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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
May 2020 #12250 Page #26
The Importance of Change Management in Today’s Business Climate By Ben Hershey, CEO 4Ward Solutions Group
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he current global demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) has created a severe shortage of PPE across the world. And while regular distribution channels ramp up, we have seen several creative ways some individuals and companies are making changes to support our COVID-19 response, including obtaining and producing protective gear for our caregivers. What is also interesting is how some manufacturers are looking at ways to bring manufacturing onshore, changing their production models and seeking ways to produce more efficiently and cost effectively. Another opportunity for our industry is to look at offshore manufactured products and bring that manufacturing back to the United States and Canada for production. But to do that we need to embrace the concept of change management. In this current pandemic, we’re being forced to finally face how organizations learn; and frankly, for many of us, we are having to change not only our organizations but also our homes which now include home schooling for our children. Even during the financial crisis of 2008, there hadn’t been sufficient market forces to compel organizations to persevere their way through all of the obstacles of change, and those same organizations failed to change their “mindsets” and shift from their deeply entrenched traditions. We now know that our world can be turned upside down without warning by tsunamic forces outside our control. This leaves us with no choice but to change. It’s also clear that, after this crisis abates, there’s no guarantee that the forces of social and political instability, market upheaval, technological shifts, and demographic churn are going to stop. It is absolutely clear that organizations need to develop their capacity to respond to radical disruptions that can, at any moment, attack with unrelenting combinations of speed and complexity. We see this in the conversation around “offsite construction” and those who are trying different ways of accomplishing a different tactic in delivering components, panels, modules, etc. to the construction site.
Performance Agility So, what’s our role in the LBM/Component/Modular industry to address this need? Organizations can’t adapt the collective and individual performance of their workforce without the learning and development team. I have often said that the LBM/Components industry has been slow to change in some respects, a point I made even in an automation article I wrote in 2000. And, here we stand in 2020 with many who are still questioning the role Continued next page
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