I have read the book titled “Managing Organizational Change” authored by V.Nilakant and S.Ramnarayan (Publishers - Response Books - Sage Publications). The book focuses on organizational change and provides practical insights about managing change effectively. It focuses both how and what to do in managing change. It presents several case studies, examples and research findings that substantiate the content. It views organizational change in terms of three generic processes – growth, transformation and decline.
According to Hindu philosophy Lord Brahma is the creator, Lord Vishnu is the generator and Lord Siva is the destroyer. Every human being undergoes various stages in lifetime such as birth, growth, transformation, decline and death. Similarly every organization has birth, growth and decline. However, managing change helps in reinventing and prolonging the survival and success of organizations. Like human beings, organizations cannot afford to die. Therefore, to keep the organizations alive and kicking it is essential to bring necessary changes as and when needed.
Organizational change refers to processes of growth, decline and transformation within the organization. It is imperative to study organizational change as changes at local and global level are pervasive and persistent.
There are two aspects of organizational change. One touches upon ‘what is change’ which is known as ‘content of change’ and the other one outlines ‘how to change’ which is known as ‘process of change’.
Managing change involves simultaneously managing resources, processes and emotions. To effect change successfully it is essential to blend both theory and practice where theory represents knowledge, understanding and insight and practice constitutes values, skills and abilities. For productive change to take place, it is essential to mix ingredients like right values, knowledge and action.
The authors discuss four different types of change such as continuous or incremental change, discontinuous or radical change, participative change and directive change. They unfold three fold strategy where in managers must know the difference between continuous and discontinuous change, managers must acquire the skills and abilities to implement change both in a directive and a participative manner and finally managers must be aware of the different change strategies and learn to use appropriate strategies.
What Do Authors Say?
• Managers who wish to develop skills in leading and managing change must first learn how to analyze their environments. They need to make a detailed and systematic study of their customers, suppliers and competitors.
• You need to analyze four aspects of environment while changing your organization such as changes (contingency perspective), dependencies (resource dependence perspective), limits (population-ecology perspective) and institutional norms (institutional perspective)
• The relatively calm period of continuous change is called ‘evolution’ and the period of turbulent change is called ‘revolution’.
• Re-invention is not changing what is, but creating what is not.
• There are two types of strategic changes – reactive and anticipatory changes. The former include changes made in direct response to external events whereas the latter refer to changes made in expectation of future event.
• A manager or administrator interested in bringing about change needs to learn and understand some specific aspects about implementing change. First, it is important to know how to orchestrate change in terms of a sequence of steps. Second, managers need to know how to promote learning in an organization. Organizational change can take place only after people in an organization collectively learn how to do things differently. Therefore, learning and change are intimately connected and are almost synonymous. Third, managers should learn and know when to use specific change programmes like business process reengineering, lean thinking and total quality management.
• Effective organizational change is a clever blend of participation and pressure.
• Although a variety of change programmes have been suggested over the years, three are particularly important. These are business process reengineering (BPR), lean thinking and total quality management (TQM).
• They highlight eight change levers such as leadership, strategy, structure, human resource management practices (people management), technology, marketing, quality and costs.
• To survive and thrive in the new environment firms have to make appropriate changes in the four content areas of quality, costs, marketing and technology.
• Change is successful only when there is simultaneous and rapid implementation.
• The most important lesson from leadership research in recent years is that change leadership is rooted, not in charisma, but in character. Organizational change requires value-based or principle-centered leadership. They further add that the general principles of change are the same all over the world. They believe that when organizations are led by value-based leadership the change will be enduring and everlasting.
The authors roll out seven steps to successful change. They are
1. Assemble a change management team.
2. Establish a new direction for the organization.
3. Prepare the organization for change
4. Set up change teams to implement change
5. Align structure, systems and resources to support change
6. Identify and remove roadblocks to change and finally
7. Absorb changes into the culture of the organization.
The authors furnish several references from global writers like John Kotter, Michael Beer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Todd Jick and Barry Stein that substantiates the content. Besides, they back up content with facts and figures and the references of proven intellectuals in the domain of organizational change. They outline the case studies of several companies that stimulated growth such as Infosys, Anagram Finance, EGCO and QPH.
