» By: Hans Bool

The second industrial revolution: reinventing your business on the Web, is a book that I received from (former) professor of MIT John Donovan when I attended his conference in Paris in 1999 about the same topic.

I recently re-opened the book accidentally and found an interesting part about change management, especially a passage I remembered about the word crabs although I had forgotten the origin of this metaphor.

Donovan uses the metaphor of the crabs as one of the ten impediments to change. Another impediment is culture on the ‘road map’ to change.

• "Technical people tend to be averse to risk. Sales people promote a culture of aggressiveness. Japanese culture promotes respect for authority. European Culture tends to be structured. Americans tend to be spontaneous."

He describes two issues with culture: How to prevent the cultural brick in the wall in the road to change (1) and how to change someone else’s culture (2).

For the first issue Donovan refers (implicit) to knowledge management by suggesting to explicit the desired culture to the people ‘you are trying to change.’ The answer to the other issue is to ‘put together’ the old and the new. Donovan refers to ‘the new’ as employees who have grown up with the new culture (the ‘unstructured’ Internet) and ‘the old’ as those who have not. In that context his metaphor of CRABS is interesting. He refers to a fishing experience where he wanted to search a cover to put on the basket for preventing crabs to crawl out. Where his daughter said, “No, Dad, watch what happens. When one starts to crawl out, the others reach up and pull the crab back down.”

According to Donovan, the crabs are the cynics in the organization, people you can identify because “they move only side-ways or backwards. If you are going to change your people, you must neutralize and destroy the crabs within your organization.”

I remembered this crab metaphor as being very powerfull. Yet years after, I also realize that it is no longer completely in line with what I now think; "Crabs" serve to resists to all those ideas that are still green. Very Usefull. Did I change over the years...?

© 2006 Hans Bool

Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days. You can apply for a free demo account