Book Description
For every business, the choice is stark: "Change--or die." At any moment, fully two-thirds of America's companies claim to be in the midst of some type of organizational revamping. We don't need research from the Harvard Business School (even though it has been conducted) to tell us that most of these initiatives will fail. The business landscape is littered with the carcasses of giants who were unable to adapt to change--Digital, Prime, Wang, and Polaroid, to name a few. What many companies fail to recognize is that organizational change needs to come from within, no matter how profound the external forces. Positive change requires "change agents" throughout the organization--those individuals who can translate the strategic vision of leaders into pragmatic behavior. They will be the early adopters of the new values, actions, and skills required by the company. This book identifies the qualities of great change agents and how these skills can be mastered to serve as a catalyst for change throughout the organization. Illustrating these principles through examples from world-class organizations, Dealy and Thomas demonstrate the techniques for acquiring and executing those skills-and how corporate leaders can encourage and reward this behavior, creating a culture of risk-taking, innovation, and a focus on the future. From seasoned executives to entry-level employees, readers will learn that great change agents: * challenge the status quo; * stoke the fire of creativity; * embrace the necessity of conflict; * manage risk rather than avoid it; and * develop new change agents. Bringing the process of change out of the realm of the analysts and consultants and to the front lines, the authors show you how to thrive in a world that demands nothing less than continuous change.
Customer Reviews:
Very concise. Elementary. Lecture notes like and little fun to read.......2006-10-26
As there's no table of content of it on Amazon, I would like to take the privilege to type one for you:-
Ch1. The Inevitablility of Change
Ch2. The Great Change Mistakes
Ch3. The Change Agent Solution
Ch4. Great Change Agents Challenge the Status Quo
Ch5. Great Change Agents Embrace the Necessity of Conflict
Ch6. Great Change Agents Manage Risk, Not Avoid It
Ch7. Great Change Agents Stoke the Fire of Creativity
Ch8. Great Change Agents Develop New Ones
Ch9. Change Expectations and the New MBA
Despite of its 93 content page, key points/advice to any business executive committing to organizational change are there. Nevertheless, the shortage of real stories do make it boring and lecture notes like. For green aspiring/ssigned change agents/facilitators who want to learn some priniciples fast, this is not a bad choice. Otherwise,..........
p.s. IMHO, the book title "Change or Die" is the best thing one can find in it.
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De-Coca-Colonization: Making the Globe from the Inside Out
Steven Flusty
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415945380 |
Book Description
A novel theoretical account of globalization, De-Coca-Colonization argues that we must move away from top-down visions of the processes at work and concentrate on how ordinary people who are locked out of power structures create "globalities" of their own. Taking us on a kaleidoscopic tour through the worlds of ordinary people and their deceptively prosaic commodities, the author demonstrates that the little-g globalization is where much of the action reconstituting global social life is happening.
Book Description
For any organization to compete successfully in today's market, it must focus on building not only from the outside but from the inside as well. Shows the correlation between successful people management and the bottom line. Explains how involving employees in the planning and implementation process and allowing them to see the fruits of their labor (the sense of connection between daily work and long-term customer success) benefits the organization. The aim here is to show how focusing on organizational capability will not only meet short-term financial requirements, but also build a solid foundation for the future.
Customer Reviews:
Not a very useful book for the complete perspective.......1999-08-06
This book focusses on the "human" side of building organizational capabilities. It is a pretty good treatise of how HR and individual development can be used to achieve competetive advantage. The model for competitive advantage given in the book makes interesting reading. But the biggest drawback of the book is the lack of illustrative examples. There are hardly any useful cases. In addition there could have been some focus on value chain activites and how organizational capability responds to that. The book also doesnot focus at all on some of key components of capability like technology, time etc. There is also no clear model/ process given which shows the transition of capabilities to competencies. The emphasis of the book also seems to be how to build organizational capabilty - there are really no clues provided about how strategy should be shaped by capablity.
A must for those seeking to sustain change.......1998-09-24
Organizational Capability provides a good explaination of all the peices required to achieve, change, and sustain an organization's competencies. The book really focuses on competency and not capability. This makes the title a misnomer. However it is a worthwhile read for anyone contemplating or leading broad scale change.
The book is definately not for people from Human Resources as between the lines there are some fairly cogent criticisms of traditional HR Departments and their operations.
The only drawbacks to the book are its week testimonials. Frequent references to Apple Computer, GE and others appear weak and less than anecdotal. A few strong case studies would have raised the value of the book dramatically. While this shouldn't keep you from reading it, it does cause you to wade through "fluff" from time to time.