The authors refer the paper written for the OD practitioner, by Linda Ackerman that provides an interesting perspective on change. Linda Ackerman distinguishes between three types of change. The first type of change is developmental change. This refers to improving what already exists in the organization. This is the same as convergence, incremental or evolutionary change on models of organizational change. The second type of change is transitional change which involves moving from the current state to a known new state through a transition state. Re-structuring, mergers, introduction of new processes, technologies, systems and procedures are examples of transitional change. In transitional change the organization retains some of its old aspects and adds on new ones. The third type of change is called transformational change. This type of change is a fundamental re-invention of the organization by changing its leadership, mission, culture, structure, strategy, human resource practices and so on.
The authors say, “A change leader needs to master change processes by adopting change roles, managing attention and demonstrating personal competence. There are various change roles that leaders need to be aware of. A change sponsor legitimizes change. A change agent implements change. A change advocate drives change and a change target receives change. In a complex change process different people play different roles and leaders must understand the contribution of each role. Leaders are also known as change advocates.”
The authors argue that management of change involved synchronous attention to eight change levers. Four of these are content levers-technology, marketing, quality and costs. Only changing three other levers that make up the context of the organization, it was argued, could bring about changes in these areas. These are strategy, structure and people management practices. Finally all these changes need to be anchored in value-based leadership.
The authors unfold the success story of Silicon Valley which is a thin slice of land between San Jose and San Francisco in northern California. It is the home of such technology leaders as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, Oracle, 3Com, Applied Materials, Netscape, Cisco Systems and Intel. Silicon Valley is one of America’s greatest success stories of this century.
The authors state the study of 90 leaders in USA by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus and that reveals that all leaders shared five key skills: They are
1. The ability to accept people as they are, not as you would like them to be, so that you truly understand what other people are like on their terms.
2. The capacity to approach people and problems in terms of the present rather than the past, and thus free yourself from the preoccupation with rehashing things that are over.
3. The ability to treat those who are close to you with the same courteous attention that you extend to strangers and casual acquaintances, and thus avoid misunderstandings, misconceptions and mistakes.
4. The ability to trust others, even if the risk seems great, without assuming that most people are incompetent and insincere.
5. The ability to do without constant approval and recognition from others, and thus being free to take appropriate risks without undue preoccupation with being a ‘good guy’.
Just as learning is vital for change, so is unlearning crucial for change. Unless an organization is able to unlearn by giving up old habits, attitudes, assumptions, behaviors and mindset, it cannot embark upon change, particularly discontinuous change. There is an old story of a person who had come to visit a Zen master. The visitor claimed that he had read widely, but was interested in finding out if he could learn anything more from the master. The master offered him a full cup of tea, but continued to pour more tea into the cup from the tea jug. The visitor was intrigued, and pointed to the tea overflowing from the cup on to the ground. ‘Just as the cup is too full to hold any more tea, you may be too full to learn anything new’, said the master. ‘For new learning to find space within you, you have to first give up the belief that you already know those things.’
Finally authors sum up that the liberalized economy in India presents three important challenges for organizations in this country. First, they must be efficient in terms of costs and resources. Second, they must be responsive to customers, competitors and the community at large. Third, they must be continuously learning.
The authors conclude the book with
‘What is greater than knowledge?’ asked the mind.
‘A heart that can see and care,’ whispered the soul.
Conclusion:
The only thing constant in this world is change. Nobody can survive without change. Change requires a new mindset, tool set and skill set. Therefore, everyone must learn to change with the changing times and technologies to grow personally, professionally and socially.
The book presents the case studies of Indian companies that effected change successfully. Although the cases belonged to the past there are certain takeaways from those case studies that are still relevant today and we can implement. Besides, the authors wrote few case studies based on their first hand experience in managing organizational change.
The book is worth reading as it provides both theoretical and practical ideas and insights about change management. It contains several case studies, research findings that help both academicians and practitioners.
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