Conferences all over the country, blogs from every corner of the world are filled with the voices of revolutionary thinkers telling you how to blow up your company, start over with a clean sheet of paper and build the dream organization of tomorrow.

I don’t hear the visionaries talking about what you should do with the organization you already have; the one you spent years building; the one in which you have a significant investment; the one that you rely on for your financial and emotional sustenance.

We also have a body of experts telling you how to defend and sustain the status quo: how your message about your value proposition can be repositioned so that doing what you’ve always done for the prices you’ve traditionally charged will suddenly seem appealing to the public. A slick new web site, a new ad campaign and life is good. Comfort food for the delusional.

I don’t hear any meaningful talk about transition; that fear filled journey from current reality into the unknown and out the other side to a more successful future.

Let’s consider just three basic elements of your present reality:

Your current fixed costs:
You have leases or mortgage payments on your premises. You cannot wish them away because you went to a workshop and imagined the brokerage of the future. So assuming you want to redesign your traditional brick and mortar presence into something better attuned to emerging consumer wants and needs, then time – transition time – must become a part of your thinking and planning.

While you are waiting (and perhaps negotiating yourself out of some current leases) the question arises, what do you do during this fixed cost transition period? How do you blend your message and image and structure of the future with the physical and financial realities of the present? Surely, not everything you’re doing is bad, obsolete or unprofitable, as some of the pundits would have you believe. The world as you know it is not going to crash and burn in the next few months.

Your current culture:
You have people: Realtors/agents; administrative staff; marketing people; technology people. In all probability your Realtors are diverse in their views and their business methods. Some embrace the Internet, some cringe at having to turn on their computers. Some of the cringers may be your highest producers. Some of those skilled in the new technologies may lack the interpersonal skills to achieve great financial results. They all pay desk fees. They all carry business cards with your name on them. They all define who you are.

Over time you have created, both consciously and unconsciously, an organizational culture/dynamic, an established way of doing and being and interacting and getting things done and communicating and helping one another. You cannot take that cultural dynamic for granted and assume that it will sort itself out through a period of profound change.

Your current market(s) and customers:
The demographics and behaviors of your markets and customers will weigh significantly on how and at what pace you transform your business model. Not everyone wants to radically change. Not everyone will decide to do or not do business with you based on whether or not your company embodies the form and practices of the company of the future. Certainly some will. But how many? How quickly? What is the speed of the trend toward change? When do you reach the “tipping point?”

At the end of the day, the real value you deliver lies in helping people buy homes that meet their lifestyle and financial needs and sell homes at optimum prices in acceptable time frames. Everything else should support that value proposition.

You must protect and enhance your Brand. You must grow. You must optimize your bottom line. Your agents must do the same, for themselves and for the organization.

What does all this mean?
Change for change’s sake has never made good business sense. Self proclaimed “visionaries” who tell you to destroy what you have built because fashion dictates it have probably never run a successful company over a long period of time.

Still, you cannot ignore the winds of change. You cannot deny that technology is altering lives and life styles and the ways in which people engage, connect, form relationships and transact business. You cannot ignore shifting demographics and the resultant changes in the behaviors of the people who are spending their money to buy what you offer.

All of it demands that you, as a leader, use a well-reasoned sense of balance. You achieve that balance by choosing and investing in the right elements of the “new wave” of thought, of technology, of behavior – elements that will not destroy you in the process of transforming you.

One of those leading edge elements that can help you reshape your business is Social Media. Social Media offers an array of new engagement tools, creative behavioral approaches and cultural change mechanisms that can have a profound, positive impact on creativity and results without trampling on what is tried, true and effective. Social Media requires only a small financial investment and, executed correctly, a modest investment of time.

Most importantly, Social Media is not a fad.

Social Media is here to stay. And Social Media can become a hands-on, experiential metaphor for a variety of new behaviors that will define the organization of tomorrow, both inside and outside the Social Media world. In upcoming articles, we will discuss why all that is so and how to use Social Media effectively.

Stay tuned.

Are the majority of established Realtors just so fearful and stubbornly defiant that they won’t embrace Internet marketing even if resisting it could mean their demise?

