The End of Change: How Your Company Can Sustain Growth and Innovation While Avoiding Change Fatigue

In this conceptually challenging treatise on business management, the authors clearly diagnose a major contemporary corporate problem: ""Inexorable worldwide pressure for performance is leading to change initiatives, which result in greater disruption, which make it more difficult to change, which builds the pressure for performance, which leads to more initiatives."" So what's a manager to do? The answer, according to these four consultants at Arthur D. Little, is to build organizational structures that will best adapt to the required rates of change and then institute change systematically. To this end, they outline four conceptual organizational structures--the pyramid, cube, cylinder and sphere. Naturally, the pyramid is the form most resistant to change (think of the World Bank), while a spherical structure is most open (a reasearch and development lab, for example). While structures can be mixed within a company--the finance department may be a pyramid while production is configured like a cylinder--it's crucial to know the type of structure one is dealing with when introducing anything new. The authors offer three ways to present a change initiative and suggest techniques for implementing them (e.g., always build bridges off old structures and minimize uncertainty to keep disruption to a minimum). Many managers will find the argument too theoretical, and long for self-diagnostic tests and more ""how to."" But to their credit, the authors frame the issue well, giving readers a context to apply when thinking about the change process. (Sept.)