If you read enough posts on social media and/or professional journals about organizational change, the impression of massive constant change is ubiquitous. Change appears to be constant, fast and furious and if you don’t adapt you to be left behind in a cloud of dust.

Which may be true, but equally may not be true. Because there are certain elements in organizational life which do not change.

 In this post, I want to point out 5 constants of organizational life which do not change, “or bends with the remover to remove. O no,  (they are) an ever-fixèd mark. That looks on tempests and is never shaken” (Sonnet 116-Shakespeare)

• When people work together in physical proximity, the probability for trust to severely break down is less than if people work in different geographies. Yes, people in the same physical location often have trust issues, but people who work remote from one another always have chronic trust issues, and they are very difficult to manage. Each geographical site has hidden agendas that impact all interaction.
• Hiring good people at a fair price is far more effective than hiring mediocre people at a better price; training cannot bridge the gap of mediocrity.
• AI is a fad. It will cause “some” change, but it is not the game changer it is made out to be. Like TQM, MBO and JIT, AI has come in with a lot of noise; it will not change the basic operating system of organizing.
• If you want to change culture, do things differently. You cannot change culture by talking-only by doing. And it takes a long time. After things are done differently, people will report a cultural change in a year or even longer.
• There are no mergers; just acquisitions. It is a Darwinian process in which a stronger organization digests another. Taking the best from both cultures to form a new one is total nonsense that never ever happens. Never.