“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more uncertain of success, or more perilous to manage, than to lead the introduction of a new order of things.” Machiavelli wrote this in the sixth chapter of “The Prince” five centuries ago. Since then, almost everything has changed. Except this!
Someone might object: “But businesses change all the time. New systems, new organisation charts, new markets.” True. Change will come anyway. The question, however, is not whether we will change. The question is whether we will lead the change, or whether it will lead us!
And this is exactly where the trap lies. In “Conversations with Machiavelli”, the Florentine returns again and again to the distance between what we plan and what actually happens. In change, that distance becomes a chasm. On paper, change is a decision. Management decides, announces, sends an email, presents the new organisation chart and considers the job done. In practice, at that very moment the job has only just begun. Because an announcement is not change. Change is not announced. It is led.
But why is it so hard? The Florentine gives the answer on the same page. Whoever brings the new has as enemies all those who did well under the old, and only lukewarm supporters in those who would do well under the new. Lukewarm, because people do not believe in anything new until they have seen it work. I believe no one who has lived through even one reorganisation will disagree with that.
Let us bring this into the business. Who loses from a change? Usually those who held the control, the information, the habit. The middle manager who “knows how things are done around here”. The salesperson who has worked the same way for years and still hits the target. Who gains? Often everyone. But later. And “later” convinces no one today.
Resistance to change is like a fever. It is a symptom, not the illness. If you fight only the fever, the body will fall ill again. Behind resistance there are almost always two things: uncertainty and the fear of loss. Loss of position, status, role, security. Whoever fails to recognise them is not leading change. They are merely imposing it!
So what works? From my own years in the market, I would single out four things.
First, the “why”. People do not follow a new system. They follow a reason. If management cannot explain in two sentences why the change is necessary and what the business will gain, then it has not understood the change itself.
Second, the early wins. Let us recall the Florentine once more: people believe what they see. One small, quick and visible success persuades more than ten presentations. It turns lukewarm supporters into active ones.
Third, the example. Change demanded of others while the leadership carries on as before is not change. It is an order. And orders are carried out until the person who gave them leaves the room. Leadership must be the first to change. Only then does it earn the right to ask the same of everyone else.
Fourth, endurance. Kurt Lewin is credited, as early as the 1940s, with describing change in three stages: unfreezing, changing, refreezing. The third stage is the one we forget. Decades later, John Kotter recorded declaring victory too soon as one of the most common mistakes. Old habits do not leave. They wait. And they come back with the first pressure, with the first bad quarter. Change is complete only when it becomes the new rule, the way “things are done around here”.
Someone will ask me: “And what if, despite all this, some people do not follow?” There will be such people. There always are. The goal is not to convince everyone. The goal is to convince enough people for the change to gain its own momentum. From then on, change no longer needs to be pushed. It moves by itself.
Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice. Markets confirm it every day. The river will change, whether we like it or not. The question is whether we will swim in the direction we have chosen, or wherever the current carries us.
Because, in the end, change is not made by plans. It is made by people. And people cannot be ordered to change. They must be led!
Sources
- Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”, chapter 6 (1532).
- Kurt Lewin, “Frontiers in Group Dynamics”, Human Relations, 1947.
- John P. Kotter, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail”, Harvard Business Review, 1995.
- Heraclitus, fragment 91 (Diels–Kranz).
- Dimitris Timotheatos, “Conversations with Machiavelli” (in Greek), Kapa Publishing, 2026.