Moving organisations from current to future changed states is not easy and requires skills and knowledge some managers do not possess.

The desperate call-to-arms, Change or Die—which can be heard echoing down the corridors of businesses everywhere—is evidence that leaders have recognised the need to change. Managers know that companies must be fast, flexible, responsive, resilient, and creative to survive. Most also know that current mind-sets, techniques, and tools are ineffective for creating such an organisation. These people are displaying the talents required to successfully negotiate change. They are aware of the limitations around or within themselves and are willing to learn the necessary skills required to succeed as change managers. Change is the process of moving from one state to another. Just as moving house requires the massive packing of furniture and other items, change requires just as much preparations to be successful. Most people do not like change, they like things to remain the same. Changes require more effort to adapt. It threatens
stability and security and people fear that they will not be able to cope. Resistance is the natural defence to such perceived threats. A good manager has to be able to work with and overcome resistance he/she must be able to control the whole process of change. With this in mind, I have considered the role of the manager, what his/her function is and what skills are required to enable him/her to be a successful change manager.

Fayol identified the functions of the manager as: setting objectives, organising, motivating, controlling or measuring and co-ordinating. These functions are as true today as they were then, but I consider communication as the key to them. It is the essential function in successful change management. Drucker also makes the important addition of, ‘the development of people.’ Each of the functions can be seen as essential to managing emergent or planned change, however it is the balance of skills and knowledge combined that produce a successful change manager. With these points in mind we then consider organisations and their nature.

Organisations are living social organisms, each with its own culture, character, nature, and identity. Every organisation has its own history of success, which reinforces and strengthens the organisation’s way of doing things. The older and more successful the organisation, the stronger its culture, its nature, its identity becomes. They are communities of people with a mission , not machines. The basic nature of a living social organism is naturally more fundamental, deeper in the hierarchy, and therefore much more powerful than business work processes, financial systems, business strategy, vision, supply chains, information technology, lean manufacturing, marketing plans, team behaviour, corporate governance. All of these phenomena are important. But they are less fundamentally important than the basic nature of organisations as living social organisms.

This critically important reality must be where any intervention starts. When this occurs, the intervention has a chance of working. To enable this managers must be able to combine their knowledge of the above systems with response ability.

A fine balance is required by a manager to remain agile, allowing him/her to manage a changing organisation whilst taking into consideration the infrastructure of the organisation. Agility is an important skill for a manager to possess, if he/she is able to reach this point then they are more likely to manage change efficiently. Whether a particular change will work or not is related to the extent to which the idea behind it takes constant process of patterned change into account. Determining where an organisation has been, where it is currently, and where it is primarily poised to go next is critically important before any change is attempted. Indeed, what managers must do is discover the unique patterns and processes - and then work to influence them in a manner that helps the organisation to help itself function more efficiently and effectively.

The pattern of dynamic relationships at the organisation level is culture, which explains why organisational culture is so powerful. So powerful, in fact, that its impact supersedes all other factors when it comes to organisational change it is strikingly evident that organisational culture lies at the centre of what differentiates visionary companies from comparison companies (and significantly greater economic performance over the long-term). Culture, how we do things around here in order to succeed , is an organisation’s way, identity, pattern of dynamic relationships, reality. It has everything to do with implementation and how success is actually achieved. No management idea, no matter how good, will work in practice or implementation if it does not fit the culture. Therefore managers have to consider how they can make the culture fit the plan. They do this by acknowledging which type of culture they are in, and then choosing which skills and knowledge they require to ‘fit’ the circumstances. Leaders create one of four core cultures, consciously and/or unconsciously, from their own personal history, nature, socialisation experiences, and perception of what it takes to succeed in their marketplace.

After years of denial and negligence, President Bush and his aides are finally waking up to the desperate mess they’ve made in Afghanistan. They have little choice, since the alarms are coming from all corners.

In a rare moment of agreement, America’s 16 intelligence agencies are warning that Afghanistan is on a dangerous “downward spiral.” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is publicly predicting that next year will be an even “tougher year.”

As The Times reported last week, a draft intelligence report blames three problems for the breakdown in central authority and the Taliban’s rising power: rampant corruption, a booming heroin trade and increasingly sophisticated attacks from militants based across the border in Pakistan. Unless all three are addressed quickly, the war in Afghanistan could be lost.

Under pressure from the United States and other NATO governments, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, appointed a new interior minister over the weekend who will be charged with cleaning up and strengthening the country’s police force. Mr. Karzai now must cut all ties with corrupt officials. He must take a hard and credible look at allegations that his brother may be involved in the heroin trade that is pouring $100 million annually into the Taliban’s coffers.

