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Contents | Chapter 1
| 2 | 3 | 4
| 5 | 6 | 7
| 8 | 9 | 10
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Leading the Change to the Event-Driven Company
- Beating the Odds
- Leadership: Beyond Charisma
- Missionaries
- Overcoming Barriers to Change
Excerpts
Let us clearly distinguish here between two concepts that are often used interchangeably: "leadership" and "management," "leaders" and managers." "Managers" may be the worst people to lead a company's change. They've been successful until now keeping things moving the old way. Their charter is to make the organization hum smoothly. They thrive by avoiding urgency and the exceptional, making it harder for them to accept management by exception. They are, nearly by definition, heavily invested in the past.
Until a company becomes event-driven, its processes, as well as its applications and databases, are disconnected islands, and each island has its own indigenous culture, with its own chiefs. Becoming event-driven unites the islands, forcing the indigenous cultures to blend and disenfranchising the chiefs of fiefdoms. Information, once the tightly guarded treasure of each island leader, now circulates freely. In one company that became event-driven, a department manager complained bitterly that every decision his department made was instantly published to the whole company. He felt threatened by the publication of "his" information to others in the company and worried that he might occasionally "look bad" if his department's activities were automatically shared with the rest of the organization.
The most reassuring and effective message that leaders can broadcast is that once the organization becomes event-driven, machines will actually handle everything that machines can handle (because the event-driven architecture maximizes automated capabilities). Everything a person is asked to do, therefore, is exceptional and requires exceptional knowledge and reasoning skills. And you are the people being asked to do it!
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