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How many change initiatives has your company
been through? How many CEOs have come and gone? How many
new IT systems have been introduced? Most important: Have
any of these changes actually improved profits and performance?
If your company is like most, the relentless push for change
has done more harm than good -- levying a tremendous financial
and human toll on your organization.
Columbia Business School professor Eric
Abrahamson argues that while change is necessary for companies
to grow and prosper, the pain that accompanies it is not.
In Change Without Pain, Abrahamson outlines a new
approach to change -- creative recombination -- that
stands in sharp contrast to the "creative destruction"
advocated by change champions for the last two decades.
Rather than obliterating and inventing anew, creative recombination
achieves change by putting already existing organizational
assets to new uses. Rather than forcing through radical,
sweeping change, this approach calls for smaller-scale,
well-paced changes that can be done more cheaply, more quickly
-- and with far less pain.
Drawing on a decade of research -- and illustrated
with compelling examples from the author's extensive consulting
work with companies undergoing change in many industries
-- Change Without Pain presents a range of hands-on
tools and techniques for identifying and reusing five key
organizational assets.
- People: How to redeploy rather
than downsize talent
- Processes: How to salvage rather
than reengineer "how we do things around here"
- Structures: How to recombine rather
than reorganize organizational parts
- Culture: How to revive rather
than reinvent core values
- Social Networks: How to leverage
rather than automate human networks
In addition, Abrahamson guides managers
in determining when, and how often, to initiate change to
ensure the greatest chance for long-term success.
A refreshing paradigm for change has arrived
-- and companies don't need anything new, revolutionary,
or radical to make it happen. The inspiring result: Change
will actually work, for a change.
Eric Abrahamson is Professor of Management
at Columbia Business School in New York City and an internationally
recognized expert on change management.
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