Blunder: a spectacular change failure A book I have just finished reading contains some excellent ideas for avoiding a complete failure in a change. The book, The Blunders of our Governments by Prof. Anthony King and Sir Ivor Crewe describes a series of major blunders by our governments. In each case a government minister set …
Category archives: Leadership
New Year, New Behaviour
New ways of thinking The new year party is over and everyone turns to wonder what the new year will be like. And then you start to think about what are you going to do to make it better and different. Of course there are plenty of articles and blogs to suggest some ideas — …
Three supports to successful change
Is Managing Change the same as Project Management? A recent tutorial from Prosci identifies three critical areas of activity needed for change success. The model is both simple and elegant. However, it opens the question about where should change management professionals go for their support. The three areas are: project management; sponsorship; and change management. …
How to persuade people to change
Persuasion skills for a Change Manager There are two basic ways to get people to do what you want: tell them and ask them. Actually, telling people is incredibly effective and works more often that you might expect. Tell is really the tool of the manager. I remember when I first became a manager (actually …
Strategic change journey
Internal strategic change for fast growth I have written in the past about the need for change in an organisation being driven by strategic change outside. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review on Transient Advantage by Rita Gunther McGrath (one of my favourite management authors) shows that there are internal drivers for change …
Lessons from Big Science
A comment piece in a recent edition of the economist looked at lessons that the rest of the world can take from the collaborative projects in Big Science. Big Science is things like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN at which the existence of the famous Higgs Particle was demonstrated to world wide interest. The …
Rate of Change and Change Saturation increase
Depressing News: change saturation increases Recent data reported by Prosci show that both the amount of change expected by organisations and the number of organisations saturated by change have increased. This is a gloomy outlook given the problems most organisations have in doing change. Lets put these three ideas together and see what can be …
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Mid-Level Managers: the new superhero
Mid Level Managers as Superhero In a recent blog post on the Harvard Business Review web site Behnam Tabrizi reported on some research he had undertaken on why change and innovation (a pre-curser to change) didn’t work. The article is focused on Leadership but I found some powerful snippets about doing change.
Using a capability model for organisation change
Change Capability Model We have developed a simple capability model for organisation change. The purpose is to better understand the nature of organisation change and how people go about it. The model allows us to explain what sort of training is useful given the organisation’s capability maturity (i.e. the level they are at). It also …
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Its the activities that count
Strategic Change The key to a successful strategic change is to change the things that matter to an organisation’s survival; and leave the things that don’t matter to operations. In his seminal paper ‘What is strategy?‘ Michael Porter argues that effective operations is necessary for survival, but not sufficient. Strategy is always needed. So I …