The Change Monster: The Human Forces That Fuel or Foil Corporate Transformation and Change - Hardcover

Duck, Jeanie Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609607715 ISBN 13: 9780609607718

Publisher: Crown Business, 2001

Synopsis

A brilliant, original, and powerful look at corporate change—mergers, reorganizations, transformations—and why it succeeds or fails.

The Change Monster is the first book on the central issue that blows so many change efforts out of the water: the human interactions and emotional dynamics of the people involved. It is also an unusual book about business, one written from the heart as well as the head.

The Change Monster is a tough-minded but compassionate book about leadership when major changes are demanded: after a merger, when profits are falling or markets being lost. It is also about the discipline and kindness it takes to get the people who report to and depend on you to confront their fears and move on to a new agenda, strategy, or company.

The Change Monster is a reminder, through stories and anecdotes, of the essentials of the heart and mind that provide the basis for leadership. It also offers warnings that probably will be heeded only after they have been ignored. How, when you think you have made it clear to people what the new objectives are and how they need to behave differently, you are suffering serious illusions. And how, when you think they are not watching, they are, scrutinizing and often misinterpreting your every move.

The Change Monster is also a personal journey. It will take you for a roller-coaster ride and make it clear why you have to muster the courage to take people down to reality before you can lead them back up to success, no matter how brilliant the strategy or plan.

Jeanie Duck has a voice and style unlike those of any other business book. She introduces her own life into the book and writes with efficiency, informality, humor.

The Change Monster has an important tool, the Change Curve, at its core. Developed from Jeanie Duck’s years of experience working with some of the most important change efforts of our time, it provides a highly practical way to help you understand and deal with “the change monster” —the emotions and fears everyone has when going through major change. It will serve as your compass in making judgments about where, both intellectually and emotionally, your people are in their readiness and ability to execute a new strategy or make a new organization succeed. So valuable is it that a General Electric vice president commented after seeing its five stages: “I feel like someone who’s been suffering for years with an unknown ailment and finally got a clear diagnosis. You can’t imagine how helpful this is.”

E-mail your comments about The Change Monster to change.monster@bcg.com.

About this title

About the Author

Jeanie Daniel Duck is senior vice president of The Boston Consulting Group and a leader in its organizational practice. She has worked with companies around the globe on major change efforts. Her article in the Harvard Business Review, “Managing Change: The Art of Balancing,” has been a bestselling reprint used by many companies in executive education programs and many business schools as required reading. She is not only an expert in change management but also an artist--with a master’s degree in sculpture--and has a keen sense for what makes people tick.

From the Back Cover

“Since any change effort--from merger to corporate reorganization--inevitably involves people, it’s hard to believe that no book has ever addressed this issue head-on. The Change Monster is all about the ‘hard part’ of strategy--getting the organization to internalize, commit to, and follow through with change. As Jeanie Duck well knows, even organizations that know they need to change often can’t get up the head of steam needed. The Change Monster not only talks intelligently about the social dynamics and emotions of people, it does so with wisdom, insight, and practicality. With Jeanie Duck’s book, managers now have a creative, powerful tool for understanding and dealing with this crucial subject.”
-- Daniel Leemon, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, The Charles Schwab Corporation

“Where else can you explore companies like Sisyphus Systems and FastMovingGoods or learn why Ennui International is mired in the past and Worldwide Frenzy is going nowhere fast? With scores of such tales from the consultant's trenches, Jeanie Duck offers a practitioner’s primer on revitalization. She puts you in the shoes of some who have failed and others who have succeeded, and in doing so graphically delivers her main message to management: Learn to master the emotions and obsessions of those who stand in the way of change, including your own, and once you do, you have your hands on a miraculous engine for change.”
-- Michael Useem, professor of management and director of the Center for Leadership and Change at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Leadership Moment

From the Inside Flap

original, and powerful look at corporate change―mergers, reorganizations, transformations―and why it succeeds or fails.<br><br><b>The Change Monster </b>is the first book on the central issue that blows so many change efforts out of the water: the human interactions and emotional dynamics of the people involved. It is also an unusual book about business, one written from the heart as well as the head. <br><br><b>The Change Monste</b>r is a tough-minded but compassionate book about leadership when major changes are demanded: after a merger, when profits are falling or markets being lost. It is also about the discipline and kindness it takes to get the people who report to and depend on you to confront their fears and move on to a new agenda, strategy, or company. <br><br><b>The Change Monster</b> is a reminder, through stories and anecdotes, of the essentials of the heart and mind that provide the basis for leadership. It also offers warnings that probab

Reviews

Although the concept of managing the implementation of major changes in business has existed for at least two decades, Duck contends that senior management often overlooks or underestimates the emotional impact of fundamental changes such as mergers, reengineering and strategic initiatives on employees. While "emotional data" (e.g., fear of job elimination, the sense that senior management doesn't know what it's doing) may not be easy to define, it's as critical to executing strategic change as financial data. In her work as a senior vice-president of the Boston Consulting Group, Duck came to the conclusion that while every company's experience with strategic change is unique, each will go through the same five phases of a model she calls the "change curve" (stagnation, preparation, implementation, determination and fruition). Understanding these components is what makes the difference between success and failure, she contends, offering countless anecdotes to support her claim. She stresses that leaders must help "institutionalize the proclivity for change," which, she maintains, can be "their most important legacy." Eschewing a formal business tone (she assumes her audience knows how to execute strategy), Duck frames her argument well, and even includes elements from her personal life to explain the emotional components of change. While the ultimate responsibility for managing change lies with those with the most authority, her message is pertinent to managers at all levels. Refreshing and to the point, Duck offers corporate leaders uncommon business advice in this evolving age of bricks, clicks and bricks-and-clicks.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Change is now a constant topic, and it has been represented by many different metaphors. Change is cheese, it is five frogs on a log, it is a rampaging river. For Duck, a senior vice-president at Boston Consulting Group, change is now a monster, but in a seminal article she wrote for the Harvard Business Review in 1993, she likened managing change to balancing a mobile. Regardless, she warns that corporate transformations fail not because of operational tasks or systems but because of emotional factors and social issues. The unpredictable "human issues that swirl around change" constitute the "change monster." To understand and control the monster, Duck devised the "change curve" to represent the five phases of change: stagnation, preparation, implementation, determination, and fruition. Duck explains that each company's experience along the curve will vary; the phases, though, will always remain the same. She then uses two examples, one real (Honeywell) and one mythical, to illustrate successes and difficulties in negotiating the curve. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0609607715
• ISBN 13: 9780609607718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304