Changing Organizations

Every leader understands the burning need for change–and every leader knows how risky it is, and how often it fails. To make organizational change work, you need to base it on science, not intuition. Despite hundreds of books on change, failure rates remain sky high. Are there deep flaws in the guidance change leaders are given? While eschewing the pat answers, linear models, and change recipes offered elsewhere, Paul Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change that fully reflects the newest advances in mindfulness, behavioral economics, the psychology of risk-taking, neuroscience, mindfulness, and complexity theory. Change management, ostensibly the craft of making change happen, is rife with myth, pseudoscience, and flawed ideas from pop psychology. In Gibbons’ view, change management should be “euthanized” and replaced with change agile businesses, with change leaders at every level. To achieve that, business education and leadership training in organizations needs to become more accountable for real results, not just participant satisfaction (the “edutainment” culture). Twenty-first century change leaders need to focus less on project results, more on creating agile cultures and businesses full of staff who have “get to” rather than “have to” attitudes. To do that, change leaders will have to leave behind the old paradigm of “carrots and sticks,” both of which destroy engagement. “New analytics” offer more data-driven approaches to decision making, but present a host of people challenges—where petabyte information flows meet traditional decision-making structures. These approaches will have to be complemented with “leading with science”—that is, using evidence-based management to inform strategy and policy decisions. In The Science of Successful Organizational Change , you'll learn: How the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world affects the scale and pace of change in today’s businesses How understanding of flaws in human decision-making can help leaders guide their teams toward wiser strategic decisions when the stakes are largest—including “when to trust your guy and when to trust a model” and “when all of us are smarter than one of us” How new advances in neuroscience have altered best practices in influencing colleagues; negotiating with partners; engaging followers' hearts, minds, and behaviors; and managing resistance How leading organizations are making use of the science of mindfulness to create agile learners and agile cultures How new ideas from analytics, forecasting, and risk are humbling those who thought they knew the future–and how the human side of analytics and the psychology of risk are paradoxically more important in this technologically enabled world What complexity theory means for decision-making in the context of your own business How to create resilient and agile business cultures and anti-fragile, dynamic business structures To link science with your "on-the-ground" reality, Gibbons tells “warts and all” stories from his twenty-plus years consulting to top teams and at the largest businesses in the world. You'll find case studies from well-known companies like IBM and Shell and CEO interviews from Nokia and Barclays Bank.

In Managing Change in Organizations, Stefan Sveningsson and Nadja Sörgärde explore a broad range of perspectives on change management, encouraging critical reflection and making sense of a complex field of theories. Their unique approach based around three key perspectives of change will help students understand: How change is accomplished – the tool perspective What change means for those involved – the process perspective And Why is change initiated (and is it necessary) – the critical perspective This focus on the common how, what and why questions offers students the chance to learn pragmatic tools for managing change, as well as gain an in-depth understanding of different theories and their value. The book is complemented by a range of online resources including PowerPoint Slides, Multiple Choice Questions, and a selection of SAGE Business Cases and journal articles. Stefan Sveningsson is Professor of Business Administration at the School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden. Nadja Sörgärde is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden.

Focusing on the essential uncertainty of participating in evolving events as they happen, this book considers the creative possibilities of such participation from a complexity perspective.

Transform your organization with speed and efficiency using this insightful new resource Incremental improvement is no longer sufficient in helping organizations navigate the complexity, uncertainty and volatility of today's world. In Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times, authors John P. Kotter, Vanessa Akhtar, and Gaurav Gupta explore how to create non-linear, dramatic change in your organization. You'll discover the emerging science of change that teaches us about how to build organizations – from businesses to governments – that change and adapt rapidly. In Change you'll discover: Why the ability of organizations to deal with threats and take advantage of opportunities in the face of ever greater complexity and uncertainty is being severely challenged In-depth, evidence-based, actionable solutions for dealing with institutional resistance to change Case studies and success stories that describe organizations who have successfully built the ability to change quickly into their DNA A universal approach for how to dramatically improve outcomes from various change efforts, including: strategy execution, digital transformation, restructuring, and more Perfect for managers, executives, and leaders at companies of all types and sizes, Change will also prove to be a valuable asset to other professionals who serve these organizations. This book is for anyone seeking a proven approach for delivering fast, sustainable and comprehensive results.

“Change (Transformation) in Government Organizations” discusses recent efforts to bring about change in government organizations. The book brings together contributions by a number of managers, practitioners, academics and consultants in the study of international, federal, state, and local government efforts to respond to increased calls for change (transformation) in public sector organizations. Each contributor describes their work in this area using as a backdrop the fact that public sector organizations continue to be under new and substantial pressures to change and transform themselves. Hence a collection of current contributions such as those in this book are intended to add to the ongoing debates and rewriting of the success and failures of change in public sector organizations. The ultimate purpose of this book is to further our knowledge about the related issues and current efforts to bring about change or transformation in public sector organizations. The contributors, all experts with extensive experience as change agents in both public and private sector organizations not only support their analyses and discussions of specific cases and change (transformation) management issues but also provide practical tools, ideas and lessons learned, intended to be generalizable to other public sector agencies and helpful to those responsible for developing, implementing and evaluating similar efforts in the years to come. The audience for the book will be government managers, scholars and others interested in undertaking or learning about such efforts.

Organizational Change integrates major empirical, theoretical and conceptual approaches to implementing communication in organizational settings. Laurie Lewis ties together the disparate literatures in management, education, organizational sociology, and communication to explore how the practices and processes of communication work in real-world cases of change implementation. Gives a bold and comprehensive overview of communication research and ideas on change and those who bring it about Fills in an important piece of the applied communication puzzle as it relates to organizations Illustrated with student friendly, real life case studies from organizations, including organizational mergers, governmental or nonprofit policy or procedural implementation, or technological innovation Winner of the 2011 Organizational Communication NCA Division Book of the Year

Available in paperback for the first time, this book describes and considers ideas and insights from complexity science, and examines their use in organizations, especially in bringing about major organizational change.

In Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, the celebrated innovation and design firm, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.