Changing down

Three change stories caught our eye in Management Today's excellent daily bulletin on this Valentine's Day. Two are about downsizing and one is about the threat of extinction for CIOs.

The high performing retail group that MT describes as 'the saintly John Lewis' may be about to axe some 325 manager level posts in its stores. Blockbuster - not described as 'saintly' or anything else - is to close another 164 stores. And corporate Chief Information Managers are going to have to do more to prove their worth if they are not to join Blockbuster and John Lewis managers as the next cohort of executive job seekers.

This, taken together with the report that the economies of our friends and trading partners in Germany and France saw their economies contract in Q4 made us feel that the world of business was losing that loving feeling on this of all days.

When you look into it however, each of the downsizing stories has a different flavour and perhaps offers different lessons. Whereas the Blockbuster closures are just another stage in the inexorable wind-down of a collapsed company whose business model failed to change quickly enough in response to new technologies and consumer demand, John Lewis is taking action from a position of relative strength.

According to MT, the John Lewis plans come in the wake of a healthy 13% rise in like for like increase in sales in the pre-Christmas period. They're not reacting to events but sensibly planning for a future in which more of their business will be conducted on line rather than in store and they're adjusting accordingly. That's anticipating and managing change rather than becoming the victims of it.

That leaves the threatened CIOs. It appears that they just need to adjust to the changes in technology all around them. MT is quite clear: "The old guard of CIOs need to change their ways if they are to compete with the next generation of enthusiastic tech-savvy IT guys who are chomping at the bit to get under the skin of the old CIO mentality and change it for the better".

Apart from the horse-drawn metaphor, we would go along with that. But why stop at the CIOs? It applies just as well to 'old guard' CMOs, COOs and CEOs and everyone else in the C-suite for whom we don't yet know the acronyms.