Zooming is about stretching your limits without threatening your foundation. It’s about handling new ideas, new opportunities and new challenges without triggering the change-avoidance reflex.

This extract is from a book I’m reading: Shift Happens by Seth Godin and I found it an excellent concept to keep in mind for companies to embrace change and not to avoid it or fear it. This pretty much represents the modus operandi any company should take and exercise.

Expanding a bit further from the book, same chapter:

Most companies that re-engineered did so in order to make the “machine” more efficient. This usually meant laying off people. According to CSC Index, a consulting firm heavily involved in re-engineering, more than 70 percent of the employees involved in these efforts assumed that their purpose was to lead to layoffs.

Zooming is almost diametrically opposed to this position. A zooming organization isn’t worried about making today’s machine work better. It’s worried about being flexible enough to put its assets to work building tomorrow’s machine. The management of a zooming company must communicate to the people who work there that the goal isn’t to get smaller—it’s to get more flexible. Flexible companies make better use of their assets, and the first asset they maximize is their people

You can’t shrink your way to greatness

I prefer this concept better than the belief of ‘flexibility’ my teacher of Change Management at NCI is trying to impart to us which is: unions stop companies evolution and stagnates them, people lay-offs  are necessary to lower costs and also to offer extreme cheap ass services in order to beat competitors. He finds and idolizes Michael O’Leary‘s (Ryanair) for this which I find quite uncompetitive.