HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management

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.

Classic ideas, enduring advice, the best thinkers: HBR's 10 Must Reads.

 

 

There are certain things most CEOs will agree on - the speed of change in the world continues to increase therefore increasing the need for internal changes just to stay competitive. Change is damn difficult. You have no choice. Conditions are constantly changing, you must adapt to change. The successful companies - the ones that will survive and thrive will be the ones who can quickly and efficiently adapt to changing conditions. If you want to be successful, learn to manage change.

Unfortunately most change initiatives achieve mediocre results. If you want to improve the odds, this is a good place to start. On Change will help you understand why so many change initiatives are less successful than hoped for.

On Change is one of the HBR'S 10 Must Read Series. It is a collection of 10 articles dealing with change. In each article there is a sidebar "Idea in Brief" which gives a thumbnail sketch of the article and a sidebar "Idea in Practice" which recaps how to implement the idea contained in that article. While these are excellent reference material, they should not be used in lieu of reading the entire articles.

To be honest, some articles are better than others - at least some resonated with me more than others. But they all contain excellent insights on what makes for successful change efforts and what can derail your change efforts.

There were three articles that stood out the most. "Leading Change" by John Kotter was the first. Here he points out the major errors which leaders make when instituting change efforts. There were a couple of points which really were worth noting: "There seems to an almost universal tendency to shoot the bearer of bad news ...Read more ›

This volume is one of several in a new series of anthologies of articles that initially appeared in the Harvard Business Review, in this instance from 1960 until 2006. Remarkably, none seems dated; on the contrary, if anything, all seem more relevant now than ever before as their authors discuss what are (literally) essential dimensions of organizational and/or individual change.

More specifically, why transformation efforts fail (John P. Kotter), how to achieve change through persuasion (David A. Garvin and Michael A. Roberto), what can be learned from an interview of Samuel J. Palmisano about leading change when business is good, why radical change can be "the quiet way" (Barbara E. Meyerson), what "tipping point leadership is and does" (W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne), what a survival guide for leaders should provide (Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky), the real reason people won't change (Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey), how to crack "the code of change" (Michael Berr and Nitin Nohria), the hard side of change management (Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson), and why change programs don't produce change (Michael Beer, Russell A. Eisenstat, and Bert Spector).

Each article includes two invaluable reader-friendly devices, "Idea in Brief" and "Idea in Practice" sections, that facilitate, indeed expedite review of key points. Some articles also include brief commentaries on even more specific subjects such as "Dysfunctional Routines" (Pages 238-29), "Tempered Radicals as Everyday Leaders" (Page 64), "Adaptive Versus Technical Change: Whose Problem Is It?Read more ›

This book was recommended to me by a friend who has had a successful career as a change management consultant, after working for IBM for years. There is an almost identical book which has a Chinese painting on the cover and contains 8 of the 10 articles in this book. Make sure you don't order both! This is a great read for anybody interested in formulating a structured approach to implementing change.