MAKE THE
Change
OR
BECOME THE
Change
O
n landing at the Bengaluru airport last week, I
ferried my backpack to the shared cab stand on a
pleasant 18 degree Celsius morning, and waited
for Uber. In a few minutes a cheerful person in mid-forties
showed up and opened up the trunk to put my cabin bag
over and looked over at my backpack and said “Nice bag,
sir!” Appreciating my fully stuffed overnighter ready Tumi
laptop backpack. “Where are you coming from, Sir?” Being
the conversationalist, I went “Thank you. I am coming from
Pune. Where are you from?” He goes “I am from Assam,
sir” as he turned on the car and started the ride on his uber
app.
I observed him navigate through the traffic and as we rode
along, I learnt a lot about how this Assamese driver with no
formal education moved to Bengaluru in his early forties
and learned a new language & culture (he spoke broken
Kannada at the toll booth) and how to use a smartphone and
30
this App and figured out a way he can earn livelihood. As I
chatted with my new Assamese friend for a few minutes on
the post demonetised economy and its impact (which BTW
is my current favourite topic for cab driver conversation), I
could see the change that this guy with almost no education
embraced in the last 3 years - language, culture, distance
migration into a new state, learnt new technology &
embraced a new business model of shared cab services,
battled with taxi unions and figured out a way to co-exist -
A mammoth change for a security guy turned entrepreneur
driver. I wondered whether this super senior IT leader, I am
meeting at Flipkart today might be ready for this much
change? He was. As I discovered later.
At Searce, as we help businesses become ready for the
future, one of the key challenges we face is “ongoing
change management” - getting companies ready for the
change is easy given the current trend on modernizing IT
| August 2017 |