Change

Pushing for real change inside a company is never easy. Anyone who leads a Web initiative knows, the Internet is proxy for change.

Whether creating a site for a large corporation or a team to build one, the web is necessarily disruptive, requiring flexibility in managing change and identifying business processes to nourish and sustain the new initiatives.

Being a change agent takes all of the charm that you can muster, all of the political skill that you can summon, and all of the allies that you can rally. It can be lonely. Many people don’t want to go where you want to take them. In a traditional business organized in silos, the Internet is the sum of all fears.

Departments that previously had little interaction, now share the same space on the Web. And those that previously manually processed information are now challenged to automate their work, and themselves out of a job.

Technology is almost never the problem. It’s not about coming up with a good strategy, but about getting people to work differently.

You have to be a teacher and a motivator. You have to build support one person at a time. You have to be flexible. You have to be a good listener, You have to want to be open and sharing with information. You have to put a stake in the ground to show people where you’re going.

And you have to posses a certain level of self-confidence — because you’re going to get challenged — alot.