The United States will also have to send more troops into Afghanistan and persuade its allies to send more. It’s chilling to watch America’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, begging NATO—and the White House— for help. Germany’s commitment of another 1,000 troops is commendable but marred by its refusal to deploy them in southern Afghanistan where the fighting is heaviest. NATO members that can’t or won’t send more troops must contribute money to build Afghanistan’s national army and finance local development.

NATO’s recent decision to authorize its forces to go after drug lords and drug labs is a (much belated) start, but it still has far too many strings attached.

The Bush administration must drop its resistance to working with tribal leaders to fight the Taliban. The time for worrying about undermining President Karzai is long past. Reconciliation talks should also be explored with members of the Taliban—if they forsake violence.

Washington must also come up with a better mixture of incentives and pressures to persuade Pakistan to shut down Taliban and Al Qaeda havens. The country’s new civilian leaders and army chief say that they understand the threat posed by militants and are willing to fight them. That must be encouraged, including with more carefully monitored military and economic aid.

Imagine if Mr. Bush had not invaded Iraq in 2003 and instead put all of this country’s resources and attention into defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even optimistic analysts say that things have now gotten so bad that, with the best strategy, it could take another 5 to 10 years to stabilize Afghanistan.

That is one more reason why the next president must plot a swift, orderly exit from Iraq and begin a swift and serious buildup of troops and aid in Afghanistan—the real frontline in the war on terror.

Music's death-knell has recently been sounded from various points by a disparate group of doom-sayers. Norman Lebrecht has written When the Music Stops: Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of Classical Music (Pocket Books). Roger Scruton continues his own reactionary aesthetic polemic in an essay on music in The Future of the European Past (Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, editors; IR Dee). Julian Lloyd Webber, cellist and brother of the more famous Andrew, gave a speech at the unlikely venue of the World Economic Forum in Davos in February, attacking "the dictators of modern music." Ivan Hewett of Radio 3 has joined in with an intelligent vein of pessimism. Their threnodies are challenged by Charles Rosen, the distinguished American pianist and musical writer, for whom reports of the death of music are much exaggerated. If music is in crisis, he says, it always has been-or there have always been those who thought it was: "The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition." Whenever the old was forced to give way to the new, conservative musicians claimed that the end was nigh-as far back as the age of Monteverdi, whose expressive style was held to be killing the true madrigal tradition.

A century later, Bach's music baffled his contemporaries. Then 18th-century musicians bemoaned the florid and vapid new style of Italian virtuosity, which was destroying the true art on which they grew up. And so on, through one generation after another who thought that Beethoven, or Wagner, or Schoenberg heralded the end of music. Rosen might have added that even with such a distinctive brand of popular-cum-art music as jazz, less than a century old, every decade for at least the past five has heard voices bemoaning its death. Those near contemporaries with so little in common (politically at least), Philip Larkin and Eric Hobsbawm, both claimed that jazz died in the 1950s or 1960s (by an act of parricide, in Hobsbawm's view: "rock murdered jazz"). All of this defence is presented by Rosen with forensic skill and wit, and he will appeal to anyone who instinctively dislikes the "give-us-a-tune-we-can-whistle" brigade. Julian Lloyd Webber's Davos attack on modernism was notably saloon-bar-ish, with its over-heated denunciation of the "gauleiters and furers" who have turned the public away from music by dictating a diet of atonal tunelessness.

And yet, like Ivan Hewett, I think "the cellist may, in his muddled way, have put his finger on something that Rosen misses." With all his musicianship, Rosen makes a series of what lawyers would call bad points, or self-defeating arguments. Behind his elegant denials, there is a crisis in our musical culture, and I believe that it can be shown to differ in kind rather than degree from earlier episodes when the end of musical life was proclaimed. The crisis concerns music's contacts with its roots in society.

For Lebrecht, the culprits are commercialisation and greed on the part of record companies, agents, promoters and musicians themselves. Music has become a racket, with singers, conductors and sometimes instrumentalists demanding absurdly high fees. Concerts are confined to an increasingly hackneyed repertory; the output of recording companies even more so because, as Rosen concedes, "the music business, like publishing, is controlled by multinational conglomerates that care nothing for art." Although there is something in this, it is not the nub of the problem, and it is only partly true in any case. Only the rich can afford to go to the Salzburg Festival. But London teems with concerts at affordable prices, and it is significant that the epicentre of musical life in the capital is now the Wigmore Hall, where more good music can be heard in one month than all the year round in most of the rest of England.

What Lebrecht calls a disease may really be a symptom. More worrying than the commercialisation of music is its atrophy. The late Hans Keller, musician, writer, teacher, and the most musical man I have ever known, used to say that music was undoubtedly better performed now in technical terms than it ever had been-which was far from saying that we were more musical. Atrophy through virtuosity has come in succession upon singers, pianists, orchestras and maybe even string quartets. One can adapt for many performers now (and even some composers) Karl Kraus's saying about journalists: people who have nothing to say and who know how to say it.

