Real Change
  Real change leaders (RCLs) who affect how the majority of people perform come from the ranks of middle and frontline managers. A recent study of nearly 150 mid-level change leaders in 29 different change efforts explored what makes RCLs stand out from traditional middle managers, and what top management can do to ensure a critical mass of this emerging new leadership capacity. :Jon Katzenbach :McKinsey Quarterly :6/1/1996 :Article
The Change Management Learning Center (Prosci)
  After six years of research with over 1000 organizations, Prosci has released its new Change Management Process. One of the most comprehensive resources on the web for change management teams.  Provides practical books, articles, tutorials, benchmarking reports, change management toolkit, guidelines, templates, checklists for change management teams and consultants. :Archive
The Real Reason People Won't Change
  Resistance to change does not necessarily reflect opposition nor is it merely a result of inertia. Instead, even as they hold a sincere commitment to change, many people unwittingly apply productive energy toward a hidden competing commitment. The resulting internal conflict stalls the effort in what looks like resistance but is in fact a kind of personal immunity to change. An employee may have an unrecognized competing commitment to avoid the even tougher assignment that might follow if delivers too successfully on the task at hand. Without an understanding of competing commitments, attempts to change employee behavior are virtually futile. :Robert Kegan ; Lisa Laskow Lahey :Harvard Business Review :Article
Waking Up IBM: How a Gang of Unlikely Rebels Transformed Big Blue.
Much of the credit for the IBM turnaround goes to a small band of activists who built a bonfire under IBM's rather broad behind. Together, building simultaneously from the top and the bottom of the organization through an ever-widening grassroots coalition of technicians and executives, they put IBM on the Web and morphed it into an e-business powerhouse. :Gary Hamel :Harvard Business School Publishing. :8/1/2000 :Article
Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail
  The change lessons that can be learned will be relevant to more and more organizations as the business environment becomes increasingly competitive in the coming decade. One lesson is that change involves numerous phases that, together, usually take a long time. Skipping steps creates only an illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result. A second lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating previous gains. :John P. Kotter :Harvard Business Review :2/1/2000 :Article
Managing for Value: It's Not Just About the Numbers
  In theory, value-based management programs sound seductively simple. Putting VBM into practice requires a great deal of patience, effort, and money. According to the authors' study, companies that successfully use VBM programs share five main characteristics. Properly applied, a VBM program will put your company's profitability firmly on track. That's because, the authors contend, the successful VBM program is really about introducing fundamental changes to a big company's culture. :Philippe C. Haspeslagh ; Tsutomu Noda ; Fares Boulos :Harvard Business Review :7/1/2001 :Article
Integration Managers: Special Leaders for Special Times
  Although the integration of an acquired company with the parent organization is a delicate and complicated process, traditionally no one has ever been responsible for that process--for charting how the two companies will combine their operations, for seeing to it that the integration project meets its deadlines and performance targets, and for educating the new people about the parent company and vice versa. The authors determined that integration managers help the merger process in four principal ways: they speed it up, create a structure for it, forge social connections between the two organizations, and help engineer short-term successes. :Ronald N. Ashkenas ; Suzanne C. Francis :Harvard Business School Publishing :12/1/2000 :Article
Analysing and Realigning Organizational Culture.
  Presents a process developed by the authors that can be used to help organizational leaders and change agents make alignments between their 'espoused' and 'existing' organizational cultures. The immediacy of the changes produced by 'tune-ups' can build trust and commitment to the change process. The process can also initiate deeper change in the form of rebuilds and replacements. Finally, the process provides organizational leaders and members with a working mental model of culture and its powerful effects on behaviour. :Kimberly Buch & David Wetzel :Leadership & Organizational Development Journal 22/1 2001 MCB University Press. :6/1/2001 :Article
Harley's Leadership U-Turn
  Rich Teerlink (CEO) saw the need for a new kind of leadership--one far removed from the command-and-control model that had carried it through its turnaround. In this First Person account, Teerlink tells the story of how difficult it was to make that shift. In a plan to improve operations, he came up with an idea for a program he hoped would motivate every employee, customer, and stakeholder. The program, called gain sharing, would allow every employee to share in the company's financial success. These initiatives--as well as other efforts toward inclusiveness--have helped transform Harley's culture and made it the success story it is today. :Rich Teerlink :Harvard Business Review :7/1/2000 :Article
Transition Leadership: A Guide to Leading Change Initiatives
  This Insight provides an overview of critical change issues. It addresses issues of power, anxiety, and control, as well as the establishment of a transition structure, manager, and plan. It examines building and using an integrated change agenda, and explores issues around communicating change, and managing and monitoring healthy attrition. :Mercer Delta Consulting LLC. :Mercer Delta Consulting LLC. :6/1/2000 :Article
Reshaping the Enterprise: Understanding the Dimensions of Organizational Change
  This Insight provides a broad overview of various dimensions of organizational change and the widely differing challenges they present to leaders. It provides some general perspectives on how organizations work and how dynamics are influenced by external forces and industry-wide patterns of change. It also describes various categories of change that organizations confront and delves deeply into the special challenges of radical, or discontinuous, change. It concludes by presenting a model for understanding and leading each phase of the change cycle. :Mercer Delta Consulting LLC. :Mercer Delta Consulting LLC. :6/1/1998 :Article
Managing the Dynamics of Change: The Keys to Leading a Successful Transition
  This Mercer Delta Insight presents tactical approaches to meeting the challenge of large scale change including complex social dynamics. It reviews the concepts of current, transition, and future states, and addresses issues of power, anxiety, and control. The Insight concludes with twelve action steps for managing the transition. :Mercer Delta Consulting LLC. :Mercer Delta Consulting LLC. :6/1/1998 :Article
The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations.
