Making Sense of Change Management

Book Review

By Glenn Strange, CMC
Azure Consulting Limited
www.azureconsulting.ca
glennstrange@azureconsulting.ca

Book Title: Making Sense of Change Management
Authors: Esther Cameron and Mike Green
Publication Information: Published in 2004 by Kogan Page ISBN 0-7494-4087-2

Author Profile for Esther Cameron

Esther Cameron is the Director of Cameron Change Consultancy, a niche consultancy offering senior level change management coaching and leadership development to a wide range of organisations both internationally and within the UK. Esther is a skilful coach and a leading edge thinker in the area of organisation development and managing change. She is also an extremely creative workshop designer and facilitator, more recently employing multi-voiced techniques for looking at change and capturing learning. Esther has worked for the last 18 years with leaders at significant thresholds and has developed a passion for making positive change happen well. Esther is a skilful coach, a leading edge thinker and writer in the area of organization development and managing change. She is also a highly effective top team coach and an extremely creative workshop designer and facilitator. Esther has worked successfully for the last 16 years providing leadership coaching and development for managers with big challenges both in the UK, the US and mainland Europe. Esther focuses on maintaining long and fruitful relationships with clients and has developed an excellent network of senior managers around the UK and beyond. She also views the client-consultant relationship as collaborative and developmental, and works hard to ensure sustainable change, rather than dependence or quick fixes. Recent clients include Allied Domecq plc, Hewlett Packard Company, Corus Metal Services Europe, Microsoft Ireland, NTL, Amerada Hess, QinetiQ, Nissan Europe and Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Author profile for Mike Green BSc Dip Psych MBA FIPD

Mike is Managing Partner of Transitional Space a consultancy specialising in individual, team and organisational development. He works in both the public and private sectors. He has facilitated organisational learning and performance enhancement through a variety of personal, inter-personal and systemic interventions. Mike also tutors and coaches in People Management, Organisational Behaviour and Business Transformation and is currently an associate at Henley Management College, UK. Mike has facilitated individual, team and organisational change and development in the public and private sectors for the past fifteen years.

As executive mentor, team developer and organisational consultant, working at middle management through to board level, Mike has facilitated organisational learning and performance enhancement through a variety of personal, inter-personal and systemic interventions.

Mike has lectured and tutored at undergraduate and postgraduate level in People Management and Organisational Behaviour at the Universities of Bath and North London. He tutors at Henley Management College.

Why This Book is of Value to Management Consultants:

This book will appeal to all Management Consultants engaged on change management assignments or where there is a need to understand concepts of organizational change. The emphasis is based upon helping the reader to understand concepts of change and how to deal with the changing circumstances. The book provides many frameworks and models for ways of both interpreting and approaching change. The book is essentially split into two parts : ( 1) The Underpinning theory and (2) The Applications. Each part has its' own introduction clearly setting out the foundation for the chapters to follow

Part One: The Underpinning Theory

1. Individual Change: Provides an introduction to the learning of the process of change, the behavioral approach to change, the cognitive approach to change, the psychodynamic approach to change, the personality of change and managing change in self and others. The chapter provides excellent use of illustrations and diagrams. Very good cross-referencing to other academic literature in the field. Above all it is extremely readable, comprehensive and easy to understand. Excellent use of checklists and self challenging questions.

2. Team Change: Examines aspects of group dynamics and how to improve team effectiveness, what team changes look like, leadership issues in team change, how individuals can impact team dynamics, how well teams adapt to organizational change. The particular strength of this chapter is the depth of analysis and coverage. This is particularly well laid out in the tables presented. I believe this would have benefited from some additional case studies or war stories to elaborate upon the good theoretical arguments put forward.

3. Organizational Change : Discusses how organizations really work, models and approaches to organizational change. This is a vast subject area but the book does extremely well to consolidate this into the most important subject matter. The models are extremely useful in this context. The Management Consultant using this as a reference manual will be well served using this as a basis for further research into the important aspects of organizational change. The chapter provides excellent use of illustrations and diagrams. Very good cross-referencing to other academic literature in the field. Above all it is extremely readable, comprehensive and easy to understand. Excellent use of checklists and self challenging questions.

4. Leading Change: Considers visionary leadership, roles that leaders play, leadership styles and skills, different leadership for different phases of change, the importance of self knowledge. One of the strengths of this book is the summary and conclusions presented at the end of each Chapter. This chapter is no exception and the subject matter is very well concluded.

Part Two: The Applications

5. Restructuring: The reasons for restructuring, restructuring from individual change perspective, the special case of redundancy, enabling teams to address organizational change. Good use of illustrations and tables. I particularly liked the Critical Success Factors for a Local Authority on P 171 as this relates well to a number of similar assignments that I personally have been involved with.

6. Mergers and Acquisitions: The purpose of merger and acquisition, lessons from research, applying the change theory, guidelines for leaders. A chapter that particularly appealed to me, having completed numerous similar large scale international assignments. This subject matter is extremely diverse and complex. Nevertheless, the reader is provided with a good foundation. I would have liked to have seen more references and research links here - the art of being able to navigate from the fundamentals to more advanced subject matter. I equally recognize the complexity of this and the challenge for the authors.

7. Cultural Change : Guidelines for achieving successful cultural change, case studies, rebranding the organization. The strengths of this Chapter are the well presented three case studies. This is again a wide and complex area but the case studies make for an enjoyable read and explain the subject matter very well indeed. This is a Chapter that will particularly appeal to Consultants with the ability to compare approaches to completed assignments and perhaps challenge some new ideas / approaches for future engagements

8. IT Based Process Change : Strategy and IT, the role of IT management, The need for IT Change Managers, Achieving process change, Changing the IT information culture, new roles for a new age. In my opinion this is the final Chapter and one of the most important. It should, however, not be read in isolation and I would recommend looking at Practical Strategy by Geoff Coyle / Prentice Hall as a good companion.

The Authors have provided an extremely useful and practical reference book for Making Sense of Change Management. The reader is provided with a valuable insight into a very large subject matter area. The book examines and offers explanations on nearly all of the current models of change. The reader can clearly see examples of what might go wrong and provided with ideas as to how to get it right.