Even more pernicious is the sheer availability of music, the misleading appearance of abundance. Never has there been so much music-and never has it been so little understood. Never has so much music been heard and so little listened to. Muzak or background music makes pubs, restaurants and shops unbearable for anyone with the misfortune to be musical. It is bad enough when the background music is worthless schlock. Much worse is when what you hear while eating and drinking is some masterwork by Mozart or Brahms, hackneyed and polluted in the process. On a recent visit to Bosnia, I saw some harrowing sights but experienced nothing as personally disagreeable as the piped extracts from Lakmot the airport, and Schubert's Rosamunde played interminably in the aircraft awaiting take-off.

Canned music isn't only a form of legal torture, it represents the extreme case of degradation by inanition: music as wallpaper, as atmosphere. And yet a Muzak-hating music-lover who works for Radio 3 would have to recognise some degree of collusion on his own part. As Walter Benjamin famously recognised, the inventions of recording and broadcasting have together been a great blessing to music, and a great curse. They have vastly extended the availability of music, and this has vastly diluted its intensity. More has meant less.

If we don't know what will endure, we should not be afraid to follow our instincts. It is plainly wrong to claim that "no one" likes contemporary music: Rosen is correct in saying that much is not only composed but also listened to with sincerity. I myself listen to and admire (to name only compatriots) Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Judith Weir, Michael Berkeley. And yet...

The ecological problems caused by human economic activity are worsening and taking on global dimensions. Climate change, ozone-layer depletion, and loss of forest cover are important examples. At the same time, social conditions continue to worsen in many developing countries. It is estimated that more than 1 billion people now live in poverty without sufficient food, adequate educational opportunities, or any possibility of political participation. Although financial and economic markets are becoming more and more interconnected and we like to think in terms of a "global village," our efforts to enshrine environmental protection and development as the common task and responsibility of all countries have just begun to make headway.

The key aim for the 21st century is "sustainable development," which the international community embraced at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development. Sustainable development seeks to reconcile environmental protection and development; it means nothing more than using resources no faster than they can regenerate themselves, and releasing pollutants to no greater extent than natural resources can assimilate them.

If we are to move toward sustainable development, the industrialized countries will have to accept special responsibility--not only because of their past ecological sins, but also because of their present technological know-how and financial resources. Yet, one must keep in mind that sustainable production and consumption involve not merely technical progress, but also cultural patterns of individual behavior and values.

There are several possible ways to achieve environmental compatibility in lifestyles and economies. Technical and scientific innovations provide excellent prospects for environmental protection. As we approach the end of the 20th century, industrial society is becoming a knowledge-based society. It is vital that we use our growing knowledge and capabilities responsibly, and that we use them in the interest of environmentally appropriate development. Science must play an important role in the pursuit of sustainable development. The key technologies of sustainable development include new energy and propulsion technologies that will help reduce emissions of climate-damaging greenhouse gases.

Simply to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations at twice their preindustrial levels, we will have to reduce current global greenhouse emissions by over 50%. Achieving this goal involves focusing on improved thermal insulation in buildings, on the use of heat/power cogeneration, and on efficient support for the use of renewable energies. Currently the most progress is found in the area of wind energy; in the medium term, the use of solar energy, with photovoltaic technology, will continue to grow in significance. An honest consideration of our options indicates that we cannot afford to discontinue peaceful use of nuclear energy.

Modern microsystems and control technologies are also providing new opportunities to design environmentally friendly production processes. While filter and wastewater-treatment technologies have considerably enhanced air and water quality in recent years, they are never more than the second-best solution, and have been surpassed by integrated environmental technology, that is, technology that optimizes the use of materials and energy. This involves material-efficient, energy-efficient production processes as well as the manufacture of environmentally compatible products, especially those that generate little waste. We have created the necessary framework for this with the Closed Substance Cycle and Waste Management Act, which came into force in 1996. Instruments such as eco-audits, which help identify the saving potentials from environmental protection investments, also promote development of such "clean" technologies. Sustainable development can succeed only if all areas of the political sector, of society, and of science accept the concept and work together to implement it. A common basic understanding of environmental ethics is needed to ensure that protection of the natural foundation of life becomes a major consideration in all political and individual action.

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao's attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return. Today's Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its 'interstices'. Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of 'divine violence' - a revolutionary version of Heidegger's 'only God can save us.' Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In today's triumph of global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfill, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism.

These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some 'true' radical Left politics - what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole story of the last thirty years, however. There is another, no less surprising, lesson to be learned from the Chinese Communists' presiding over arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in history, and from the growth of West European Third Way social democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better. In the UK, the Thatcher revolution was, at the time, chaotic and impulsive, marked by unpredictable contingencies. It was Tony Blair who was able to institutionalise it, or, in Hegel's terms, to raise (what first appeared as) a contingency, a historical accident, into a necessity. Thatcher wasn't a Thatcherite, she was merely herself; it was Blair (more than Major) who truly gave form to Thatcherism.