  Grounded in extensive research, The Leadership Challenge captures the continuing interest in leadership as a critical aspect of human organizations. Demonstrates how visionary leaders keep accomplishing extraordinary things. Addresses current challenges such as the new cynicism, the electronic global village, and the shift to team-oriented work relationships. :James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner :Jossey-Bass Publishers :6/1/1996 :Book
Time, temporal capability and planned change.
  Four ideal types of planned change processes are proposed, each with distinct temporal and nontemporal assumptions, and each associated with altering a distinct organizational element. These types are commanding, engineering, teaching, and socializing. I then argue that large-scale change involves an alteration of multiple organizational elements, thus requiring enactment of multiple intervention ideal types. This requires change agents to display temporal capability skills to effectively sequence, time, pace, and combine various interventions. :Quy Nguyen Huy :Academy of Management Review :10/1/2001 :Article
Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management
  Mission is to stimulate basic research and practical application in the area of strategic leadership and change management. Provides support for individual and cross-disciplinary team-based research projects on organizational leadership, strategy, and change; Sponsorship of periodic conferences on leadership and change management for both university scholars and company managers; Dissemination of practical summaries of current research on leadership and change to the academic and management communities through the monthly electronic Wharton Leadership Digest and other avenues. :Centre
Business Transformation Outsourcing: Partnering for Radical Change
  Business transformation outsourcing is collaborative, risk- and gain-sharing relationships with outsource business partners to drive enterprise transformation and achieve significant performance improvements at speed. It is not about cutting costs per se, or offloading non-core functions, but about taking on the outsourcer as a business partner - sharing both risks and rewards - to transform the critical processes that can most radically change a company's way of doing business at the enterprise level. :Jane C. Linder, Al Jacobson, Matthew D. Breitfelder, Mark Arnold :Accenture :6/1/2001 :Article
Merger & Acquisition Integration: A business guide.
  Most organisations approach business change with a heavy emphasis on the rational aspects - the business case, plans, resources, financial measures, and the processes and systems that need adjustment. However, the internal political and emotional aspects are magnified due to the high levels of uncertainty and fluctuation associated with a transaction which complicates the need to address differences in corporate cultures, whether they be geographic, corporate or functional in nature. The integration programme must be designed to tackle these softer issues overtly and be an integral part of the programme design and implementation. :KPMG Consulting :KPMG Consulting :1/1/2002 :Article
Managing the Human Aspects of IT Initiatives: Installation vs Realization.
