"Change is good." That's what the head of an acquiring company once told me and other employees of a business he was taking over. For all the spin about mergers and acquisitions being good for companies--the majority do not pan out except for the bankers who engineer the deals and then later often come in to disassemble the conglomerations. In the case of my company, change didn't feel good and turned out to be bad. Indeed the business failed and had to be sold off in parts with many people losing jobs along the way.

But whether change is good or not, isn't so much the issue. Change is inevitable and often how well people and businesses cope with change determines how successful they can be.The need for change typically signals that our systems, businesses, and lifestyles need modification. The way we have been doing things can't be sustained without re-adapting. That's what's happening now in the U.S. and it's a struggle for all of us, especially when we have thought of ourselves as number one, impervious, the beacon of the world, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.

The U.S. economy and real estate businesses are dealing with a wellspring of change right now. Our high wage scale businesses are under relentless pressures from lower cost competitors overseas. The government and many consumers are overleveraged, and we must pay down our debt and spend less. The transaction-based economy of the past several decades has hit the wall without easy credit and all the middlemen, including brokers and lawyers, who made hefty incomes off lots of deals are on their backsides. We need to re-regulate the transaction markets to tamp down bad behaviors, which will limit future transaction volumes and broker/banker profitability. The investment industry will fight that change. Then there's healthcare and all the concern about transforming a system that everybody agrees doesn't work that well and is certainly economically unsustainable. But many people and businesses fear that any change could disadvantage them and oppose reforms. At the fringe, some folks worry about government takeover.