Remain competitive, inspire innovation, and ensure success Constantly adapting, improving, and changing is more important than ever for companies to remain competitive in today’s marketplace. Make Change Work presents real solutions to thriving in a world of constant change. This book educates managers and leaders on how to lead change, with strategies for creating urgency, building support, and ensuring successful change. Get the guidance you need to be bold in the face of change, and learn how to make your company faster, better, cheaper, and friendlier—by simply listening to your customers Advises leaders on how to design and implement a strategy that allows you to successfully lead change and deliver meaningful business results Author Randy Pennington is a 20-year business performance veteran, author, and expert in helping organizations build a culture focused on results Learn how to establish a clear and purposeful goal, inspire a culture relentlessly focused on customers, and create an environment where your talented team wants to Make Change Work.
A far-reaching transformation is taking place in the US in the relationship between employers and employees. The lessons learned from Japan and from "best practice" companies like IBM about how job security, training, and internal development can improve employee commitment and performance have given way to a new set of lessons about how companies can redue fixed costs, increase flexibility, and improve performance by eliminating the elaborate employment systems that prepared employees for long careers in the company. Where the old arrangement protected employees from outside market forces, the new ones drag the market right back in through downsizing, contingent workforces, hiring on the outside for new skills, and compensation contingent on overall organizational performance. New work systems that reengineer processes and empower employees "flatten" the organizational chart, cutting management jobs in particular and reducing opportunities for career development. The new arrangements shift many of the risks of business from the firm to the employees and make employees, rather than employers, responsible for developing their own skills and careers. They also increase the demands placed on workers while reducing what they receive back for their efforts. While morale is down and stress is up, employee performance seems to be rising largely because of fear driven by the shortage of good jobs. Change at Work explores the theme that employees have paid the price for the widespread restructuring of American firms as illustrated by reduced security, greater effort and hours, and reduced morale. In this important study--commissioned by the National Planning Asociation's Committee on New American Realities--the authors consider how individuals and employers need to adapt to the new arrangements as well as the implicatioons for important policy issues such as how skills will be developed where the attachment to the firms is sharply reduced. The future is uncertain, but the authors argue that the traditional relationship between employer and employee will continue to erode, making this work essential reading for managers concerned with the profound impact corporate restructuring has had on the lives of workers.
* A Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist for 2005! * Focuses on development management positions in international service employment * Devises the concept of the "service-choice spiral" in career evolution * Provides information about volunteer and professional opportunities, organizations, and degree programs In Working for Change, Derick and Jennifer Brinkerhoff explore career paths in international public service, focusing on development management positions. They offer practical and inspiring guidance on finding the right mix of public service objectives, degree programs, job opportunities, and personal lifestyle choices. The Brinkerhoffs’ concept of career evolution is encapsulated in a framework they call the service-choice spiral. This model rejects standard set-the-goal, plot-the-steps planning and pulls one’s personal values, skills, professional goals, and sense of altruism into a solid career choice. Through profiles of six public service professionals, the Brinkerhoffs illustrate how real people have faced the choices that confronted them in the course of their careers. Working for Change will assuredly become the ideal guide and resource for anyone considering work in public service and mid-career professionals looking for a change in direction. It will also serve as a powerful resource for university career development officers and faculty advisors. View the entire book online at ebrary.com here.
Underpinned by decades of research and application, Making Change Work shows that the lynchpin that connects change initiatives and their ultimate success is behavioural change. The book brings together the ROI Institute's established methodology for aligning projects and programmes to business needs and for evaluating impact and ROI with the Turning Learning Into Action methodology developed by Emma Weber to support learning transfer. It offers a step-by-step process that partners with any business initiative requiring behavioural change, providing the critical link bridging the knowledge and application. At the heart of the methodology is a framework for reflective conversation, ensuring accountability and aligning people to the desired outcomes. Cutting through complex change theory, Making Change Work is a 'how to' guide, providing an end-to-end approach to solve the problem that businesses have grappled with for so long from change projects that don't deliver business impact. It includes real life case studies from organizations such as BMW and the University of NSW Department of Innovation on how organizations are using the framework to create successful outcomes that are not just demonstrated but that are delivered and measurable. It is ideal for any professional who is embarking on any organizational initiative requiring change and evaluation of the subsequent ROI, whether it is a learning initiative, quality initiative or change initiative.