The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the 'old paradigm': the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should 'mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty' one opposes? Shouldn't the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use 'mocking satire and feather dusters'? The ambiguity of Critchley's position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way?
Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, 'calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect'?

“No one knows what goes on in these cloning labs,” says Nina Mak, a research analyst at the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS). “No one knows how many animals are used and what happens to those animals. There’s no assurance about the state of their welfare and their treatment and care. All of that happens without any oversight.” Neil Trent, executive director of the Marin Humane Society, has called for “legislative intervention to regulate this dubious activity.”

Is pet cloning really so strange and untenable? In addition to voicing concerns about animal welfare, those who oppose it take issue with its metaphorical implications. “This idea that you can take an animal and duplicate it whenever you want–treats animals as objects that can be manufactured,” says Mak.

But canine fabrication is not a new idea. There weren’t any trendy “designer” hybrids like puggles or schnoodles on Noah’s ark, nor even any certified purebreds like Boston terriers or French bulldogs. As their not-exactly-biblical names suggest, these dogs are modern inventions, painstakingly crafted by uncompromising artisans following detailed blueprints, a.k.a. “breed standards,” drafted by 19th-century canine eugenicists. And our efforts to make dogs more serviceable, more aesthetically appealing, and more fun to be around are much older than that. For some 15,000 years now, man has been artificially shaping his best friend to serve human ends. In fact, it’s their very malleability that makes dogs. If it weren’t so easy to retool them to exacting specifications, they’d still be wolves.

Cloning represents the next step in a process that’s been going on since the late Paleolithic era, one that opens up new possibilities for pet lovers. “If you love golden retrievers, you can go to a conventional breeder and get a very similar set of genetics again,” says Hawthorne. “But if you have a spayed or neutered mixedbreed animal, there’s no other way to get that same configuration of genetics. You can guess and breed what you think to be the source breed, but you’ll never get the same configuration.”

In July four anonymous pet owners submitted winning bids in the BioArts clone auctions. The prices they paid ranged from $140,000 to $170,000. For that fee, Hawthorne says, they’ll get a puppy that is guaranteed to have “a very high degree of physical resemblance” to their original pet. Cloning isn’t doggy reincarnation, but Hawthorne says it’s more than just similar markings. “I thought it was going to be about looks,” he says of his first clone, “and maybe someday behavioral similarity. But it’s a much more visceral experience than that–the feel, the smell. When they first handed me Mira in Korea, you could see the look of genuine astonishment on my face”.

As the AAVS suggests, there are aspects of cloning that are less camera-friendly. To clone a dog, you need multiple lab animals. Some serve as sources for ova, others are used as surrogates to carry the embryos that scientists create by enucleating an egg and fusing it with cells from the dog being cloned. All those animals, according to the Humane Society/AAVS anti-cloning report, are “subjected to painful hormone treatments and invasive surgeries.”

Hawthorne, who says he and his associates will soon be publishing a paper detailing the advances they’ve made in “a major scientific journal,” disputes that characterization, claiming that the procedures for ova flushing and embryo transfer take only five minutes and require an incision between a half-inch and an inch long. The animals are sedated during the process, he says, and the procedures are less invasive than a spay-a procedure the Humane Society and the AAVS endorse without protesting the pain involved. It takes approximately eight laboratory dogs to produce one clone; four supply the ova, and four act as surrogates. “For every four embryo transfers we do, we get a clone,” says Hawthorne. “And that rate is going up very quickly.” BioArts has a provision in its contract with the cloning lab that requires the latter to either care for the canine egg donors and surrogates in perpetuity or put them up for adoption. In other words, euthanasia is not an option.

That’s not to say Pixar is likely to set its next heart-warming animal pic in a pet cloning lab. But conventional breeding operations, be they high-volume puppy mills, semi-pro backyard setups, or even reputable licensed breeders, aren’t default havens of cuddliness either. In all these scenarios, there are aspects most pet owners would probably prefer not to acknowledge: inhumane confinement, invasive artificial insemination techniques, Cesarean sections, birth defects, and high mortality rates.

What distinguishes cloning from these other approaches is the extremely high motivation of the buyers. They’re not interested in a Chihuahua because they saw Paris Hilton’s and now they want a cute little accessory that poops, too. They don’t want a Dalmation because they think it would go well with the living room. Everyone’s heard stories about pet breeders who make buyers jump through hoops like trained seals in an effort to prove they can provide a suitable home for the breeder’s progeny, but Hawthorne’s customers have already passed a test more stringent than even the most demanding breeder could devise: They’ve lived with a dog very much like the one they’re purchasing. They loved it so much they’re willing to spend six figures to obtain a facsimile.