Getting Your Shift Together: Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change

In today's business environment, changes come in staggering succession: mergers, acquisitions, rightsizing, downsizing, restructuring. As accountants, lawyers and executives scrutinize these changes for bottom-line impact, they pay little attention to how change will affect an organization's culture or how its culture will affect change. This dooms many corporate change initiatives before they even start. A whopping 75 percent of change initiatives fail within the first three years. Getting Your Shift Together: Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change explains - in plain English - why companies need to conduct a cultural assessment like Cultural Due Diligence before embarking on any change initiative.

Bouchard and Pellet say that nothing can be more deadly to an organization's long-term ability to sustain change and grow than a dysfunctional "incongruent" culture that depends on the old "do as I say, not as I do" method of leadership. An "incongruent" culture destroys morale, decimates productivity and encourages workers to resist and even sabotage change. Therefore, the authors offer techniques and tools, such as their own Cultural Due Diligence process, to measure the congruence of an organization's culture and to reshape it into a healthy - and successful - congruent culture.

If youll pardon us for saying it, authors Lizz Pellet and P.J. Bouchard really know their shift!

Lizz Pellet, for instance, brings more than 15 years of experience in human resources, cultural integration, training and development, and Total Quality Management to the table in her role as CEO of EMERGE. Lizz has held key management and leadership positions in a broad spectrum of industries. Before getting her shift together to form EMERGE, she held quality-management and human-resources positions with international manufacturing firms, major health-care organizations, and various service industries. Along the way, she has been a director for a major hotel chain, internal management consultant for a major acute-care hospital, and quality director for a major international manufacturing firm.

Lizz has served as key facilitator at strategic planning and visioning sessions with major manufacturing and health-care firms. She was a key player in a number of turnarounds, including one high-tech firm that was in Chapter 11. Lizz has managed the cultural-assessment and cultural-integration processes for high-tech firms going through mergers. She has also successfully led internal mergers and reengineering projects.

Lizz is co-author of Getting Your Shift Together: Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change Introducing Cultural Due Diligence. She earned a Bachelor of Science in business from Lesley College, Cambridge, and a Fellowship in Change Management from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She is certified in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Lizz serves on the board of NAWBO National Association of Women Business Owners.

P.J. Bouchard has seen plenty of shift, as well. For her part, P.J., president of EMERGE, specializes in cultural assessment, cultural transformation and cultural integration. P.J. has more than 15 years of human-resources and organizational-development experience, earned in a variety of professional leadership positions, such as Director of Organizational Development, Director of Human Resources and Director of Training and Development for major, international manufacturing firms and health-care organizations. She also has held executive management roles in higher education and various service industries.

The co-author of Getting Your Shift Together is dedicated to helping companies successfully learn to manage change by creating the right culture. The hallmark of her success has been her ability to create healthy cultures that create solid bottom-line results.

Intimately involved in many major acquisitions, P.J. has successfully led several integration teams through the transition process. She has worked with firms across the country to not only assess their current organizational culture, but also to help them develop a culture that has improved the return on investment. P.J. has managed a number of organizational redesigns and has successfully restructured three major organizations.

She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Organizational Behavior from Lesley College, Cambridge and a Master of Business Administration degree from Boston University, Boston. She is certified in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and serves on the board of St. Marys Food Bank in Phoenix.