There is not much new in management, but there is a lot new in business.

I think that many people have lost their sense of loyalty to their company. That's because very few companies remain loyal to their people. The old "job for life" condition disappeared 20 years ago - and nothing has replaced it.

We are a great capitalist society, that works most of the time. We do need to take better care of our people and fix the access, cost, and quality of healthcare. But we need to act intelligently. We needed the intervention of government to keep the economy from falling into an abyss, but we must now encourage the creation of business - not burden it.

I used to believe that you could change the culture or behavior of a company. I still believe it's possible, but it is at least a five to ten year process, if you are successful at all. More recently, I have been attracted to the ideas of the behavioralist, Edgar Schein. Schein has argued that you cannot change the culture of a company, but you can use the culture of a company to create change. It's an interesting approach to overcoming resistance. And if you can change how a company does its work, you might eventually be able to change how its people think.

A change initiative can fail for multiple reasons - in fact, there are just too many things that can go wrong. The focus of the initiative might be wrong - too narrow or too broad. The initiative might be poorly executed or under-resourced. But most often, a change initiative fails because it hits a behavioral impasse. Something in the culture of the company is in conflict with the objective or execution of the initiative.

When a change initiative is focused on changing a company's culture directly, it can take five to ten years to accomplish its objective. Company cultures don't change easily. My friend Peter Drucker used to argue that company cultures don't change at all.

My engineering training taught me to be a systems thinker. I looked at companies as "systems" and saw work as a system of tasks - that needed to be reengineered. I was also focused on operations, getting things done and built. My engineering training taught me to be a pragmatist.