Change management is easy, relatively. It's a one-off process that is often painful but quick. What is very hard, however, is building a systemic change capability in an organization so that it changes not once, but all the time.
Janice Klein, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who uses operations management principles to frame such a process of change, is uniquely qualified to bridge the worlds of operations and organizations. She taught operations management for eight years at Harvard Business School; prior to HBS she was at GE shouldering both manufacturing and human resource responsibilities. While her book draws on thirty years of experience and academic research, it is written for practicing managers.
A key aspect of systemic change requires finding and developing people in the organization—at every level of the hierarchy—who are both insiders and outsiders. Klein discusses at length how to get the best from both perspectives. As she observes, "Outsider-insiders play a pivotal role in introducing new ideas or processes. By their very nature, they are able to see connections that pure insiders miss because they have a different way of seeing the world or explaining why things appear to happen as they do.… At the same time, they are able to leverage the existing culture by living within the organization, another theme that is in the creation of true change."
Two best practice cases from engineering and manufacturing companies (dubbed BigFab and HiTech) help to illustrate the concepts.
Table of Contents:
- What Is True Change?
- The Process of Pulling Change
- Aligning Pulls Across the Organization
- Working Within the Existing Culture to Pull Change
- Preparing Insiders to Wear Two Hats
- Preparing Outsiders to Wear Two Hats
- Getting to the Right Place at the Right Time to Pull Change
- Maintaining Outsider-Insider Perspectives
Appendix: Research Methodology