Responses for Discussion

Change readiness:

Change readiness is that moment when a business can identify, prepare, understand, and respond to change. It is a moment in time when the business can identify, develop, assess, prepare, and respond to the new situation or challenge it faces. The change readiness is related to me as a CEO and my company as a firm. This is not a technical, legal, or managerial decision, but a company decision. And in the corporate world, the change readiness is not a decision made by a single individual or a single team member; it is an entire company decision.

I believe that the changes we need to address for growth are not technical or legal, but a change in the way we work (in ways that are in alignment with our culture). The biggest change we need to address is the way we do business at Microsoft. This is a decision I am making with our entire team, as well as with our partners at Microsoft, and with the broader business community. We believe we need a new approach. This is not a matter of making changes on a one-for-one basis; this is a matter of a change in the way our company operates on a broader perspective (Endrejat, Meinecke, & Kauffeld, 2020).

I believe we need to redefine how we think about growth, how we think about the value of our customers, and how we think about the opportunity of our customers for our company. And I believe the way we do this redefinition is by redefining the purpose of our company. We need to re-establish our purpose as the company that makes software that makes life better, and that creates an opportunity for others to make more. We need to re-emphasize this as part of our core mission, so our customers and our partners understand where we work to, not just on one-off software. I believe this must start with a conversation with our customers. We need a dialogue with customers about our priorities for the future and a deeper commitment to customer values than we have yet seen.

We need to re-establish our core customer values and to re-emphasize this focus in our conversations with our teams. We need to do this by refocusing the conversations we are having about the value of our customers. (Al-Furaih  & Al-Awidi, 2020).

References:

Al-Furaih, S. A., & Al-Awidi, H. M. (2020). Teachers’ change readiness for the adoption of smartphone technology: Personal concerns and technological competency. Technology, Knowledge, and Learning, 25(2), 409-432.

Endrejat, P. C., Meinecke, A. L., & Kauffeld, S. (2020). Get the Crowd Going: Eliciting and Maintaining Change Readiness Through Solution-Focused Communication. Journal of Change Management, 20(1), 35-58.