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Managing Change

Managing Change
Managing change has become the "silver bullet" in seeking the final component of successfully managing strategy, process, people and culture in most modern organizations. More and more, staying competitive in the face of demographic trends, technological innovations, and globalization requires organizations to change at much higher rates than ever before. Few people will argue with this statement, but fewer still will say their organization does a good job at managing those changes. Managing change well is a continuous and ongoing combination of art and science that assures alignment of an organization’s strategies, structures, and processes.
A growing number of companies are undertaking the kinds of organizational changes needed to survive and prosper in today’s environment. They are streamlining themselves and thereby becoming more nimble and responsive to external demands. They are involving employees in key decisions and paying for performance rather than for time. They are taking initiative in innovating and managing change, rather than simply reacting to what has already happened.
Leading Change
However, in our experience, we have also noticed an unsettling forgetfulness among managers regarding the principles of good change management. Trendy fads designed to produce “quick fixes” are accompanied by decreased awareness of the tools and techniques of change management that have proven effective in the past. Our purpose in this article, the second in a series on the subject of change management [see Sherman article, Vol. 8, Issue 1], is to join the “makeover” trend by revisiting and reinforcing some of these basic principles and freshening them up a bit. We discuss what we consider to be six practical aspects of any change process and describe how three successful companies—JP Morgan Chase’s Global Investor Services Division (GIS), American Healthways, and Microsoft—have applied these principles.
1. Do no harm.
In the medical...