The current (from 9/23/2006) definition of change agent from Wikipedia says that a change agent is someone who engages either deliberately or whose behavior results in social, cultural or behavioral change. Wikipedia also lists management stages for change and employee steps to commitment.

Last week when I was researching to see earlier referrals to change agents, I came upon an article from 1999 by Seth Godin. Seth is one of my mentors although we’ve never met.

Fast Company’s prototype issue was November 1993 and one of the main articles was about Gunther Pauli. Pauli as reported in this article was the CEO of Ecover. His concept was using a new business model. His products for cleaning used only natural soaps and renewable raw materials. In the process, he built the world’s largest ecological factory.

One of the earlier referrals to change agent is in the April 1997 issue about Bob Knowling. Knowling helped to transform Ameritech from the old company concepts to new company concepts. As reported, he convinced 30,000 employees to become part of community service, shifted millions of dollars of Ameritech Foundation money into high-leverage community actives, helped to revitalize the Chicago YMCA, and shared his passion to HOPE, Chicago’s largest inner-city manufacturing training center.

In a training guide for change agents, Annie Layne used the basics used by the Peace Corps to show concepts that could be used for any business.

Become a change agent where you are by reducing your beliefs and motivations to a mission statement or a single sentence to give you focus for your planned change.

I will be running a post from time to time with the beliefs behind the blog/site.

1) Agile Advice: Thoughts and experiences for practitioners following the Middle Way to Excellence. The axioms for this site are: we are creators, reality is perceived, and change is natural. They have workshops available in Canada to learn agile thinking. Also several whitepapers are available at this site.

2) Tech-recipes.com This site was started as a computer cookbook in October 2003. It contained 1000 step-by-step tutorials as well as excellent forums. I wish I had kept track of all the angels like this site that have lifted me from ignorance to learning. I am self-taught with no formal training so it has been a wild learning curve.

3) Global Kids’ mission statement is to prepare urban youth to become global citizens and community leaders. Global Kids, Inc. works to ensure that young people of diverse backgrounds have the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed in the workplace and participate in the shaping of public policy and international relations.

4) 2Nonprofits: Bringing effective change agents to the social sector is a blog project of the Wilson Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Pace University. Its mission is to help experienced business people make the transition to work in the nonprofit social sector. With the greatest number of people (baby boomers) due to hit retirement soon more and more people are “retiring” to service jobs in nonprofits. These workers are being labeled “social entrepreneurs.”

Steve Jobs in the commencement address he gave last year to Stanford University told three stories in what he called connecting the dots. The name of the address was: “You’ve got to find what you love.” The dots included the choices he made that later led to some of his amazing career development.

The choices were:

(1) He dropped out of college formally but stayed at the school for another 1 ½ years to take the courses he liked. One of those courses was calligraphy which later became the fonts for our personal computers.

(2) He was fired from Apple but started Pixar and NeXT during his readjustment period. Pixar created the first computer animated feature film, Toy Story. Apple bought Pixar and rehired Jobs.

(3) In 1994, he was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. His type of cancer was curable with surgery. But the lesson he learned from this experience is that death is life’s main change agent.

Our time here is limited so his message is to enjoy it and find what we love to do in life.