HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management 2-Volume Collection

Harvard Business Review

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781647822002
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

If you read nothing else on change management, read these definitive articles from Harvard Business Review.

Most companies' change initiatives fail. Yours don't have to. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management 2-Volume Collection provides enduring ideas and practical advice to help you spearhead change in your organization. Bringing together HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management and HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management, Vol. 2, this collection includes twenty articles selected by HBR's editors and features the indispensable article "Leading Change" by John Kotter.

From timeless classics to the latest game-changing ideas from thought leaders W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, Tim Brown, Roger Martin, and more, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management 2-Volume Collection will inspire you to:

• Lead through the eight critical stages of change
• Establish a sense of urgency
• Overcome addiction to the status quo
• Transform your company's culture
• Minimize the pain of change
• Get reorgs right
• Reshape your organization for climate sustainability
• Scale agile practices throughout your company
• Lead change when business is good—but also when times are tough

HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever?changing business environment.

On
Change Management

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS

Boston, Massachusetts

Find more digital content or join the discussion on www.hbr.org.

The web addresses referenced and linked in this book were live and correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject to change.

Copyright 2011 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

HBR’s 10 must reads on change management.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4221-5800-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Organizational change

2. Leadership I. Harvard business review II. Title: HBR’s ten must reads on change managementI II. Title: Harvard business review’s 10 must reads on change management.

HD58.8.H394 2010

658.4'06—dc22

2010031616

eISBN: 9781422172063

Contents

Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail

John P. Kotter

Change Through Persuasion

David A. Garvin and Michael A. Roberto

Leading Change When Business Is Good: An Interview with Samuel J. Palmisano

Paul Hemp and Thomas A. Stewart

Radical Change, the Quiet Way

Debra E. Meyerson

Tipping Point Leadership

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

A Survival Guide for Leaders

Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky

The Real Reason People Won’t Change

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

Cracking the Code of Change

Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria

The Hard Side of Change Management

Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson

Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change

Michael Beer, Russell A. Eisenstat, and Bert Spector

About the Contributors

Index

Leading Change

Why Transformation Efforts Fail. by John P. Kotter

OVER THE PAST DECADE, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money (Bristol-Myers Squibb). These efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, rightsizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnaround. But, in almost every case, the basic goal has been the same: to make fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with a new, more challenging market environment.

A few of these corporate change efforts have been very successful. A few have been utter failures. Most fall somewhere in between, with a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale. The lessons that can be drawn are interesting and will probably be relevant to even more organizations in the increasingly competitive business environment of the coming decade.

The most general lesson to be learned from the more successful cases is that the change process goes through a series of phases that, in total, usually require a considerable length of time. Skipping steps creates only the illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result. A second very general lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating hard-won gains. Perhaps because we have relatively little experience in renewing organizations, even very capable people often make at least one big error.

Eight steps to transforming your organization

Idea in Brief

Most major change initiatives—whether intended to boost quality, improve culture, or reverse a corporate death spiral—generate only lukewarm results. Many fail miserably.

Why? Kotter maintains that too many managers don’t realize transformation is a process, not an event. It advances through stages that build on each other. And it takes years. Pressured to accelerate the process, managers skip stages. But shortcuts never work.

Equally troubling, even highly capable managers make critical mistakes—such as declaring victory too soon. Result? Loss of momentum, reversal of hard-won gains, and devastation of the entire transformation effort.

By understanding the stages of change—and the pitfalls unique to each stage—you boost your chances of a successful transformation. The payoff? Your organization flexes with tectonic shifts in competitors, markets, and technologies—leaving rivals far behind.

Error 1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency

Most successful change efforts begin when some individuals or some groups start to look hard at a company’s competitive situation, market position, technological trends, and financial performance. They focus on the potential revenue drop when an important patent expires, the five-year trend in declining margins in a core business, or an emerging market that everyone seems to be ignoring. They then find ways to communicate this information broadly and dramatically, especially with respect to crises, potential crises, or great opportunities that are very timely. This first step is essential because just getting a transformation program started requires the aggressive cooperation of many individuals. Without motivation, people won’t help, and the effort goes nowhere.

Compared with other steps in the change process, phase one can sound easy. It is not. Well over 50% of the companies I have watched fail in this first phase. What are the reasons for that failure? Sometimes executives underestimate how hard it can be to drive people out of their comfort zones. Sometimes they grossly overestimate how successful they have already been in increasing urgency. Sometimes they lack patience: “Enough with the preliminaries; let’s get on with it.” In many cases, executives become paralyzed by the downside possibilities. They worry that employees with seniority will become defensive, that morale will drop, that events will spin out of control, that short-term business results will be jeopardized, that the stock will sink, and that they will be blamed for creating a crisis.

Idea in Practice

To give your transformation effort the best chance of succeeding, take the right actions at each stage—and avoid common pitfalls

A paralyzed senior management often comes from having too many managers and not enough leaders. Management’s mandate is to minimize risk and to keep the current system operating. Change, by definition, requires creating a new system, which in turn always demands leadership. Phase one in a renewal process typically goes nowhere until enough real leaders are promoted or hired into senior-level jobs.

Transformations often begin, and begin well, when an organization has a new head who is a good leader and who sees the need for a major change. If the renewal target is the entire company, the CEO is key. If change is needed in a division, the division general manager is key. When these individuals are not new leaders, great leaders, or change champions, phase one can be a huge challenge.

Bad business results are both a blessing and a curse in the first phase. On the positive side, losing money does catch people’s attention. But it also gives less maneuvering room. With good business results, the opposite is true: Convincing people of the need for change is much harder, but you have more resources to help make changes.

But whether the starting point is good performance or bad, in the more successful cases I have witnessed, an individual or a group always facilitates a frank discussion of potentially unpleasant facts about new competition, shrinking margins, decreasing market share, flat earnings, a lack of revenue growth, or other relevant indices of a declining competitive position. Because there seems to be an almost universal human tendency to shoot the bearer of bad news, especially if the head of the organization is not a change champion, executives in these companies often rely on outsiders to bring unwanted information. Wall Street analysts, customers, and consultants can all be helpful in this regard. The purpose of all this activity, in the words of one former CEO of a large European company, is “to make the status quo seem more dangerous than launching into the unknown.”

In a few of the most successf...