Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

There was nothing slanderous about most of the posts. The school forced students to remove their post by threatening to kick them out of school and leaned on Amazon to remove the remaining. While there are many tremendous professors at Columbia, Eric Abrahamson is not one of them. I have only read part of the book but had this man as a professor and have to say he lacks the work experience necessary to teach future corporate leaders in a real world context. For a better idea on the strength of the professors at Columbia Business School I recommend reading books by Kathryn Harrigan, Joe Stiglitz, Bruce Greenwald, and Frederic Mishkin. FYI, Amazon did not allow me the option of giving zero stars.

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.

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.

It's my job to be familiar with change methodologies. So I approached this book with the thought of "not another change model". But I was quickly drawn into Eric Abrahamson fresh perspective on change. Like him, I have experiences in which a recombinant method would have produced long-term organisational improvement. This book is a good read for every practioner who has to have several ideas up his or her sleeve at all times.

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."

This book was a complete eye opener. It really presents a completely different take on the topic of managing change. In addition, its full of rich examples, of practical advice and tools that I can put into action. Good stuff for my business.
Also, found the web site for the book www.ChangeWithoutPain.com; although it is under construction..., is also quite useful.

As someone who has worked in both the public and private sectors (for a number of years heading my own business), I found Abrahamson's book to be a breath of fresh air. He provides a clear, non-dogmatic approach to management that is rooted in real-life situations and behavior. His clear and accessible writing style helped to give this reader the insights needed to effectively analyze management situations and envision their solution. This is a useful and accessible piece of work.

Wonderfully written. Many many good examples. Fresh look on the subject of managing change. Useful. Practical. Advice on Culture, People, Social Networks, Structure and Process. Ideas about how to control the pace of change and how to make change less disruptive.

5 stars!

Finally some good old common sense about how to manage change - but common sense is so bloody uncommon.

The approach in this book is so compelling because it is how most of us manage change successfully day to day. Not by bringing in expensive consultants to rip everything apart and start over. But rather, by finding what we are good at and leveraging our strength to make things happen.

We were doing it all along, we just did not have a name for it, a way to think about it, and a set of techniques to systematize it.

I've only read part of this book but wish to share that it offers some fresh ideas that all managers should be able to relate to, regardless of their field. Many of the titles in this field are vague, idealistic rantings from academics. On the contrary, I've found this book to be cognizant of the real-world pressures and challenges that managers face.

Too add to what a previous reviewer said, the negative reviews seem more like personal attacks on the author than anything else. They are not substantiated and in my mind, fall short of being useful. My initial impression upon reading them was that the author must have done something right to elicit such impassioned responses. In that sense, maybe an academic's perspective is not so distant as some might think...