Sunday, August 05, 2012

FOR FUCK’S SAKE, DON’T CHANGE SO HARD.



In some circumstances of life, change is necessary.

Unfortunately, folks are into changing simply for the sake of change, which is alternately inefficient, pointless and/or just plain stupid.

Businesses, or to be more accurate, the people who run them, are notorious for invoking change merely for the sake of change. I like to call this particular practice “The Two Pronged Management Approach”. Its basic implementation involves merely two steps:

  1. Change it.
  2. Change it back.

To clarify, they make a change to something and, after allowing for a certain stretch of time, change things back to what they once were.

There are executives and also managers all over America, and probably the world, who have built and maintained their careers out of this practice for years on end, straight through eventual retirement, earning fat performance bonuses and spectacular annual reviews from the bosses along the way. Nothing really changes, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that a change was technically made, and therefore these so-called leaders are doing their jobs. Confused? Well, I don’t blame you. Think it through for a while. It will make sense eventually. It may also seem totally fucked up, but still, it will make sense.

Actual innovation or development seems too difficult to undertake, it seems, for so many nowadays. Instead, we witness in the world endless cycles of useless replacement again and again, and never ending ineffectual change at that. In a society of increasing throwaway trends and planned obsolescence, such misguided strategy is not that surprising to me.

Very few people in this world have a single good reason to put themselves through any significant level of constant alteration in their lives. I’m generally in agreement with the notions that if a person does not intellectually and/or experientially grow consistently in life, then they could very likely shrivel up and die.

But it also seems that many folks confuse personal growth with change. 

Sure, there’s plenty of stuff in my life that I wish I could change. I know for a fact, however, that simply changing certain things isn’t going to make my life any better. On the other hand, change simply for the sake of change would, more often than not, just make things worse.