Why Change Doesn't Work

Why do change initiatives consistently fail to reap the right results?

The fact that companies must change in order to survive and progress towards long-term goals is not in doubt. What is in doubt is the way in which change is being implemented. Quite simply, change initiatives are not working, or are not working well in many companies. This timely book examines the barriers to change and provides practical and proven methods to help managers overcome them. The authors conclude, importantly, that the most neglected aspect of the whole change process is the human factor.

• Part 1: Life in the Blender
• The High Cost of Change Failures
• Of Babies and Bathwater
• Some Discarded Babies
• Four Attitudes
• Combining the Four Approaches
• The Meaning of Meaning
• Why Change Fails
• Why We're Hurting, and What We Must Do
• Part 2: The People Problem
• Change and the Brain
• Right Brains and Left Brains
• Human Variation
• Change and Personality
• The Importance of Psychological Type
• Building the Personality Matrix
• Assessing Individuals
• Expanding the Change Space
• Part 3: Why Groups Don't Work
• Assessing the Organization
• Change and Unreason
• Rebalancing the Stress Load
• Seven Hard Truths
• Part 4: Making Change
• Hub and Spoke Planning
• Introducing Change
• What You Can Do and What You Can't Do
• Living in the Future
• Big Change Versus Little Changes
• Crossing the Swamp
• Organizational Attitude
• Igniting Organizational Imagination
• Overcoming Resistance
• The Roles of the Changemaker
• Growing Your Own (Changemakers)
• Organizing for Change
• Communicating for Change
• Training Versus Learning
• Rewarding Change
• Technology and Change
• A Change Checklist
• Rebounding from Failure
• Rebounding from Success
• Part 5: ChangeLand
• Lucky Eleven
• The Results Theme
• The Measurement Theme
• The Reform Theme
• The Integration Theme
• The Improvement Team
• The Direction Theme
• The Character Theme
• The Relationship Theme
• The Culture Team
• The Democracy Theme
• The Otherness Theme
• Epilogue: The In-Between Age

This could havee been a new classical text, but it fails. It describes change, what it is and what to do about it. Unfortunately, they are a bit too simplistic from time to time and have a very big cultural bias toward hierarchical companies.

I can only recommend this for people that like Robbins and Finley or people that works with change and need to know what they say about it. A disappointment.