4 Premiership Change Stages

Typically big hooha about the Premier League’s investigation into a 39th round of footie matches to take place at international venues.  The sooner we get a proper Euro League the better.  Anyway… the Sundays welcomed such a debate so they could fill their pages once more.  One of them focused on the selling job that league chief Richard Scudamore is conducting on behalf of his member club chairmen paymasters.

The first wonderful observation, direct from him is, “[Britain’s] such a conservative nation, so resistant to change, our initial reaction to everything is ‘How is it going to affect us negatively?’ “.  How many times have I tried to use the very same chat with IT managers, bean counters, engineers, career middle managers?  This is a decent line of attack if you sell in the UK to get across the fact that resistance is futile.  In this football case, globalisation is of course a matter of when, not if.

And there was a journo’s lovely summary of what we as sellers must be aware of, work around, and shape; “According to management experts and psychologists there are four stages in dealing with significant change, and not everybody will make it all the way to stage four:
denial/anger
confusion
renewal
contentment”

A useful quartet to introduce to blockers, sceptics, doubters and general grubby influencers