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The End of Change

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The End of Change

How Your Company Can Sustain Growth and Innovation While Avoiding Change Fatigue

McGraw-Hill,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

If you’re searching for the latest method to introduce radical change to your company, it’s probably already too late.

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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

If the wildly successful Who Moved My Cheese? represents the kindergarten version of basic change management theory, The End of Change makes a welcomed leap to graduate-level studies. Authors Peter Scott-Morgan, Erik Hoving, Henk Smith and Arnoud Van Der Slot maintain that many of the concepts intrinsic in the current genre of change management are just plain wrong. In reality, companies that successfully manage change do so by building structures specifically designed to induce and digest change into their overall organizations. In order to explain these structures, the authors present them in the form of geometric shapes - a metaphor that is easy to grasp and easily captures the essence of each strategy. These graphic examples are reinforced with real-life examples of companies and industries that manage change in ways that closely resemble the book’s shape-based techniques. getAbstract recommends that all executives and students read this book, which takes a sophisticated approach to a topic that has been addressed by a slew of authors and consultants-turned-authors on the most superficial of levels.

Summary

Change at Global Speed

Change involves growth and destruction. In the past, change was incremental and organizations could take their time implementing new practices. Global competition, however, has altered the landscape. Organizations are now required to change more often and more radically than even one decade ago.

While business has become obsessed with figuring out how to implement change, management and consultants both tend to overlook the way change affects employees. For employees, change is always disruptive. Because many managers have not addressed the upheaval that their policies create, thousands of employees have been left disoriented by existing change efforts and afraid of new change proposals. The term for this workplace shock is change fatigue.

Change fatigue is the emotional and physical response that employees experience before, during and after change efforts. As an executive or manager, you can safeguard against change fatigue by preserving your firm’s relevant culture and establishing communication channels that will allow you to identify the rough spots. But such efforts are not intrinsic to sustaining growth and innovation; rather they...

About the Authors

Peter Scott-Morgan, a speaker, consultant and teacher, is the author of the Unwritten Rules of the Game A well-known authority on managing revolutionary transformation in business, he is a partner in the international consultancy Arthur D. Little, Inc., and professor of business at Boston’s ADL School of Management. Erik Hoving, Henk Smith and Arnoud Van Der Slot are partners in the Rotterdam office of Arthur D. Little, Inc.

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