift in our world. Factors such as evolution, environmental, social, demographic, cultural and many more. The latter shows us the importance of change leadership and management and how it is essential in our world where change is constant.

Reading 1 of drivers of world change provided a list of 14 drivers of world change including a summary for each driver which would be an excellent resource for reference. Drivers of world change is an extremely vast topic as the amount of information for each driver is just endless. However, I felt that one very interesting driver that was brought up in Prof Shahi's slides was changing taste and expections in changing times. I guess such a driver would not be a commonly thought of one as it is an intangible and it is a phenomenon that people rarely notice. In the world of consumerism, demand brings in supply, and what consumers desire changes with influence of media and even cultural influence.

 “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change.” It is intriguing to note that what Charles Darwin said about evolution of species can apply to our modern world today, be it political or commercial. Because if one really thinks about it, we are in fact still undergoing the process of evolution, the process of gaining new knowledge and new technology is human's way of adapting and making life more comfortable. My key takeway from this lesson would be the importance of acknowledging and embracing change in every aspect of our life. Insisting on status quo would not get us anywhere.

Reading 1 of change management and leadership provided a very good fundamental to the topic as it explains what change management is and its purpose.Change management=human management. There is a need for leaders to be people oriented when introducing a new change to an organization in order to help them adapt. In other words, if the employees do not understand what the change is about, how are they going to support it? This also translates to the outcome that the management wishes to see in the change. Reading 4 also brings up an issue on change management - the shift from a labour-intensive economy to a knowledge-based economy and what challenges on human resource it brings about. As the brain become more important than the hands in an economy, it brings about about unemployment of the less educated.

I feel that the models introduced to us by Prof Shahi is always very effective as it is simple to understand and it is extremely applicable to the real world. For example, the freeze-unfreeze-refreeze traditional model of responding to change showed us how reacting to changes only when it occurs is no longer sufficient to survive in the corporate world.

Overall, my rating for this lesson is 9/10. I felt that the pace of the discussion was just right. At no point were we dwelling to long on a single topic and everything was covered in sufficient detail

-Zhishu of G22