On Tuesdays, I’m part of a radio show hosted by two men who were forced by nature to change.
Both Steve Novotney and I fought a hard-won battle with nicotine, and we were both at one time a couple of packs per day smokers. Nature intervened and forced us to change. We each had to turn our very existence upside down and get rid of the highly addictive cigarettes.
The ultimatum was simple. Change or die. Our bodies delivered a clear and concise message, and we took heed. It was not easy, and we have each succeeded, and we agree that it’s better being on this side of the turf, and not having that aura of stale smoke.
Change is never easy, and human nature tends to reinforce doing things the same way we always have. It’s comforting, and change, by its very nature, is uncomfortable.
In my companies, a sure-fire way to short circuit your career was to resist change and say something like “but we have never done it that way before.”
The words express an attitude, and the attitude is highly toxic. I generally transfer those people to another position. Often at a different company that I happily had nothing to do with.
“Insanity is doing the same things over and over again, but expecting different results.”
An extremely powerful meaning, delivered succinctly and necessarily harshly. The fact that there are companies that help businesses change should tell you this is a recognized problem, and that if your organization does not change, it’s doomed to the same end as so many of our industrial companies. Business as usual is never a good thing.
Consider the industrial trend of the Upper Ohio Valley in 1970. All the talk was “save our steel mills.” They wanted to run the same mills the same way they did before and get a different result. It didn’t happen that way, and the steel industry in this part of the country is a historic footnote.
If you had said that a startup doing things differently than the steel mills of that era would be the largest steel manufacturer in North America in 2025, you would have been laughed at, but here we are a little more than half a century later and a startup who did things differently, Nucor, clearly holds that title. They didn’t get there by doing things the same as their competitors.
They approached the industry in a new and innovative way. They changed.
Change is about stepping on toes. Change is leaping out of your comfort zone. Change is trying things you have not done before with the realization that most of the new ways you’re going to try won’t work … but the ones that do will be simply spectacular.
Change is the stuff of success. It’s also not optional.
If you have to continually add more debt to keep operating, you’re going to need to change.
Like our government. Upside down by $37,000,000,000,000. That’s $37 trillion dollars. In the hole. Loss. Deficit. Debt. No matter how you describe it, it’s not a good thing. Even if you control the printing presses that print the dollars.
It’s a number that is growing, too.
I can’t imagine that number – so I need comparison, and the only thing that is close is our economic output or gross domestic output. Which is $27 trillion. We owe more than we produce in a year.
This is like having a family income of $100,000 and having a credit card balance of $133,000. The interest payments alone would be stifling, and there is also no clear way out.
Our nation’s interest payments on our debt are crushing. They are more than what we pay for defense. That’s all the men and women, all the hardware, fuel, planes, ships, and tanks. More than all of it. For just the interest on the debt alone, and that means we are not reducing our debt. Only servicing the interest.
This makes us, as a nation, weak.
Half of our politicians think everything is just grand – they resist change. Nope, it’s all OK. Don’t look for waste, and don’t look for fraud. Let’s just keep on piling on debt. We are too big to fail. Like the Titanic, our nation’s economy is NOT unsinkable. It’s tough to make it turn quickly, and once it hits the iceberg, it won’t be long.
The alarm has been sounding for well over 40 years.
Change or die.
If the government continues its current path, our economy will enter a “death spiral” and it will take us with it. The spending needs to be curtailed. Right away. Which means the government needs to stop overspending. Immediately. They need to change, and learn to live within our means, and our means are the taxes collected.
There are “change agents” in our government today. They are being mercilessly abused and harassed.
We have to support them, and the handful of politicians who understand this and have the backbone to stand and fight. When they go back to their home districts, and they are challenged with “what have you brought us,” they need to be able to say, “sound fiscal policy.”
Our government, which gets every red cent it spends from you and me, needs to change. Or it will die, and at our expense.
