TWC Session4

This week’s lesson is on technology and world change. We started the lesson on talking about some driver of world change. There was a quote in the slide “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change” by Charles Robert Darwin. I think that this is definitely true in today’s tough and competitive environment. If one is not adaptable, they will most likely lose out to its competitors. There are major changes everywhere and it forces businesses to rethink about the way that they are doing things. They have to open to changes, learn to be flexible and push boundaries to their competitive limits.

We also talked about the revolutionary and evolutionary change. Revolutionary change is a disruptive change and the current way of operating cannot work anymore. One cannot carry on doing things that way they used to do it. On the other hand, evolutionary change is incremental changes and this change is always happening. I think that evolutionary change is better than revolutionary change because this change is predictable and people can slowly plan. Revolutionary change happens within a relatively short period of time and this would indicate that the risk can be high, but the payoff can be profound.

There are two presentations on the drivers of world change. One of them presented on whether alternative energy can be replace by fossil fuels and the other on presented on how social media changes the world. The rise of social network and the fact that it is everywhere has definitely changes the world in many different aspects. Its changes the way people communicates, the way of doing business, the way you meet people, the way people advertise and so on.

The second part of the lesson is on change management and change leadership. We discussed about leadership and management. Leadership is setting people who lead the change; they set new direction or vision for a group that they follow. Management is people who direct people in a group according to the principles or goals that they have already been established. I think that these two must go hand in hand and they are complementary. If you were to separate them, then problems would occur. This is because there must be someone to set the direction and encouragement to motivate a team to achieve organizational success and another person to direct the team and allocate of resources to maximize efficiency in achieving identified goals.

I am one of the presenters for this topic. I presented on how technology changes the CIO’s role. The article states that the CIO has been transformed from the past to present. It says that times have change and business has become much more IT-aware and IT-literate, and sees the need to get more involved in IT so that business benefits are delivered. As a result, IT has become more influential and has driven changes to the CIO’s role. And I think that CIO now must have business brain instead of only possessing technological skills. CIO has to think of how to make use of new technology to create new business opportunities to ensure their business’s survival.

Overall, I learnt many things related to the drivers of change, change management and change leadership. It is important for one to adapt to change since it has a lot of impacts on the different aspects of your life, the way you do things and it is also very important for survival.