Change

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”[1]

By nature, human beings shrink from change. Change seems to stir our insecurities as it forces us from the familiar into unsettling confrontation with the new. Wrongly, we equate change with loss. Psychologists say that because we subconsciously want to return to the stability and warmth of the womb, we gravitate to the comfortable and the routine. But life is change, and true success in any field is largely a matter of learning how to anticipate change, how to harness it, and how to ride its power into the future

When Winston Churchill was born on November 30th, 1874, electricity, radio, television and telephones were unknown. Benjamin Disraeli had just become Prime Minister of England and Queen Victoria still reigned, as she would for another twenty-seven years. There were men living who had fought Napoleon. In America, Ulysses S. Grant was in his second term as President. Karl Marx was in the British Library writing the Communist Manifesto and Mark Twain had not written most of the works for which he would become famous. Tennis was in its infancy and Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers Universities had met only the year before to draw up the first rules for a game called football.

When Churchill died ninety years later, on January 24, 1965, the world was quite a different place. That year, men orbited the earth, walked in space, and launched a space probe to the surface of Venus. Pictures from Mars were beamed 134 million miles back to earth by Mariner IV. An automobile was driven over 600 miles-per-hour, satellite links were in operation between the US and Europe, and sex-change operations were a reality. Nuclear power had come of age. The American President at the time was Lyndon Johnson, who, though considered an elderly man, was born when Churchill was already 34. Johnson was but one of the nineteen Presidents who served during Winston’s lifetime, a span which also included six British Monarchs and twenty-eight Prime Ministers. That same year, the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace to receive the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II. Churchill also received this honor, but for an entirely different contribution in an entirely different age.

Change was an ever-present challenge in Churchill’s life and it frequently filled his thoughts.

“I wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.”[2]

Had Churchill regarded all change with dread and foreboding, he might have passed his days in a nostalgic paralysis. For him, though, change was no enemy: it was opportunity—and he intended to seize it. He valued tradition and heritage as much as any man of his age, but he refused to be enticed into a wistful nostalgia. History was about progress and whatever the future held, it would be led by those who conquered their innate fear of the unknown and determined that for them change meant advance.

Nothing demonstrates Churchill’s ability to embrace “the new” more dramatically than his mastery of military technology. Churchill rode in Victorian-era calvary charges when the lance was weapon of choice. Yet, when he inherited an antiquated British Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty prior to World War I, he wasted no time in preparing for the future. He dismissed mossbacked admirals and replaced outdated ships. He ordered the Navy to switch its fuel from coal to oil, a critical decision which gave British ships the winning edge in speed and efficiency. He also introduced the fifteen-inch high-explosive gun without which the Navy would have been fatally out-gunned and out-maneuvered. True to form, when war broke out, he had already foreseen it and the fleet was long at sea by the time Churchill received official notice of hostilities.

Churchill not only used change: he created it. Prior to World War I, he instructed Naval engineers to explore the idea of an armored car designed to scale trenches. He thus became the father of the modern tank, or “Winston’s folly, ” as critics then called it. In 1912, moved by his belief that aviation was “most important,” he formed the Royal Naval Air Service, which later became the Royal Flying Corps and then the Royal Air Force. Britain became the first country to equip a plane with a machine gun or to launch an airborne torpedo because of his efforts. During World War II, Churchill first suggested the idea of the artificial harbors used at Normandy. He proposed that bombers drop strips of tinfoil to confuse enemy radar, pioneered the idea of building a pipeline under the ocean, and invented a device called a “Gee” for guiding pilots.

“The only way a man can remain consistent amid changing circumstance,” he wrote in the middle of his life, “is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.”[3] Change tactics and methods, he believed, but never principles. So, whether he was switching political parties or devising strategies to accommodate the shifting tides of war or harnessing the latest in technology, Churchill made change serve his vision. He learned to love it and to welcome the demands it made. This attitude distinguished him among men of his or any other generation, and it is part of the command of historical forces that so marked his leadership.

[1]Irrepressible Churchill, p. 100.

[2]My Early Life, 67.

[3]Thoughts and Adventures, p. 23.