Navigating Change - A Book Review

-- a university of arizona course on methods and approaches for studying the future

The subtitle to the book is "How CEOs, Top Teams, and Boards Steer Transformation", edited by Donald C. Hambrick, David A. Nadler, and Michael Tushman. It is from Harvard Business School Press, 1998, 414 pages. This is part of a series of books on The Management of Innovation and Change. This is a book about organizational transformation.

They set the state of change by saying there are three important forces: 1) emergence of global competition, 2) new technology, and 3) public policy. They add that these and other forces are redefining markets, trade relationships and the basis of competition. They note the roles of CEO's fall into three broad categories: 1) envisioning, 2) energizing, and 3) enabling. They call attention to the omission of "charisma", noting it has little to do with long term success in complex organizational change. The authors paraphrase and amplify on a Peter Drucker statement "the first job of leaders it to define reality and the last it to say thank you", to define 7 steps.

Druker's Comments Paraphrased Define Reality

1. Enshrine the institutional values

2. Articulate a vision

3. Set the strategic path to that vision

4. Demand performance

5. Empower the people (and get out of their way)

6. Say thank you.

 

The authors define lessons of transformational leadership:

1. Self managed senior teams don't work

2. Remotely located teams work less well than teams in physical proximity

3. Laissez-faire or consensus leadership doesn't work

4. Ill-defined team objectives, processes, and rewards hamper performance

 

How Boards of Directors could monitor change (and performance):

1. Agree with management on a strategic plan for one year and for longer (e.g., 3-5 years).

2. Review the annual plan relative to execution and results at each board meeting

3. Annually review the annual and longer term plans to see if actual strategy is consistent with the plans

4. Part of the CEO's annual performance evaluation relates to the strategic planning evaluations

5. Based on all of these periodic assessments, revise the plan if appropriate

 

Ten Lessons learned for making "discontinuous change"

1. Do not expect people to embrace easily the need for change

2. Sometimes it is better to experiment than to plan

3. Pay close attention to the timing of change

4. When the need to remove people becomes clear, do not put off the inevitable

5. You cannot succeed without a senior team that thinks and acts as a team

6. Enlist  your board of directors as active partners in change

7. Give coherence to the change process by clearly articulating a central mission and consistent set of themes

8. Even though the content of change may be radical, the building process has to be methodical.

9. Think of change as a campaign that must be waged simultaneously on a variety of fronts

10. This race may not have any finish line, so keep looking for reasons to stop and celebrate along the way.

 

Five Requisites for Implementing Change

1. Cultivate a winning attitude

2. Make the organization the hero

3. Establish cumulative learning

4. Promote strategic communication

5. Align strategy and behavior

 

Five Steps for integrating it all into a success strategy

1. Master the and/also (no single right answers)

2. Believe in the individual and value diversity

3. Look for embedded traits (people values and styles)

4. Stimulate constructive conflict

5. Vision and information management hold everything together