Payment Industry Insider

Two weeks ago I blogged about resistance to change and how our ability to adapt to change will dictate our ability to survive change.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about how to deal with change. One of my favorite quotes comes from Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who says, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

So with that being said, how can we deal with change if resistance is not an option? As many of the greatest inventors have done, one option is to blow up the current model and start over. It worked for Thomas Edison after many tries to get the light bulb to work right. The key here is not to get caught up in how things have been done in the past. When the market changes, your lending models might have to change drastically to stay competitive and profitable. Small changes to existing lending strategies might not get the job done.

Another method for dealing with change is planning. We know change will happen, but just how it will happen, no one knows. So the key here is creating a plan for how to deal with the change…not what you will do in response to the change but how you will process the change. A simplistic example of this might be, “when the Fed changes rates, we will compare our current lending practices with what the new best structure is and make changes accordingly.”

Whatever you do, remember Darwin…you don’t have to be the smartest, just the most responsive to change.