The last few weeks have seen rapid changes in organisations all around us. Sleepy, slow-moving giants have made changes to their organisational structures and processes in a matter of days where previously they have struggled to make minimal progress over multiple years. Similarly, companies that have spent years jealously guarding percentage points of market share have found themselves with common ground and collaborating with erstwhile rivals in ways that would have been unimaginable a few months ago. Christopher Lake and Adam Gold ask: What, if anything, can the change management community and theoreticians learn from what has happened?
ShareInterviewed last week on the BBC, China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, called for an end to the blaming and scapegoating swirling around the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of this, he resisted the suggestion that the pandemic's origins in China were an established fact. Why was the ambassador so keen to deflect this charge? In this article, we highlight four reasons. Only one of these requires China’s handling of the outbreak to have been at fault.
ShareFor older workers in the UK, the passing of the 2010 Equality Act – coming in the wake of new regulations introduced four years earlier – was seen as a landmark in this path to progress. Huge changes followed the Act. Out went the idea of a mandatory retirement age. In came a wide range of protections aimed at cementing the standing of older workers within the labour market and changing attitudes towards them.
Fast-forward to 2020 and this progressive agenda, as it relates to older workers and the elderly more generally, is coming under challenge. On the grounds of age (and age alone), the government has encouraged millions of people not just to stay at home but to shun human contact altogether. Crisis or no crisis, Christopher Lake and Adam Gold see no immediate prospect of the legislation protecting older workers being watered down. But Covid-19 has brought the issues of age and work to a head in ways that the framers of the 2010 Act could not have imagined.