The Change Monster

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.

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.