I’ve had a few fellow bloggers suggest that I submit a post to the Carnival of the Capitalists to spread the Alchemy love. So with a free weekend I decided to nominate a post and see what happened. By the way, if you’re coming from CotC, this is the post that I actually submitted.
Boy, I picked a wild time to start getting involved with CotC. This week it’s being hosted by a fella named Russell Buckley at The Mobile Technology Weblog and he’s getting acquainted with a bit of  controversy.

Here’s the TWO posts (normally, just one post – hence, the reason for all the hullabaloo) for this week’s collection:
Carnival of the Capitalists – Part One (Monday)
Carnival of the Capitalists – Part Two (Wednesday)
PS. You’ll find me halfway down the page in Part Two.

I must admit that I’m a little green to the whole Carnival scene and it’s been interesting to be involved in the process. This whole episode also has been an intriguing example of change: how it is implemented and how it is accepted. Tell me if this little case study doesn’t resemble how change is sometimes created in organizations.

The decision to implement Change usually comes from good intentions. Good intentions don’t always make it the right decision, though. For Russell, his intention was to alleviate reader fatigue created by having to wade through numerous entries (this week had 50 posts). It was also done with the blogger in mind since he believes that a post listed in the first 10 or so entries attracts many more readers than a subsequent one. There are a couple of other more cynical rationalizations for the decision, but I choose to believe that Russell did have good intentions.

Communicating how Change will occur is vital. Who likes to wake up in the morning to find that ESPN SportsCenter has suddenly altered its format or discover that a favorite alternative rock station has mysteriously switched to a Spanish-language pop station? Nobody really likes to be caught by surprise and so it was probably a little shocking to find that CotC was going to deviate from its normal method of delivering its weekly roundup. It also didn’t help that the change was made "unilaterally" and without prior input from those invested in the process. Russell could probably have saved himself from some of the vitriolic responses had he noted his intentions up-front and made his case.

Change must be guided not commanded*. I’m putting an asterisk on this one because there comes a time when everyone has to be on-board with the change process. Yet, by the time the commanding part comes, it should be toward the end of the change curve.

Okay, I’ve lost my momentum. Check out the two CotC posts (particularly the first one for many of the comments). While I don’t agree with Russell on a number of points (particularly his belief that the contributors are a secondary concern to the readers – without the contributors, there is no CotC in the first place) and in his decision-making process, I have to hand it to him for being gutsy enough to spark the passionate response. I’m eagerly awaiting how the folks over at Law & Entrepreneurship News, who are next up in the CotC hosting queue, handle next week’s roundup.