TITLE : SAVE YOURSELF! SIX PATHWAYS TO ACHIEVEMENT IN THE AGE OF CHANGE.

"I'm working for a company that's just been bought, and I need to know how to protect my job. What can I do to save myself?" I was taken aback, so used to dealing with corporate change, culture change, and business transformation as a topic that I was unprepared to give individual advice to the very people affected the most. More questions from other callers followed. "My division is going down the tubes and I've got the feeling I'm the only one who cares"; "I want to make changes around the office, but my boss is resisting"; "No one knows what the new computer system will mean"; "The parts I've made all my life are going to be made in Mexico"; "I'm being and I don't know what to do." For the blank kr in the last sentence, substitute "laid off," "promoted," "transferred," "outsourced," "decentralized," "automated," "off shored," "attritioned," and any other current euphemism for personal job change.

The CNN show was the first of over 50 television and radio appearances on my schedule. Over and over, in city after city I heard the same message: Everything is changing and I'm caught up in it. What do I do to save myself? Now, after more than three years of speeches, lectures, and consulting assignments (all devoted to the subject of business change) throughout the United States and in more than twenty foreign countries, I'm ready to give some answers. Not new corporate strategies, not new organizational theories, and not simply another voice in the chorus that's been crying, Change is coming! Change is coming! I'm ready to tell you what to do in a changing business world. What steps to take, what techniques to use, what to watch out for. How to survive and succeed. How to save yourself when change is either around the corner or on top of you.

I'll share what I've learned in factories being automated, utilities being deregulated, banks being consolidated, stores being sold, government agencies being cut back, insurance companies reorganizing, airlines merging, subsidiaries spinning off, and massive information systems being installed. I'll include what I've learned from board chairpersons, chief executive officers, chief information officers, presidents, directors, and manufacturing engineers; from sales people, teachers, hospital administrators, shop supervisors, union stewards, and armies of white-collar workers lined up behind computer terminals, service counters, and drafting tables. You won't hear all their stories, but rather, my synthesis of what their stories mean. You'll hear echoes of their complaints, fears, hopes, and challenges. You'll receive the net result in an organized, concise way. One that-you can put to use easily, quickly, and effectively. You'll learn the fundamental skills needed to make it in a world under transition, the world in which we all work.

I'll also tell you what can go wrong, and why. You'll be able to spot changing situations instantly, prepare for their impacts on you, and reconnect with meaningful, rewarding work. But the rules for such work may be new and unfamiliar to you now. I'll make them understandable. Above all, you'll be able to discern between rules that worked in the age of stability, the past, and the ones that are absolutely essential for the age of change, our age.

The first step is important. You've got to accept the fact that the way to succeed in the past may be the way that leads to frustration, failure, and permanent damage to your well being today. All these changes-competition, globalization, information technology, deregulation, quality and service campaigns, productivity pushes, mergers, changing demographics, and more-have combined to make our working conditions and concerns very different. A new world of work requires new rules and new survival techniques.

So expect some surprising or even upsetting messages here. I can't make change any less threatening or powerful, and I can't play down its reach. Everybody either is being tested by it or soon will be. I want you to pass the test. I want you to win by winning through change, not by fighting it or ignoring it. It won't go away. If you know the new rules and practice the new techniques, you'll protect your job, your sanity, and your future. If you don't, you could end up a victim.

The focus of this book is on six central, critical abilities which I call Pathways. Once mastered, they work together to help you triumph under the conditions we all face now and will continue to face for the foreseeable future. If you are among the millions of employees and managers in the middle of change or in its path, you'll benefit from the key skills contained here. You'll put them to work immediately, and you'll see almost instant payoff and protection. This book is for you, the person who cares about his or her job, knows that change is the rule and not the exception anymore, and wants to take active steps to respond to it. The tricks you learn might not be called on right away, but when the time comes, when you're taking the bus or the train or driving your car to work and wondering what's going to happen next and what it means for you, you will remember them. You'll be able to save yourself. And I'll have answered the question that came in the middle of the night, the one that has haunted me since.

ROBERT D. GILBREATH