Luman's Law of Change

Luman's Law of Change

“If you’re not exploiting change, it’s exploiting you.” –James R. Lucas

The Problem

After working with thousands of leaders for nearly 25 years, I’ve come to see something that unites us all: We like talking about change, because that makes us feel good; but we hate actually changing, because that makes us feel bad.

We can’t avoid a close relationship with change. We can try to ignore it, we can be passive rather than active, we can resist it outright – but it is always coming at us, surrounding us, pushing us to become something different.

What are the main drivers of change? In one sense, it’s everything in the world in which we live. But here are some of the biggest:

 Us. We are at core restless, creative beings. We can’t leave things alone. We’re always trying to improve them, make them a better fit, make them less painful. Even for those of us who lean more toward stability (more on that word later), the status quo is never satisfying in a “just so” way. Part of this is what Jacques Barzun calls the problem of “boredom and fatigue” – even if it works, we don’t like it anymore.

 Changes across generations. Those of us at the “senior leadership” level have seen huge change in our lifetime. Everything is very different – cultural values, expectations, markets, industries, technology. These aren’t just because “time passes,” but rather because new generations are different in many significant ways from their predecessors. As they take control from their forebears, they put their own stamp on everything. We find many leaders and organizations completely befuddled by generations X and Y.

 Customers and competitors. Right now, people are out there creating opportunities (and, of course, problems) for themselves or for their customers, and at almost any time one of those could change our view of our business.

 Innovation. Change doesn’t just “happen” – a lot of it is driven by what human beings invent and create. Every innovation can affect us in many ways, with ripple effects in the hundreds or thousands. And then we change in response to that innovation, and then we add our own innovation to it, leading to more change. Innovation and widespread change are intimately interconnected.

 Context. Although the mix can be different for different industries and can change in an industry over time, the political (sometimes proactive, sometimes reactive), economic, and social (including demographic trends) environment can change our lives – always in small ways, but increasingly in large ways.

What does this mean for us as senior leaders? The train is moving. And it’s moving faster than it has in most periods of history. We can get on it, or we can be run over by it. But we have to do one or the other. Pretending there is no train won’t help us.

Some of this change we can control, at least somewhat, but most of it is beyond our reach. For the 90 percent that is “out there,” we say, “We’ll wait and see what happens and then react – after all, we can’t control it anyway.” Or we can take a different approach, one that begins with a mindset.

The Principle

Luman’s Law of Change gives us a clear choice: If you’re not exploiting change, it’s exploiting you.

In order to have a right relationship with change, we must have the right mindset. We have to decide how we are going to face change and how we are going to have our organizations face it. Here is what I would suggest:

Great organizations and leaders don’t try to survive, or even thrive, during change, but rather try to exploit change.

This means that we tell our people something like this:

“Here is [Change X]. It’s huge. We probably don’t even grasp how big it really it. But I know this: There is more opportunity in times of great change than at other times, for those who are ready to exploit it. And that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take advantage of it. I don’t want to hear anything about ‘getting through this change,’ as though it’s a case of the flu. And I don’t even want to hear about ‘trying to make the most of it,’ as though it’s a really bad time but we’ll attempt to soldier on.

I want to hear about how we’re going to take advantage of it, how we’re going to increase our market share or revenues or earnings by attacking it, how we’re going to change our business and culture and structure to maximize our position in this ‘new world.’ We should talk about the problems and challenges created by this change, but only so that we can use them and our solutions to them to exploit it. There is opportunity beyond imagining here, and we’re going to find it all.”

There are several other important “change mindsets,” but this is the overarching way of thinking that is mandatory if we want to be and stay great.


In our experience, this principle of change exploitation is missing from most organizations. Although change is sometimes dealt with by sticking our heads in the sand, more often we attempt to do “business as usual” with adjustments no greater than necessary to avoid the “excruciating” part of the ongoing pain.

But this is a dead end. Here’s what one outstanding leader reminded us about change:


Here was a company that saw a huge chunk of its business wiped out by the internet. Now customers didn’t even have to wait for next morning delivery – they could do it in the next nanosecond. And yet, FedEx responded to this by looking for the opportunities. They didn’t go the way of buggy makers, and hat makers, and encyclopedia sales.

To avoid the dead end and embrace the opportunity, we need to make an assertion, and ask our people a question: “We can all see how this change can nail us. The real question is, how can we nail it first?”

We’ll need some things to help us deliver on our new mindset – what we call here PMATs (practices, mechanisms, and tools). But without the mindset, we will indeed be “extinguished.”

The Practice

With the right mindset, we’re ready to give our change exploitation a form. The form has at least the following non-optional components:

Purpose – The change has to be given a face. We have to define in some detail what this change can mean for our organization and its future. What are the best results that we can imagine from this change in X years?

Focus – We’ve still got a business to run. We can’t do everything. What are the three to five critical success factors that, if we concentrate on them, have a chance of delivering maximum value from this change? Defining these can be challenging, but we have to define them clearly and crisply. Otherwise the organization will chase the thousand strands that come with any change – and at best we’ll only “survive” it.

Change model – We have to have a way of presenting the change to the organization and of incorporating the organization’s ideas into our response. Change exploitation goes beyond informing to involving.



Fluid structure. We have to put some structure in place to give the change a form. But even as we put it in place, we know it will have to be changed (or replaced) as our change exploitation becomes more detailed and nuanced. The structure is a tool, not a destination.

Leadership. Change exploitation cannot occur unless someone or some team is given the primary responsibility to make it so. Our response needs advocacy from people who believe in it, won’t let it die, and have the time and resources to see it through to a successful finish.

Ultimately, many of us even need to redefine how we approach strategy. With many of our clients, we’ve had to redefine the very term “strategy,” since for many people strategy is a tightly managed and controlled plan for the future direction of the organization. It’s why most strategic plans are suboptimal, if not disastrous.

In an effective leader’s vocabulary, strategy is defined as “a flexible program for managing change.” If nothing ever changed, we wouldn’t even need a strategy – we could keep doing or selling the same thing that was done or sold since forever. Money would roll in, and life would be good. It’s only because things change so often and so much that we even need strategy.

We were privileged to assist Cintas Corporation, a leader in diversified industrial support services, at a critical moment in its history. A double-digit growth company for many years, it had seen its growth slow to low single digits and stay there. Leaders could see the current and future impact on the market’s assessment of their company and the stock price. Their world had changed, and they decided to face it and exploit it. With our assistance, they revolutionized their “face to the market.” They gave their stance the right mindset and then put the other components discussed above in place to assure the results. And the company did indeed return to double-digit growth.

We all long in some ways for stability. But we have to redefine that as well. For 21st century leaders, stability can no longer mean, “Get things settled and keep them that way for as long as possible.”

In our new world, stability means having an undefeatable mindset about change and an unbending approach toward exploiting its potential.

Copyright © 2008 by James R. Lucas, All rights reserved.

Luman's Law of Change - To learn more about this author, visit Dr. James R. Lucas's Website.

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