Creating Strategic Change: Designing the Flexible, High-Performing Organization - Hardcover

Pasmore, William A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471597295 ISBN 13: 9780471597292

Publisher: Wiley, 1994

Synopsis

Pasmore has brought over 20 year's worth of expertise to thisconceptually sophisticated yet practical guide concerned withorganization design and change. Concentrates on implementation andhow organizational planning and transformation efforts can improveperformance productivity. Features extensive cases and examplesdeveloped by the author from his consulting work at enterpriseslike Proctor & Gamble, TRW, Goodyear, General Foods and othercompanies.

About this title

About the Author

William A. Pasmore is a partner in Mercer Delta Organizational Consulting. He advises CEOs in the areas of organization design, senior team effectiveness, acquisition integration, strategy implementation, and managing large-scale change. He has published more than fifteen books and numerous articles on the topic of managing change and designing effective organizations.

From the Back Cover

In today's hypercompetitive global marketplace, the name of the game is change - radical, unrelenting, and ever-accelerating change. And amidst this whirlwind of change, only those business organizations that make the evolutionary leap beyond traditional hierarchies and the "program-of-the-month" approach to management have any hope of survival. Today's new breed of flexible, high-performance organizations are those in which all its people are active participants in managing the changes that occur both within their organization and in the marketplace. Available for the first time to a general business audience, the powerful concepts and organizational strategies you'll find in this book have already created quite a stir within academic and upper-echelon business circles. Growing out of Professor Bill Pasmore's consultancy work with a number of top companies, including Procter & Gamble, Levi Strauss, Goodyear General Foods, Polaroid and Amoco, they have been proven to dramatically enhance performance productivity wherever they've been tried. Creating Strategic Change doesn't offer managers a one-size-fits-all program. Rather it provides a set of guidelines for designing, implementing, and managing the fundamental changes that companies need to make if they are to be equal to the challenges of today's business world. Writing in an intimate, eloquent, jargon-free style, and with the help of dozens of real-life examples, Bill Pasmore shows you how to help people become participants in change; how to design and implement more flexible work systems; how to implement a more flexible approach to the way technologies are managed; how to apply bold new nonlinear organizational models; and muchmore. Creating Strategic Change is must reading for managers, human resources specialists, organizational development specialists, and all those responsible for managing strategic change.

Reviews

The author, a business consultant and professor at Case Western Reserve, writes about two pivotal issues: change and its impact on leadership. He argues that managers must "think systemically about change rather than trying to solve one problem at a time." His keyword for those trying to manage in today's environment of constant change is flexibility. Although Pasmore's coverage of managerial theories is useful, the book's strength rests on its treatment of technology as it relates to running a successful organization. This solid study, which features case histories from the author's consulting work with large corporations such as Procter & Gamble, Goodyear and General Foods, deepens our understanding of the importance of people in an evolving business environment.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pasmore is a management consultant, professor at Case Western Reserve University, and author of Designing Effective Organizations (1988). Acknowledging that change is a constant in today's world, he argues the need to build flexibility into all levels and aspects of organizations. He explains how to make people, technology, work, thinking, managers, and even organizational structure all more flexible. Emphasizing the organic nature of organizations, Pasmore advances the idea that organizations themselves are capable of learning and adapting. Borrowing the concept of chaos theory from the physical sciences, he applies the notion of fractal design to organizational systems. Written while he was on sabbatical in backwoods Maine, his book evinces a style that is both relaxed and expert. David Rouse

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471597295
• ISBN 13: 9780471597292
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304