It is perhaps all too easy to observe that change has become a norm to the point where it is the rule rather than the exception. But this really is the case in the demanding circumstances of the early twenty-first century. So the fact of change surely now barely merits attention: it underpins how organisations run and plan themselves. What is perhaps new is the rate of change. Take one statistic: that, even in 2013, 20 per cent of all Google daily searches are new.

So the challenge for you as a leader is to manage the rate of change, and specifically a rate of change which is accelerating, and to implement today’s set of changes while planning for tomorrow’s. To face this escalation of the pace of change, you need to confront four key issues:

• You must understand how to work with change and not against it – what I call the ‘imperative’ of change.
• You need to articulate with increasing frequency the need for change, without pushing change for change’s sake.
• You will face resistance – from people and from institutions – and must face this down with a determination of the same relentlessness as its advocacy.
• You have no choice but to accept that the ever faster rate of change is creating an unmatched level of complexity which requires an increasingly flexible and sophisticated response.

This is really hard, and many businesses and leaders now confront a pace of change which seems overwhelming – just look at the once unthinkable reversal of fortunes of Nokia or Blackberry, or the very rapid decline in share value of Groupon. The only way to meet the hard-ness of this is to be bold – this really is a time when decisions made fast may likely be better than no decisions at all. And it is a time to confront any and all received wisdom: just look how MOOCs are challenging the world of higher education; and reflect on how Microsoft, after totally recreating an operating system in Windows 8 because the time it would take to refresh its predecessor had become three years, is now facing amending it again!

So leading change is about calculated risk-taking: the real stuff of leadership!