Unwritten Rules of the Game: Master Them, Shatter Them and Break Through the Barriers to Organizational Change

If you're like most managers today, chances are you're experiencing employee resistance to many of the important changes that your company needs to make. But, says Arthur D. Little consultant Peter Scott-Morgan, if you understood what really drives day-to-day behavior in an organization, you'd then be able to easily break through the barriers and get results. And what Dr. Scott-Morgan has discovered to be the silent engines of employees behavior are not official policies but unwritten rules.
[Following are some] examples: Written rule: to become a top manager, get broad experience; Unwritten rule: To get to the top, job hop as fast as possible; Written rule: managers are accountable for their P&Ls; Unwritten rule: protect your turf and watch your quarterlies.
In this book you'll learn how to ferret out and decipher all the unwritten rules that are driving day-to-day behavior in your company. You'll learn to pinpoint the specific causes of such organizational negatives as rebellion, gridlock, power plays, conspiracies, paranoia, isolation, lip service, and cynicism. You'll be armed with potent "Rulebusters" that are guaranteed to destroy the power of the most damaging unwritten rules that are insidiously at work in your organization.
Plus you'll learn how to internalize the unwritten rules of the game as a core skill; use unwritten rules to decode success as well as failure; manage change when everyone else is suffering from "change fatigue" and "initiative overload"; view your business from the perspective of the individual, because that's the only route to sustainable high performance; learn from real-life case studies - including examples from companies whose initiatives failed; conduct examples from companies optimally selected, cleverly directed interviews that will enable you to start making the connections you need to make between unwritten rules and unintended side effects.
Written in 65 mini-chapters, all wryly on target in their analysis of human nature and human foibles, and featuring New Yorker-style cartoons that emphasize major points, this is a book that is at once breezy and brilliant - one likely to become both a best-seller and a classic.

In this pragmatic guide to making change initiatives work, Scott-Morgan relates his successful experience as a consultant in change management. He describes the "unwritten rules" that thwart success and shows how to analyze the motivators, enablers, and triggers that help to shed light on these barriers. Kudos to Scott-Morgan for opening his consultant's bag of tricks, literally walking the reader through a typical change-management process-something from which any organization would benefit. Targeted CEOs will likely find this process useful, although they may also need a lot of help making it work. A worthy addition to change-management collections, this is strongly suggested for larger public and academic libraries.
Dale Farris, Groves, Tex.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.