Customer Reviews

Creating Contagious Commitment: Applying the Tipping Point to Organizational Change, 2nd edition

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In 2005 I started my journey through organizational change, with the first edition of Andrea Shapiro's Creating Contagious Commitment: Applying the Tipping Point to Organizational Change as my implementer's guide to successful change. Since 2005 I've learned a lot of lessons of what works-and what doesn't-when driving change. I'm excited to say the second edition of Creating Contagious Commitment captures and amplifies many of those lessons.

Believe Andrea when she says she wants to help you successfully implement your organization change initiatives. In my experience, Andrea lives up to her claim that her framework is "general enough to be applied to many initiatives and many organizations and specific enough for action planning."

The book's structure with logical chapters, clarifying diagrams and detailed chapter summaries makes it an accessible daily resource while you're implementing change. If you start to feel your change's momentum slowing, turn to Creating Contagious Commitment to find successful change truths (e.g., pay attention to the people side of change), organizational system change responses and explanations of the people of and levers for change.

Whether you're an experienced change agent or a novice, you'll achieve more success with Andrea Shapiro's Creating Contagious Commitment by your side.

As a survivor of many change initiatives in organisations I have worked for, I am weary of failed, over-hyped changes and the cynicism that they leave in their wake. As a manager of change, I have been frustrated by my inability to make things happen in the way I planned. And as a student and sometimes teacher of 'change management' I am familiar with the plethora of models and theories, and often frustrated by the gulf between sound theory and everyday practice.

Dr. Shapiro's achievement is that she has blended key ideas from some of the best theories of change into a powerful and practical 'mental model' that challenges us to confront our assumptions about what will and won't work, and why. If conventional wisdom about organisational change is so good, why is the failure rate of 'initiatives' so high? The book has been written to support training workshops of the same name, but also stands alone as a fresh and thought-provoking examination of an important and difficult subject. A worthwhile and insightful read for anyone confronting the thorny challenge of making important changes happen successfully in busy, over-stretched organisations populated by busy, over-stretched people.

The second edition sharpens-up some of the narrative, and introduces new and helpful examples.

As you read this, millions of well-intentioned corporate executives are planning thousands of doomed change efforts. Why? Steeped in the tradition of "hoping for A but doing B" they will needlessly waste millions of dollars and thousands of hours by doing what's expedient rather than embrace what Andrea Shapiro shows is a proven path to success. Much like bringing an Iphone instead of two cans and a string, her elegant model strips away the façade of Dilbert-esque practices leaders use which actually undermine their plans.