Appetite for Change

Guest Author: Stephen Warrilow Before starting out on your change management initiative – some strategic questions to ask yourself. This list is not exhaustive but is intended as an aide-memoire to kick start your thought processes and to help you avoid the 70% failure rate. (1) Have you thoroughly addressed the originating strategic review questions? [...]

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“How can we … free ourselves from our addiction to episodic change and move to a much more healthy habit of continuous business improvement?” is the very pertinent question asked by a senior BP executive, Fiona Macleod, at the recent Wharton Leadership Conference. Her thoughts on the subject are interesting as she has lead several [...]

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Image via Wikipedia The McKinsey Quarterly published an excellent paper by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, that explains why change management theory often doesn’t work just like that. The background to their work is a 2008 McKinsey survey confirming that the success rate of change programs remains stuck at around 30%, more than 10 years [...]

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The well known UK based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) conducted an online poll among its HR community to determine the most important “HR skills for survival”. More precisely, the respondents were asked to chose three competencies they believed were most important to establish the function’s effectiveness and credibility in the organisation. The [...]

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IBM has just published a new global survey among more than 1000 CEO’s to find out what the company of the future would look like. The findings highlight the growing importance of successful change management: Organisations are bombarded by change and many are struggling to keep up CEO’s view more demanding customers not as a [...]

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Changing our behaviours to reduce our carbon footprint is a key and sometimes difficult challenge for us individuals and businesses. Air travel represents 2% of the world’s total CO2 emissions, which may seem insignificant at first but is in fact a lot if you compare it with cleaner means of travelling. As an indication The [...]

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From my experience and learning, resistance to change comes from lack of skill or lack of will and to determine which of the two is the starting point for neutralizing resistance. I read this interesting article from HBR (and the idea in brief here) which focuses more on how managers can positively use resistance to [...]

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Not much scared Niccolo Machiavelli, but one thing that did was change. “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things,” he wrote 400 years ago. John Oesch, assistant professor of [...]

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A new study commissioned by Logica Management Consulting identifies winners and losers in business process change and outlines best practice guide Companies surveyed in the UK losing £1.7 billion a year One third of business process changes fall short of expected benefits One fifth of businesses do not measure change management performance A key finding [...]

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