Change Without Pain: How Managers Can Overcome Initiative Overload, Organizational Chaos, and Employee Burnout (Hardcover)

by Eric Abrahamson (Author) "Cisco is not anomaly and it is perhaps unfair to single it out..." (more)
Key Phrases: structural recombinants, people recombinants, organizational plumbing, Westland Helicopters, Peter Browning, Con Edison (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"a starting point for thinking about change in the paradoxical context of continuity." -- Financial Times, 8 January, 2004

...a good deal of practical advice, especially when discussing painless change in company structure or in a management team. -- The Economist, July 26th 2004

Product Description

For more than two decades, businesses have been warned to "change or perish." Yet a growing number of companies are perishing because of change. What's going on?

Columbia Business School professor Eric Abrahamson argues that while change is necessary for companies to grow and prosper, many organizations have blindly taken the mandate too far. The "creative destruction" advocated by change champions has resulted in a painful cycle of initiative overload, change-related chaos, and widespread employee cynicism.

To reverse this cycle, Abrahamson says, companies must learn to change how they change. Drawing on a decade of research and dozens of company examples, this book offers a positive new approach to change called "creative recombination." Rather than obliterating and then reinventing anew, creative recombination seeks sustainable, repeatable transformation by reconfiguring the people, structures, culture, processes, and networks the company already has. Abrahamson offers a broad toolkit of techniques for achieving smoother, more cost-efficient, less painful organizational change-and helpful guidance for how and when to implement each tool.

A refreshing paradigm for change has arrived-and companies don't need anything new, revolutionary, or radical to make it happen. The inspiring result: Change will actually work, for a change.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (December 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 157851827X
• ISBN-13: 978-1578518272
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #92,907 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A controversial approach to change, February 12, 2004

By A Customer

Finally a management book that will create a little controversy.

Change Without Pain criticizes subtly, but unabashedly, the advocates of big, destructive, revolutionary change. Authors like Garry Hammel, Leading the Revolution, or Sarah Kaplan and Richard Foster, Creative Destruction. Remember, Hammel is the guru, and Kaplan and Foster, the McKinsey consultants, who held up Enron in their books as a model of revolutionary change.

For my money, Change Without Pain, is worth reading for two reason. Firstly, the book introduces a completely different and novel approach to change. An approach that turns almost everything written about change management on its head. The book is not the final say. It is a start, however, in a very promising direction that others will have to follow up on.

Secondly, the book is worth reading because it provides a long overdue "poke in the eye" of a small group of gurus and consultants. Advice givers like Kotter, Hammel, Kaplan and Foster whom advocated the most disrupting approach to change with little regard to the risk to companies, the financial cost to shareholders, and the human tole placed on employees executing these changes.

You can be certain of one thing, this book is going to challenge, annoy, and even infuriate the change-management establishment.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Injects some common sense into corporate change strategies, February 13, 2004

By	Richard M. Douglass (Atlanta, Georgia United States) - See all my reviews

Having been a consultant with a large consulting firm for many years, I have seen many "transformational" fads come and go. Consultants and change management gurus, of course, have a certain vested interest in pushing the "new, new thing." And usually there is at least some kernel of truth or insight in these pronouncements. But marketing puffery aside, it is interesting to see how many corporations feel compelled to jump on these bandwagons. It strikes me as an example of what C.S. Lewis referred to as "chronological snobbery," that is, assuming something is no longer good simply because it is old.

Abrahamson's book tackles this notion in a very thought-provoking way. His idea of recombining things from the corporate basement, so to speak, is a nice metaphor for thinking critically and discerningly about what it is you need to accomplish and what resources you already have at your disposal to make it so. I think he provides an excellent counterbalance to the advice of many who advocate constant, dramatic change.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A poorly written book on an important topic, March 30, 2004

By A Customer

The ability to manage organizational change is a crucial element of being a good manager. Unfortunately, Abrahamson's book does not do an effective job of teaching the lessons needed to learn change management skills. In his book, Abrahamson makes it apparent that he is a career academic with no real experience as a business leader. His examples are trite and unhelpful, and the lessons he tries to teach are either painfully obvious or too theoretical to ever be of any real help in a business setting. For a good book on this topic with solid advice and relevant examples, try either "Change Management" or "Strategic Organizational Change."