I say the majority of Realtors because whenever I poke around various search portals to see how Internet listing presentations appear, most of them are pathetically weak. They contain one photo of the front of the home/condo, perhaps a few still photos of the interior, or not, bland descriptions of the property that are stylistic relics of MLS postings from the days when only Realtors could access the MLS. There is nothing to stir emotions and heighten the interest of potential buyers.

Would these resisters rather die (financially) than change? The standard answer is that people normally resist change and that generally speaking, the strength of their resistance increases with age and experience.

But is there more to it than that? Do these Realtors know something that the techie, product peddling, “solutions” savants haven’t figured out? Perhaps.

The Nash Equilibrium

In his new book, “The Mind Of The Market,” Michael Shermer writes:

“Technically speaking, staying with the old technology may sometimes be what is called a Nash equilibrium, a concept identified by the Nobel laureate mathematician John Nash (immortalized in the film A Beautiful Mind).”

“Applied to economics, markets reach a point of equilibrium where holding on to strategies is more profitable (or at least is perceived to be so) than switching strategies; thus, industries, corporations, businesses, and people reach a point of stability in which switching strategies appears undesirable.”

The application of this message for many Realtors is that their current strategies and actions regarding how they use or ignore the Internet may be due to their perception of having achieved market equilibrium. These Realtors believe that switching their strategies to embrace the Internet and to invest in building a strong, vibrant Internet presence/campaign would offer either no advantage or a disadvantage.

How did they form that belief?

To reach this equilibrium, Realtors must believe that: the right price is the driving factor in selling a home; adequate information about the listing is effectively disseminated through traditional channels, i.e. the MLS; buyer behavior is driven by a need to find a home at a price that represents good value; and buyers will endure whatever “theatrical” shortcomings exist in Internet presentations to find their homes.

Based on those beliefs, it follows that there would be no advantage in becoming champions of Internet marketing since all listed homes will sell with or without strong Internet marketing once the right price is established and disseminated through pre-Internet channels.

The disadvantage (to Realtors) would be making an investment of time and money on a new strategy that will not yield any return on investment and will take away time better spent on historic marketing practices.

The “proof” of this perception is the data showing that all houses eventually sell with or without an appealing Internet marketing campaign. When a house doesn’t sell for a given period of time, the seller, with input from the listing agent, simply lowers the price until the house sells. Therefore, the only significant variable in selling or not selling any given home must be its price.

If these same Realtors are getting their desired results or if their results are no worse than those they achieved before the new technology (the Internet) was introduced, they would conclude that the new technology has no effect on their outcomes and their incomes.

The perceived existence of this Nash equilibrium further strengthens peoples’ normal resistance to embracing and utilizing the Internet. So after at least 3 years of preaching and teaching and prodding by NAR and by many Real Estate companies, not to mention the many vendors who sell Internet tools and solutions, the rate of widespread adoption is somewhere between glacial and non-existent.

Solutions

The approach to helping Realtors change begins with developing a deeper understanding of why they are stuck.

The typical explanations that I hear from Brokers I’ve spoken to are inadequate. Answers such as, “Oh, people resist change. That’s normal. Eventually they’ll come around or they’ll retire and their younger replacements will embrace the Internet.” Or, “You know how it is, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Or, “These Realtors are independent contractors. If they don’t want to change, I can’t force them. And as long as they’re paying their desk fees and expenses, that’s good enough.”

I suggest that Brokers and management executives begin to dialog with Realtors about what the Realtors who do not embrace the Internet see as the justification for maintaining the status quo. Don’t focus on overcoming their resistance. Instead, dwell on what those Realtors see as the advantages of remaining unchanged. Learn whether and to what extent there exists in your organization a Nash equilibrium and how widespread it is.

That knowledge will help you develop a better foundation for making widespread change effective, sustainable and profitable.

In our next posts, I will discuss other elements that influence resistance to change: consumer apathy and cognitive dissonance. And I will examine some approaches you can employ to strengthen your ability to lead and transform your culture.

From there we’ll move to an important reality of today’s market – the existence of two distinctly different consumer populations and how to effectively address them both.