Internal and External Change Agents

When choosing between internal or external change agents, organizations should consider following advantages and disadvantages of each option:

Advantages of Internal CAs:
- Possess better knowledge of the organization and are more quickly available.
- Have more control and authority and require lower out-of-pocket costs.

Disadvantages of Internal CAs:
- May be too close to the problem and may hold biased views.
- May create additional resistance if viewed as part of the problem.
- Must be reassigned, so that they are not available for other work.

Advantages of External CAs:
- Have special experience in dealing with diverse problems.
- Have more objective views of the organization and its problems.
- Possess more technical knowledge, skills and competence.

Disadvantages of External CAs:
- Require out-of-pocket costs.
- Have less knowledge of the organization and require longer start-up time.

Change Management Books

I asked the members of an OD list to name their favorite change management books. You can find the list at http://home.att.net/~nickols/change_biblio.pdf

Change Management Cooking Class

95% of the population worries about change. The remaining 5% are managers who wish to implement change. Imagine your relief if there was such a thing as a recipe for successful change management. No more doubts, everyone would be motivated and production wouldn’t be at risk. The cooking class in this article may not guarantee you a Michelin star, but if applied properly, you will save yourself a lot of time and worries.

Click here to download the article (pdf format)

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Nobody needs Continuity Champions

Thomas A. Stewart, the editor of Harvard Business Review, signals a new trend on the horizon: continuity champions. Although change is sexy, challenging and a job for heroes, it has also a way of swalowing a company's attention and resources. Still, it's more glamorous to be Napoleon (who gained and lost an empire in little more than a decade) than Hadrian (who gave the Roman empire a stability that endured for generations). Therefore, according to Stewart, continuity needs and deserves champions, too. They should:

• Protect the image of core business,
• Identify the forces of continuity,
• Keep legacy business sound,
• Maintain communication between new and legacy business, and
• Define what lies outside the reach of change.

I would argue the standard vested interests supported by mankind's reluctance to change, particularly when not involved in the change, are strong enough to prevent change from occurring too fast.

Can you remember reading about a company adapting too fast to change?

Bestselling Books on Organizational Change

Values-Based CM

I've been thinking where I should create a review of the interview with IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano in the HBR of December 2004. I believe what Palmisano says is primarily his organizational CM vision so I've put it here. However the interview is equaly important for people having an interest in leadership, value based M., corporate responsibility and human capital M.

In the interview Palmisano describes how he dealt with the situation that he needed to change IBM in a period that business was (finally) doing well after the period in which Lou Gerstner brought the company back from the brink in the 80s.

It was necessary to get different parts of the organization working together so IBM could offer customers integrated solutions (hardware, software, services ands financing) at a single price on a global scale. Also Palmisano wanted to enable decision-making as deep as possible into Big Blue IBM and last but not least to revitalize the perception of IBM's workforce that working for IBM makes a difference.

Palmisano decided to put values in the center of his CM approach, which led to what he calls a Values-Based M. system. A crucial role in the entire process was played by a three-day discussion forum on IBM's intranet, which was called "ValuesJam", in which an estimated 50.000 of IBM's employees posted nearly 10.000 comments about the proposed draft values for IBM.

By thus empowering IBM's own workforce, Palmisano succesfully gained momentum and support for the changes he wanted to implement, ensuring people make the right decisions in the right way. An by 'right' he's not only talking about ethics and legal compliance, but also about strategy, brand and culture. Looking back, Palmisano thinks values inject balance in the company culture and M. system: balance between the short-term transaction and the long-term relationship, balance between the interest of shareholders, employees and clients.

6 reasons why organizational change fails

Bill McCarthy of Penna consultants addresses six common reasons why organizational C. fails and suggests an approach that focuses on people within a “before, during and after” timeframe.
McCarthy's 6 reasons why organizational C. fails are:

1. People planning comes last (Organizations plan the financials, the operations, the marketing and selling, but few plan the people dimension).
2. The role of managers is disregarded (while they are pivotal for winning hearts and minds)
3. Communication fails to win hearts and minds (too mechanical; leaders' passion and the vision for the future not communicated)
4. Individual agendas are ignored (failing to address the “what’s in it for me?” agenda)
5. Engagement isn’t measured (You’re then unclear about the support they need until it’s too late and productivity and profitability already suffer)
6. Lack of a project manager (Inadequate project M.)

In order to deal with these frequently made mistakes, McCarthy suggests an organizational C. approach with a focus on people within a “before, during and after” timeframe in three layers (levels) of activity: the organization as an entity, the managers; and the individuals.

The rest of McCarthy's (bill.mccarthy@e-penna.com) article can be found in Strategic HR Review (Volume 4 Issue 1 November/December 2004).

Measuring Culture C.

Yesterday I was creating a description of The Eight Considerations towards Changing Organizational Cultures. These best practices from Harrison Trice and Janice Beyer certainly are highly recommended reading if you have to walk the slippery road of organizational culture C.

While working on these considerations, that made me think it would be useful to have a methodology to measuring culture C. in order to determine if the culture C. process is actually making progress and how much progress it is making.

Measuring this kind of processes is far from easy, even if you can quantify certain things you still have to value the results (what I mean is you can measure the temperature increasing from 21 to 24 degrees, but whether that's cold or hot or even welcome or to be avoided remains a challenge).

Does any of you have a best practice method to share and recommend to measure organizational culture C.?

What is CM really?

On his interesting CM page, Fred Nichols suggests 3 valid definitions:
1. The task of managing C.
1A. Proactive: the making of changes in a planned and managed or systematic fashion, or
1B. Reactively:the response to changes over which the organization exercises little or no control
2. An area of professional practice (with considerable variation in competency and skill levels among practitioners)
3. A body of knowledge or subject area (consisting of models, methods, techniques, and other tools)
I am wondering if these 3 definitions taken together cover the whole spectrum of CM?