Management

Rescued from bankruptcy itself by an aggressive organizational change instigated and overseen by Lou Gerstner in the early 1990s, IBM is now the world’s largest business IT consultancy business. It seems natural then, given its history and its business focus, that IBM should be interested in the effects, failures, and successes of organizational change globally. Its second Making Change Work… Read more

In a world that is constantly changing, businesses need to continually adapt and change to keep pace. The corporate world is littered with examples of once-great companies that became complacent, lost focus, and ultimately failed (think Kodak, One.Tel, Kmart, and the entire British car manufacturing and shipbuilding industries in the 1970s). Effective change leadership is… Read more

In my last article, I discussed the five things that effective change leaders do every day. The onus also rests with change managers, who will be much closer to the coalface, and encounter problems even more vociferously than change leadership further up the line. The need for change managers to be proactive is no less… Read more

Most change projects fail. In fact, according to Harvard Business School, 70% of all change projects miss their targets. In my experience, these failures are because change leaders are reactive rather than proactive. When making a reactive change, people are not ready to adapt. The culture isn’t prepared for change. Employee satisfaction levels fall, and… Read more

It was John Kotter who highlighted the need for urgency when making organisational change. Without a sense of urgency v complacency needed fuelled by a desire to meet objectives, it is likely that change objectives will be missed and, in the worst case scenario, the company will fail. It is when complacency takes hold –… Read more