As I reflect on over 30 years of management experience, one thing stands out clearly above all others: change. Much of what I learned as a young management economist in my undergraduate days in the 1960s is frankly no longer valid. Much of what I believed to be the economic forces that ruled markets, no longer work. Management principles I once held sacred are now profane. I began my business career in 1969 with an "industrial enterprise model" in my head, and spent much of the next 30 years trying to cope with the startlingly new reality of information technology.

Information technologies rewrote all the rules of the industrial enterprise. They changed everything about how to attract and interact with both employees and customers. In fact, the "information empowerment" of customers and employees is the single biggest change in business over the past 30 years. Change has become the fundamental, unalterable force of our times. Change, or more precisely, the management of change, is the fundamental prerequisite for success.

As a management professor, I now teach business strategy, with its number crunching mantra. But I also try to teach students about the importance of what Jack Welch of GE calls "the mushy stuff." Along with co-author Bill Jenkins (of Cal Tech) I put everything I've learned about the "mushy stuff" into a small book (told as a fable) titled, The Eagle & the Monk: 7 Principles of Successful Change. Briefly, those seven principles of successful change are as follows:

1.		Accept your worth, acknowledge the worth of others...it provides the foundation for successful change.
2.		Generate trust...it is the centerpiece of successful change.
3.		Learn by empathy...careful attention to people and events around you provide real insights into change.
4.		Embrace change...adopt the attitude that change is a constant and cease to fight it.
5.		Unleash the synergy of teams...because no one person alone can be expected to cope with the magnitude of change.
6.		Discover champions, depend on masters, find a sage...great teams need more than a leader, they require champions (passion), masters (expertise) and a sage (wisdom).
7.		Liberate decision-making...managing change works best when those most affected are truly empowered.

I've found these seven principles at work in successful companies around the world. In fact, there are only two kinds of companies in the world today: those that embrace change and are reaping the rewards of the new marketplace and those fighting change with their dying breath.

Richard W. Oliver, professor of management at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, was previously Vice President, Marketing at Nortel Networks. He is the author of several books including The Shape of Things to Come: 7 Imperatives for Winning in the New World of Business (McGraw-Hill, Business Week Books), and The Coming Biotech Age: The Business of Bioterials, to be published by McGraw-Hill this fall.