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We keep hearing about fast change, radical change, unexpected change, need-for-change… We ARE at a time of change, internationally. Economical crisis, at a global scale as it is the present one, prompts immediate, decisive change – be it voluntary or not.

So, are you afraid of change in your company or in your own life?

It is natural, I say, that we feel insecure when things turn to be different around us, but there are several traps to avoid, at a personal and professional level, in order to REALLY survive change and make progress.

Imagine your company decides to undergo a radical reorg prompted by crisis. This is actually one of the best things an organization, big or small alike, can do to face external change – to change themselves and adapt quickly.

Organizations, like people, must be swift and decisive when the need for adaptation comes or risk perish and be forever forgotten in the limbo dot-coms and other business bubbles go lurking until complete oblivion or erasure from existence.

How would managers in an organization see change, in the above case?
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There is no denying it, it’s all over the news now and no one in perfect judgment can ignore reality: recession is here, countries do bankrupt and companies all around the world will be in trouble and letting people go because of it – or, simply, taking the excuse to make a profit from not having to pay as much as usual in salaries…

The bottom line is: the ones that need a job to bring food home and pay their bills are the ones that ultimately suffer. All of the sudden there will be thousands, millions of qualified professionals as well as others less skilled, looking for the same: a job, or a income. It’s, more than a financial crisis, a job crisis.

Personally, I went through three major recessions and at least as many job “crisis” thase sent me strugling for survival. That, in the last 20 years.

Did it make me stronger? Yes. I feel much more confident and prepared.

Did it make me ready for future crisis? NO, no new recession brings exactly the same problems neither will it flow exactly the same way.

Can I give advise about it? LOL! I certainly can, but there will never be guaranties that ANY advise will work, only common sense, effort and a lot of preserverance, as usual. Well, at least in my experience that is so, and that’s just what I can share here: my thoughts and experience.

- I read somewhere that the word for Crisis is the same as for Opportunity, in Chinese…

When a job crisis hits you, you have the opportunity to… well, first, not to let yourself fall irrevocably!

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Back in the early nineties, as in 1990 , I hadn’t heard the term “telecommuting” yet. In reality, I hadn’t heard of anything that mattered for real, anyways.

I had tried to work from home, though. Not as a telecommuter, but has in having my business based there, saving in overhead costs with office rental and so on.

In 1989 I had equiped a whole room at my new apartment in Rio de Mouro (Sintra, Portugal) as an office. There were 3 PCs, one “portable” Sinclair (read: I used to take it with me), one that had two floppy drives 5.25 where I ran accounting applications I developed (basically, glorified Lotus 123 sheets) and one Amstrad with a 10 MB hard drive where I kept the more space needing applications and data, all running MS DOS and Windows, can’t recall the exact versions. We’re talking the most advanced machines here, the Amstrad was a 386 that had cost me about 3000 Euros!

Of course, I needed a typewriter as well, because those awfull Epson printers did not have enough quality for my taste, so I bought from Xerox a Typewriter (with memory, it would store pages of documents and templates), a Fax machine and a Photocopier.

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