d59KNYm

Darkness and Chaos
157
with periods of stability and calm. Focus will shift back and forth between
worrying about the future and getting back to the job we were
hired to do.
One might think that with all the changes we have experienced
in life we would be quite good at handling change and would have
been prepared for the business changes of the 1980s and 1990s. Unfortunately,
for many people this was not the case. The rate of
change in business—and many other aspects of life—accelerated
dramatically during the 1980s and the 1990s; the changes came too
quickly and there were too many of them at once. There seemed to
be no calm between the storms, and little time to deal with today’s
frustration before being hit again. Without time to regroup, extreme
stress and fatigue begin to overwhelm the organization and its members;
frustration turns to fear, and fear to panic.
New technologies began to advance faster than many organizations’
ability to keep pace. The demand for better-quality and lowercost
products increased beyond the ability to cut costs and still meet
demand. Government controls increased in some areas and decreased
in others. Advances in computerization, in particular, have accelerated
the rate of technological change affecting organizations and
have led to dramatic social changes among the workforce as well.
Some of this change has had a positive effect. The Internet has
opened a whole new world of exploration and study. Commerce in
the computer age has advanced to the point where people can shop
or do their banking at home at any time of night or day, and small
entrepreneurial companies have grown in number as markets opened
up that were once thought out of reach. Education—on just about
everything—is now available to a greater number of individuals
around the globe.
There have also been negative effects of this rapid change. A
tremendous burden has been put on large organizations, forcing
them to reinvent themselves quickly in order to remain competitive.
As almost a defensive maneuver, some large corporations have
needed to merge, acquire other companies, or downsize their own