Valerie Keller on change, and organisations. Why is this relevant? Some of you will begin your own companies, and you need to understand this. Most of you will work in other companies, and while you might start at the bottom most will rise quickly. Change, how to manage it but also do it successfully, is the currency that will let you survive. As we’ve said, change is the one constant. Given that, we end up with two groups. Or three. Those who notice the change afterwards, then try to catch up. Those who notice the change then think it doesn’t matter (and then it’s too late – once upon a time the Saturday Age newspaper was phone book thick – oh, bad example because, um, Sensis, the directory business in Telstra that once made millions from the Yellow Pages, well, they’re kinda in trouble too – anyway the Age was phone book thick, it was full of classified ads, in Melbourne if you were looking for a house to rent, buy, a car, pets, old furniture, factory equipment, the Saturday Age was to the go to paper, it was literally described as “Fairfax’s rivers of gold”, and made so much money they could afford high quality journalism and made them the flagship newspaper in Australia, they ignored the rise of the internet until they had lost pretty much all of their classified advertising, been on the back foot ever since), and those who initiate the change. We want you to be in that first group.

Then hot on its heels a story about Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter, and now Medium) and how Medium – which is doing amazing things – is a company with no managers. Read it, deep double loop learning. This IS the model of this subject. Not that there is no senior teacher, or perfectly mapped out curriculum, but who you are as people and what you become is more important than any naff content of the subject. Learning and beginning to create knowledge (which is already happening via the blogs) is the first big change that the network enables. You are already doing it, and in a rather odd way (a nice odd way is what I mean), many of you haven’t realised it yet…