Managing Business Change For Dummies

Managing Business Change For Dummies gives you practical step-by-step advice for evaluating your organization's change effort from start to finish. This friendly guide brings you specific techniques and tools for each step of the change process -- from how to pinpoint potential problems and resolve them quickly, to how to help employees respond to change with more flexible and positive attitudes.

Direct change expertly and lead your business to success Change is natural and good, but it can incite fear if not managed properly. Leading Business Change For Dummies arms mid- to senior-level managers with trusted guidance on leading, managing, responding to, and implementing change in the workplace. Packed with helpful advice and straightforward information, it gives you the skills needed to recognize the need for organizational change, deal with unexpected change, properly communicate a vision, prepare for structural change such as Mergers & Acquisitions, and address emotional responses to downsizing. Leading Business Change For Dummies serves as the ultimate roadmap for integrating and consolidating a multitude of personnel and organizational change initiatives. With tools for managing stress levels and advice on gathering and sharing information during times of transition, Leading Business Change For Dummies covers everything you need to know to achieve successful leadership in a challenging work environment. Sound, practical guidance on how to understand, lead, and manage change in the workplace Covers operational and cultural elements that can ultimately affect the success of a transaction over time Information and tips for implementing change in the workplace If you're one of the thousands of managers who face change every day, Leading Business Change For Dummies has you covered.

Explains the global changes confronting business leaders. This book includes strategies for managing major change, creating an organizational culture conducive to change, and leading change effectively. It contains tools that managers need to get a handle on the change management strategies and ensure the success of their business improvement.

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.

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This classic, newly updated, is an indispensable source for anyone–from mid-level managers to CEOs–who must execute key business initiatives quickly and effectively. Once groundbreaking and now time-honored, Managing at the Speed of Change has helped countless business leaders learn how to orchestrate transitions vital to their organizations’ success. Rather than focusing on what to change, this book’s aim is far more valuable: It shows readers how to change. Daryl R. Conner, founder and chairman of the consulting firm Conner Partners, is a leading expert on change management. He has served as “change doctor” for clients that include non-profit enterprises, government agencies and administrations, and Fortune 500 companies in an array of industries such as Abbott Laboratories, PepsiCo, American Express, Catholic Healthcare West, JPMorgan Chase, and the U.S. Navy. Based on Conner’s long-term research and his decades of consulting experience, Managing at the Speed of Change uses simple, easy-to-understand language and elegant visuals to explore the dynamics of change, and in doing so, teaches readers • why major change is difficult to assimilate • what distinguishes resilient individuals from those who suffer future shock • how and why resistance forms • how people become committed to change • why organizational culture is so important to the success of change • the roles most central to change in organizational settings • why powerful teamwork is at the heart of achieving change objectives, and how to foster it In this pioneering book, updated for the twenty-first century, Conner demonstrates how both individuals and organizations can develop the capacity not only to endure change but to thrive on it.

Being change capable is the "new normal" for today’s growth-minded organizations. The "do more with less" strategies of the past are no longer effective in preparing organizations to meet the increasing challenges for growth, competitiveness and innovation required of them in this new era. Business change challenges including customer and market shifts, legal and regulatory requirements, strategic redirection, acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and cultural transformation are demanding that organizations effectively and efficiently manage change across multiple dimensions. To reach this level of change capability, organizations must adopt an integrated, balanced and customized approach to change management. Change management is addressed from the unique perspective of both its foundational concepts as well as practical application. Using an integrated, scalable and flexible framework, this book provides tools which can be readily customized and applied to initiatives across or within stages of the business change management lifecycle, from assessing the need for change, through planning the change initiative, designing a balanced change solution which integrates the people, process, and project management elements, through deploying and institutionalizing the change. Common risks associated with failed or stalled change initiatives are presented with best practices and key topics associated with change management are explored and illustrated through real-life case studies. Aimed at both the professionals within organizations and post graduate students and researchers within business strategy, organizational behaviour and change management disciplines, this book will provide a conceptual understanding of change management and a roadmap with a supporting toolbox for leading and implementing change that sticks.

Change isn’t going anywhere. Learn how to manage it. We live in a wild world of volatility, unpredictability, chaos, and ambiguity, with change seemingly as the only constant. Change can be difficult. It often induces resistance, panic, and fatigue. And, as you may expect or have experienced first-hand, many organizations aren’t handling change all that well, with many efforts resulting in failure. What you may not realize, however, is that some workplace change initiatives are stunning successes, rolling out smoothly and more easily embraced. Why do some change initiatives fail while others succeed? How can organizations and employees handle change better? In The Hard and Soft Sides of Change Management, Kathryn Zukof offers practices and approaches to help you and your organization roll out, receive, and manage change effectively. Namely, Zukoff shows that you need to manage the process (or the “hard”) side and the people (or the “soft”) side of change and find the sweet spot between the two. She demonstrates that when you integrate both sides, you and your organization can make change less of a hit-or-miss affair. Successful change management means deploying sound project management techniques that increase the odds of achieving the outcomes of your change initiative. It also means helping employees understand the need and vision for change, so they feel less threatened by it and become excited and energized by what’s ahead. To deliver best results, you need to: Define the change and how to get there—with project charters and plans. Involve the right people in the right ways—from dedicated change teams to affected stakeholders. Build support, understanding, and awareness—with communication, training, and resistance management plans. Assess progress and adjust along the way—through action reviews and steps to tackle thorny issues. Capturing the inherently messy nature of workplace change—from technology implementations, mergers and acquisitions, and business transformations to office relocations and more—this book offers tangible insights to help you and your organization tackle change challenges. Follow the book’s tools and practices to lessen the messy and objectionable parts of change and actively give your change initiatives the best chance for positive outcomes.