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Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organization Change: How the Best Companies Ensure Meaningful Change and Sustainable Leadership (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)

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"In September 2003, Lou Carter's Best Practices Institute performed a research study on trends and practices in leadership development and organization change. BPI asked organizations in a range of industries, sizes, and positions in the business cycle to identify their top methods of achieving strategic change and objectives. The study found that there is a strong demand, in particular, in the following areas of leadership development and organization change (leadership development, performance management, organization development and change, innovation and service enhancement, and coaching). Louis Carter, David Ulrich, and Marshall Goldsmith (editors) say that our continual research in the area of best practices in leadership development and change strongly support the assumptions and organizational case studies that we profile within this book (from Introduction)."

Louis Carter et al. write that `'this book contains step-by-step approaches, tools, instruments, models, and practices for implementing the entire process of leadership development and change. The components of this book can be practically leveraged within your work environment to enable a leadership development or change initiative. The exhibits, forms, and instruments at the back of each chapter may be used within the classroom or by your organization development team or learners.''

In this context, BSI defines a six-phase system to leadership and organization change, which may be seen in most of the case studies in this book. The phases and case studies are listed below:

I- PHASES:

(1). Business Diagnosis, (2). Assessment, (3). Program Design, (4). Implementation, (5). On-the-Job Support, (6). Evaluation.

II- CASES:

(1). Agilent Technologies. Inc. - Electronics with 36,000 employees. (2). Corning - Communications with 23,300 employees. (3). Delnor Hospital - Health care with 1,382 employees. (4). Emmis Communications - Media with 3,080 employees. (5). First Consulting Group - Business services with 1,775 employees. (6). GE Capital - Finance with 315,000+ employees. (7). Hewlett-Packard - Computer hardware with 141,000 employees. (8). Honeywell Aerospace - Technology and manufacturing with 100,000+ employees. (9). Intel - Manufacturing, electronics with 78,700 employees. (10). Lockheed Martin - Aerospace and defense with 125,000 employees. (11). Mattel - Consumer products with 25,000 employees. (12). McDonald's Corporation - Leisure, restaurants with 413,000 employees. (13). MIT - Education with 9,400 employees. (14). Motorola - Telecommunications with 97,000 employees. (15). Praxair - Chemicals with 25,010 employees. (16). St. Luke's Hospital and Health Network - Health care with 5,500 employees. (17). StorageTek - Computer hardware with 7,100 employees. (18). Windber Medical Center - Health care with 427 employees.

Finally, as Louis Carter et al. say, ``although each organization differs with respect to area of expertise, amount of yearly revenues, and types of initiatives undertaken, each shares a similar goal of creating more successful and results-oriented organizations by way of organizational change and leadership development.''

I highly recommend this handbook to all leaders who want to achieve organization change and leadership development.

Leading the change in the contemporary business environment, which is surcharged with chaotic competition, is becoming a serious challenge for business as well as social organizations. In this scenario, Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organizational Change is a significant contribution towards designing change efforts in variegated situations. The cases in it are illustrations of strategies, structures and processes of leading change management by some of the best performing global organizations. David Norton of the Balanced Score Card fame had rightly pointed out that "managing strategy is, in essence, managing change." The best practice cases mapped in the book tell us how this has actually happened in some of the most successful global organizations.

These narrations and analyses tell the reader the tools and methods used in leading the change processes and help her get the answers to several intriguing questions: why some leaders are able to use these tools to change more dramatically; how successful leaders conceive new ideas, engineer consensus on their adoption and internalize them throughout the length and breadth of the organization; the constant pull and trade-off between short-term and long-term viewpoints eventually leading to a strong management process; how visionary leaders took big and decisive moves; how sense of urgency could be nurtured among individuals and teams; how change management processes could be linked with quantifiable business results; what are the critical success and failure factors in change efforts; how vision is created and communicated to give clear mandates to people; how resistance to change is overcome in short- and the long term; and thus how change culture gets internalized to become a way of organizational life? In sum, the best practice cases remind us that the key to effective leadership is to stay focused on change, making all others in the organization do the same, and eventually create excitement to remain committed to change.

This book is a useful new resource for thought and action leaders in developing competitive position in today's changing business environment. It maps the emerging paradigm of leadership development for managing change. It helps the reader designing and implementing change initiatives and evaluating their effectiveness. The book will be seen as a professional guide towards discovering winning and successful business strategies. Corporate leaders, CEOs, boards of directors and change masters, trainers, organizational development (OD) designers and project leaders have useful lessons to learn from these best practices. The case studies themselves show that each organization is distinct in adopting their change path, processes and methods. Yet they underscore that all organizations had constant willingness to learn. Some of the other commonalities among them included: collaboration, humility, ethical working, innovation, regard for people expectation and psyche, and passion for change. Organizations across the globe will learn important how-to lessons about the contexts in which these virtues were demonstrated and how specific measurable results were realized through leading the change effort.


Dr. Debi S. Saini
Professor of Human Resource Management
Management Development Institute
Gurgaon-1220 001 INDIA


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I think this is for the practitioner. In fact it is lack of accademic focus, but it has the great merit to show how the OD and HRD is implemented in field actually . Throuhg this book I can see the overall landscpe of practical OD.

As a graduate student in International Relations I study the effects of poor leadership all over the world. So you can imagine how important insightful words on leadership are in this day and age. Mr. Carter has given us the tools to make us better leaders all we have to do is use them! I highly recommend we all read this book.

Once again Louis Carter and a team of experts have written a brilliant book on leadership development. As a person working with organizations to enhance their leadership systems I highly recommend this book as a must have for their library. Great case studies and best practices to benchmark.

Chris Webb, Director, The Ariel Group