  Most organizations do a relatively good job of figuring our what must be done to solve their problems or exploit their opportunities. The problem is that the vast majority just don't implement their solutions very well. The problem is that they spend their resources on installation rather than on realizing the intended benefits. Only those organizations that can cross the realization threshold will secure sustainable competitive advantage from their IT investments. :Organizational Development Resources :6/1/2001 :Article
Prosci Employee's Survival Guide to Change (ADKAR model)
  This diagnostic tool helps employees understand where they are in the change process. As a manager, you can use this tool to identify gaps in your change management process and to provide effective coaching for your employees. The ADKAR model can be used to: diagnose employee resistance, help employees transition through the change process, create a successful action plan for personal and professional advancement during change & develop a change management plan for your employees. :Prosci :Portal
Commitment to Organizational Change: Extension of a Three-Component Model
  Three studies were conducted to test the application of a three-component model of workplace commitment in the context of employee commitment to organizational change. Study 1, provided preliminary evidence for the validity of newly developed Affective, Continuance, and Normative Commitment to Change Scales. Studies 2 and 3, provided further support for the validity of the three Commitment to Change Scales, and demonstrated that (a) commitment to a change is a better predictor of behavioral support for a change than is organizational commitment, (b) affective and normative commitment to a change are associated with higher levels of support than is continuance commitment, and (c) the components of commitment combine to predict behavior. :Lynne Herscovitch, John P. Meyer :Journal of Applied Psychology :6/1/2002 :Article
Leading at the Edge of Chaos: How to Create the Nimble Organization
  Conner delivers action steps for instilling companies with the nimbleness and resilience needed to survive and thrive in today's supervolatile markets. He also introduces the revolutionary concept of human due diligence - the human equivalent of financial due diligence - as an indispensable tool for orchestrating major enterprisewide transitions using a culture of change. :Daryl R. Connor :John Wiley & Sons :1/1/1998 :Book
Organizational Development Resources, ODR
  Organizations must respond to a growing number of changes in how they conduct business, use technology, treat employees, deal with customers, and more. Poor execution of these changes can produce costly implications for both the organization and the managers responsible for the implementation. Failed initiatives can cost millions in wasted human and fiscal resources and far more in lost opportunity. For over two and a half decades, ODR has helped hundreds of organizations effectively implement their change initiatives. :Consulting
Corporate transformation without a crisis
  The authors suggest four conditions that must be met if companies are to transform themselves in the absence of a crisis, as well as techniques they can use to create these conditions. Among the most powerful is the "transformation story": a more practical, personal, and lasting way to build commitment for change than the common "cascade" process. An unsuccessful change effort can leave an organization less capable than it was before and unlikely to attempt change again. Without a crisis, prescriptive, top-down changes rarely work; instead, executives must build the shared commitment that makes it possible for an organization to endure setbacks. :Jonathan D. Day and Michael Jung :McKinsey Quarterly :6/1/2000 :Article
The Change Management Resource Library
  Complete bookstore for all published books on managing change. Fully-indexed article library of online material - right at your finger tips. Links to the best sites for change management material and training :Archive
The Business Process Management Group
  Founded in 1992, a global business club exchanging ideas and best practice in change management. Over 3000 members across all business sectors. Through case studies, seminars and research, supports members in improving their organisations work across business processes, information technology and people. At the leading edge of thinking, this community of users has developed a range of best practices, models and methodologies to help you successfully implement Business Process Management. :Association
The Corporate Culture Survival Guide: Sense and Nonsense About Culture Change
  Examines corporate culture on three levels -- behaviors, values, and shared assumptions -- and shows how each factors into change initiatives. Framed around the questions managers ask most often, the book uses case studies to show what successful change looks like and to demonstrate how you can dismantle a dysfunctional culture. :Edgar H. Schein :Warren Bennis Books/JosseyBass :9/1/1999 :Book
BizPlanIt
  Business plan consulting firm committed to providing high-quality free business plan resources for the do-it-yourself business plan writer or project planner. Business Plan Review provides insightful, candid and customized suggestions you need to instantly improve your existing business plan, and improve your chances of impressing those in the investor community. Business planning tips, tools and advice from experts who have prepared hundreds of business plans - you've come to the right place. :Consulting
The Dynamics of Taking Charge
  Through studies of actual cases of manager succession, Gabarro isolates those factors that cause managers to succeed or fail in new positions, including prior experiences and support from superiors, and the steps involved in mastering the situation. :John J. Gabarro :Harvard Business School Publishing :3/1/2087 :Book
Organization Development and Change (AoM)
  Theory and innovative practice relevant to organization change.  Features newsletters, classic articles, best papers, references, links, academic programs, and teaching materials. Major topics include: change processes within organizations, active intervention to improve their effectiveness, scholarly studies of interventions; roles of change agents; problems of self-awareness, responsibility and the political consequences of OD theory and practice. :Centre
Helping employees embrace change
  Managing change is the responsibility of everyone in the corporation-from senior managers on down. While a commitment to change on all levels of a company would be ideal, an initiative can still get fairly good results if employees on even one level act effectively to promote it. Research on 40 large change initiatives suggests that finger-pointing is beside the point, for employees on all levels of an organization are important to the success of any change initiative, and making employees on any level more accepting of change will help to advance the cause. :Jeniffer LaClair and Ravi Rao :McKinsey Quarterly :9/1/2002 :Article