Issue Overview

Rural businesses and organizations experience change often and the impacts ripple throughout not just the organization but also the communities where they reside. Understanding the unique needs of rural businesses in how they handle and adapt to change is important to ensure that the impact of change is as positive as possible. Where the change is negative, creating resilience in the organizations, the people they impact and the extended community requires collaboration and skill development not always emphasized in rural economies.

​Resources 

• Organizational Change Management: What it is and why it’s important.
• Change Management Toolkit
• Why Most Change Management Fails — and How to Do Better
• 7 Reasons Why Change Management Strategies Fail and How to Avoid Them 
• The irrational side of change management​

Our Expert: Vik Maraj

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Vik has an uncanny ability to get to the heart of the matter in seconds. For almost two decades he has been trained by some of the top performance coaches in the world. Vik works with leaders around the world at local and global levels, helping them to break through to unprecedented levels of performance. Vik’s work has transformed the quality of thousands of children’s lives by altering the capacity of senior leaders in the United Nations to end a decade’s long difference between their New York and Paris locations.

​Vik has enabled the elimination of food poverty in the high Arctic by empowering Inuit women to take a stand for their future. He has broken a deadlocked four-billion-dollar international impasse on capturing carbon by bringing executives in some of the world’s largest energy companies together with university academics and government bureaucrats in an almost unthinkable collaboration.  At the same time, Vik would say he is like everyone else, dealing with the same human constraints in his life and leadership that are familiar to all people everywhere.

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