Finding the courage to embrace change and take chances is the only way to succeed. Business, culture, and competitive landscapes have fundamentally changed, but basic principles and best practices for succeeding and future-proofing both yourself and your organization haven’t. With a mix of compelling stories, research from the social sciences and psychology, and real-world insights, Make Change Work for You shows readers how to reignite their career, rekindle their creativity, and fearlessly innovate their way to success by providing the tools needed to master uncertainty and conquer every challenge they’ll face in life or business. Make Change Work for You opens with an overview of the most common factors that lead to self-defeating behaviors, including fear of failure, embarrassment, underperformance, rejection, confrontation, isolation, and change itself. Using a simple four-part model, Steinberg guides readers to understand and better respond to the challenges that change can bring: Focus: Define the problem and come to understand it objectively. Engage: Interact with the challenge and try a range of solutions. Assess: Review the response(s) generated by your tactics. React: Adjust your strategy accordingly. And, finally, the book shows readers how to develop the vital personal and professional skills required to triumph in the “new normal” by understanding and engaging in the 10 new habits that highly successful people share: 1. Play the Odds 2. Embrace Tomorrow Today 3. Seek Constant Motion 4. Lead, Don’t Follow 5. Never Stop Learning 6. Create Competitive Advantage 7. Connect the Dots 8. Pick Your Battles 9. Set and Align Your Priorities 10. Always Create Value
“This is the management book of the year. Clear, powerful and urgent, it's a must read for anyone who cares about where they work and how they work.” —Seth Godin, author of This is Marketing “This book is a breath of fresh air. Read it now, and make sure your boss does too.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg When fast-scaling startups and global organizations get stuck, they call Aaron Dignan. In this book, he reveals his proven approach for eliminating red tape, dissolving bureaucracy, and doing the best work of your life. He’s found that nearly everyone, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, points to the same frustrations: lack of trust, bottlenecks in decision making, siloed functions and teams, meeting and email overload, tiresome budgeting, short-term thinking, and more. Is there any hope for a solution? Haven’t countless business gurus promised the answer, yet changed almost nothing about the way we work? That’s because we fail to recognize that organizations aren’t machines to be predicted and controlled. They’re complex human systems full of potential waiting to be released. Dignan says you can’t fix a team, department, or organization by tinkering around the edges. Over the years, he has helped his clients completely reinvent their operating systems—the fundamental principles and practices that shape their culture—with extraordinary success. Imagine a bank that abandoned traditional budgeting, only to outperform its competition for decades. An appliance manufacturer that divided itself into 2,000 autonomous teams, resulting not in chaos but rapid growth. A healthcare provider with an HQ of just 50 people supporting over 14,000 people in the field—that is named the “best place to work” year after year. And even a team that saved $3 million per year by cancelling one monthly meeting. Their stories may sound improbable, but in Brave New Work you’ll learn exactly how they and other organizations are inventing a smarter, healthier, and more effective way to work. Not through top down mandates, but through a groundswell of autonomy, trust, and transparency. Whether you lead a team of ten or ten thousand, improving your operating system is the single most powerful thing you can do. The only question is, are you ready?
An analysis of how the working class can mobilize as a force for change in the present day One of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx points out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce” – where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals” – lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties – sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But, Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of creating that change. In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work, itself, Yates asks if there can, in fact, be a thing called the working class? If so, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, location – to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions, Yates supports his arguments with relevant, clearly explained data, historical examples, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class, and what all of us might do to change the world.
Unlock your potential and finally move forward. A recent study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. Desire and motivation aren't enough: even when it's literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive. Given that the status quo is so potent, how can we change ourselves and our organizations? In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs--along with the collective mind-sets in our organizations--combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us. This persuasive and practical book, filled with hands-on diagnostics and compelling case studies, delivers the tools you need to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.
As organizations strive to remain ahead of the competition, there will inevitably and often come the need for change. All successful organizations regularly use change to improve processes and increase performance. While these times of change can be a great opportunity for an organization, it also can be a time of stress and angst for all involved. Not all organizations are in a position to make these changes effectively and efficiently, and for many their efforts often fall short of the intended goals. Making Change Work: Practical Tools for Overcoming Human Resistance to Change was written to help organizations prepare for and successfully implement change. The price of a failed change effort can be steep, both monetarily and in a loss of credibility. Making Change Work will first provide tools to measure your organization's readiness to change, helping make sure that the efforts will not be doomed to fail from the beginning. The book then provides many tools to apply sequentially and logically in order to gain acceptance of the change throughout the organization. In helping your organization make change successfully, Making Change Work addresses buy-in, acceptance, motivation, anticipation, fear, uncertainty, and all the other messy human considerations that cause change to fail in the real world.
Change has become a constant in the professional lives of almost every individual. Museum change agents Seema Rao and Robert J. Weisberg define the causes-societal, institutional, and personal-of workplace change and describe its stressful effects, and then explain how individuals can not only make it through tumultuous professional crises but then build upon their resilience and thrive. They provide nearly two dozen exercises to help readers react to, prepare for, and grow from change.
