About the Author
Lance A. Berger is CEO of Lance A. Berger & Associates, Ltd. located in Bryn Mawr, Pa. The firm provides comprehensive organization, compensation, human resources, and other change management based services to major corporations, professional services firms, and middle market corporations engaged in significant development activity. Prior to establishing his consulting firm, Berger served as managing partner of MLR Publishing Company, a worldwide business advisory, executive information, and communication concern; he also served as president of MLR Biomedical Division. He joined MLR from the Hay Group, Inc., where he served as a general partner and managing director for the worldwide compensation practice and coordinator of all strategy and human resources practices. Berger is the co-editor of The Compensation Handbook (1991), cor-author of The Change Management Handbook (1994), and publisher of The Change Manager newsletter. Martin J. Sikora is the editor of Mergers and Acquisitions, and lectures at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania on mergers and acquisitions. Before taking the editorship of M&A, Sikora was vice president of Sindlinger & Co., an opinion research and economic forecasting firm. He is a contributor to The Mergers and Acquisitions Handbook, and co-author of The Change Management Handbook. His experience includes fourteen years as a business, financial, and economics reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Dorothy R. Berger is managing director of Lance A. Berger & Associates, Ltd. She coordinates all organizational activities for both the publishing and consulting areas, while participating in a variety of consulting assignments in the change management area. She is production editor for The Change Manager newsletter, as well as other in-house publications. Her experience also includes twenty years in the field of education.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Thomas Watson, Jr., former chairman of IBM said, "It's tougher to keep a business great than it is to build a great business." It is even tougher to keep a business great when the pace of change is so rapid. To keep a company great, it must continuously grow. To continuously grow, a company must be capable of quickly creating, anticipating, and responding to change more quickly and effectively than its competitors. When the growth process is blocked, a company cannot survive. Growth processes have been stunted by the endless array of fads, like reengineering, which were ostensibly designed to help the growth process but have effectively shut it down.
Our prescription for "keeping a company great" is to use a four-stage process for leading growth from within the organization. These stages are described within the book and are summarized here: 1. Taking Back Control of Your Organization
The first step in assuring that the organization remains on, or returns to, the growth curve requires the careful selection and management of the internal leaders and external advisors who will direct the growth effort. The leaders must then engage in an effort to overcome inertia by eliminating the residue of failed and incomplete change initiatives. Once this is accomplished the firm must establish specific accountability for implementing company-wide growth from top to bottom. A set of eight principles are provided in chapter four to guide the reader through stage one. 2. Mastering the Change Management Process
Once change leaders have taken back control of their organization, they need to build a foundation for sustaining growth. This foundation is called the Alignment Blueprint. It is developed and refined on a continual basis through careful implementation of a four-stage change process. The Alignment Blueprint defines nine aligned assumptions which guide the growth process. Sustaining organizational growth is made easier when organizations master this management process. The four stage process and the nine alignment blueprint assumptions are discussed in chapter five. 3. Building the Change-Responsive Organization
After a blueprint is established through the change management process, the organization must institutionalize the resilience required by its alignment blueprint. The process of institutionalization is achieved by simultaneously implementing four synchronized processes covering strategy, operations (delivery systems), culture, and rewards. Chapter six presents a set of guidelines describing an alternative approach to creating these processes. 4. Building Change-Responsive People
A change-responsive organization is developed when its employees are self-reliant. Self-reliance provides the security necessary for employees to raise their level of risk-taking. Raising their level of risk-taking enables them to become active participants in the change process. To be self-reliant, employees must shift their mind-set from being company-employed to being self-employed. Chapter seven explores the relationship between the concept of self-employment and the company's change management process. It also describes the behaviors of change-responsive people and a model for building a person change plan.
We are less interested in tearing apart the reengineering metaphor and its apostles in the RAIC complex than we are in setting forth a more positive alternative to building change-responsive organizations and people. Our approach involves setting up a conceptual framework that will enable everyone in the organization to create, anticipate, and respond to changes for their products, services, and skills in the volatile markets of the future.
