The Human Element at the Heart of Entrepreneurial Challenge

In a globalised economic world, experienced as the forum for competition which spans the world, change is proving to be the only reliable constant. Businesses are living organisms in this world. More than ever before, they need to be ready and able to adapt constantly and flexibly to the changing economic, technological and social context in which they operate. Gertrud Höhler expressed this dramatic change in quite poetic terms: ‘The future is seeping into all areas of life and is sowing unrest.’10 Alongside this dominant element of change comes a second, equally influential — I am tempted to say ‘omnipresent’ — phenomenon: the extraordinary acceleration and pace of processes. This results in challenges which management can only overcome with a comprehensively well-founded strategic view. If it is accurate to state — and no one is doubting that it is — that change is a permanent process in the life of a business, then to a large extent management is necessarily change management (and only to a limited extent, routine). In other words, change management is not the exception but the rule in the life of a manager at the start of the third millennium.