lace you are stifled with the age old traditions. If employees are seeing new ideas tried out regularly, they will in turn, try to provide new ideas in the workplace. A top executive, interviewed for the book The Leadership Challenge states that "If organizations & societies are to make progress, then, leaders must be able to detect when routines are becoming dysfunctional. They must be able to see when routines are smothering creative planning and blocking necessary advancements.(Kouzes, Posner 47)" This was a major problem when I was working for the newspaper. We had some long time employees, many who dated back to the hand set press days. These employees were very resistant to some of the methods we needed to change to make us competitive in the marketplace. Many of the old routines that were established eons ago were still in effect because it was the "newspaper way" with unnecessary deadlines and extra print runs. Those ways needed to change to bring in the new technology needed to run a competitive newspaper in today's society. We needed to look at the demands of the advertiser and reporter which was our ability to react at a moments notice without unnecessary delays. Once we were able to break the old traditions, the new technology became accepted and the old seemed cumbersome and tiresome. Some change is inevitable, a totally stable company can cause you to become stagnant in you working environment. You never get a chance to shine with your ideas. The only direction up in a traditionally stable company can be a pre-determined route that you will need everybody's consent to take. "If the company had been totally stable, I might have stayed a vice president or who knows what. I just wouldn't have had the opportunities that I had" states one top executive interviewed in the book Smash the Pyramid (Doyle, Perking 234). Everyone wants to protect his/her status in the company and change can challenge this on a regular basis. But, Jam...