Book Description
On a landscape that seems to be transforming itself with every new technology, marketing tactic, or investment strategy, businesses rush to embrace change by trading in their competencies or shifting their focus altogether. All in the name of innovation.
But this endless worrying, wriggling, and trend watching only alienates companies from whatever it is they really do best. In the midst of the headlong rush to think "outside the box," the full engagement responsible for true innovation is lost. New consultants, new packaging, new marketing schemes, or even new CEOs are no substitute for the evolution of our own expertise as individuals and as businesses.
Indeed, for all their talk about innovation, most companies today are still scared to death of it.
To
Douglas Rushkoff, this disconnect is not only predictable but welcome. It marks the happy end of a business cycle that began as long ago as the Renaissance, and ended with the renaissance in creativity and collaboration we're going through today.
The age of mass production, mass media, and mass marketing may be over, but so, too, is the alienation it engendered between producers and consumers, managers and employees, executives and shareholders, and, worst of all, businesses and their own core values and competencies.
American enterprise, in particular, is at a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with acquisitions, tactics, efficiencies, and ad campaigns, many businesses have dangerously lost touch with the process -- and fun -- of discovery.
"American companies are obsessed with window dressing," Rushkoff writes, "because they're reluctant, no, afraid to look at whatever it is they really do and evaluate it from the inside out. When things are down, CEOs look to consultants and marketers to rethink, rebrand, or repackage whatever it is they are selling, when they should be getting back on the factory floor, into the stores, or out to the research labs where their product is actually made, sold, or conceived."
Rushkoff backs up his arguments with a myriad of intriguing historical examples as well as familiar gut checks -- from the dumbwaiter and open source to Volkswagen and The Gap -- in this accessible, thought-provoking, and immediately applicable set of insights. Here's all the help innovators of this era need to reconnect with their own core competencies as well as the passion fueling them.
Customer Reviews:
A paradigm shifter.......2007-04-27
A great book. Reading this was like a breath of fresh air and really changed my thinking about technology, innovation, design and the hope for creating a livable world.
Great Wake-Up Call.......2007-04-02
One of the best books on taking an outside look into how we do business, live and experience the world as people, not just consumers.Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out
Great scope and depth.......2007-03-16
I have read tons of books on business practice and ethos. Rushkoff brought a great mix of theory and practical examples that are working in the real world of business. This book is the business version of "positive psychology", which advises that we develop our strengths and most problems will self correct. In this case it is, pursue your deepest values and you won't have to spend all your resources on marketing. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is involved in an organization at any level. I am a pastor of a church and it has provided many thought provoking concepts to explore in our context.
Interesting new perspective on creativity and innovation.......2007-02-25
I'll admit, it took me awhile to really get into this book. Once I got through the first couple of chapters of "Get Back in the Box" though, I couldn't wait to read more of it.
The author, Douglas Rushkoff, feels that we're in the midst of a renaissance in creativity and collaboration. As he puts it, "genuine creativity is a result not of out-of-the-box thinking, but of true expertise." Here's a great example he used partway through the book: The person that decided (years ago) to put a VCR and TV into one device wasn't really innovating. The person who came up with TiVo, on the other hand, was a genius and someone who truly had a handle on people's viewing habits.
He's got an entire chapter on what he refers to as "social currency." The retailers featured as noteworthy examples in this chapter include B&N ("the store is a social hub"), Guitar Center ("it's a place to try out pretty much any piece of musical instrument there is--and to play on it for hours") and the Apple Store (described as "a little cathedral"). I tend to think Starbucks fits the mold as well. In fact, this chapter got me wondering about what would happen if Starbucks and Apple ever decided to create some co-branded shops...
Here are a few of the other interesting tidbits I highlighted throughout this book:
** ...customers don't want to communicate with brands anymore...they want to communicate through them...
** Although we claim we want more leisure time, we are much more likely to find an opportunity for genuinely fulfilling engagement and learning at work.
** It's about learning to tinker, to tweak, and to test the most basic, underlying assumptions of one's core business or technology.
** (Regarding focus groups...) In the vast majority of the dozens of groups I've observed or led, the purpose was less to glean new insights than to confirm the insights already held.
This turned out to be a very enjoyable book with all sorts of great observations.
It should be titled "Get off the sphere".......2007-02-09
Where to start...
I rated this 4 stars; 5 stars for being thought provoking and reinforcing my notions of what businesses should be concerned with, and 3 stars for the authors glaring examples of old-renaissance ideas/execution that didn't/don't work, yet providing nothing more than hindsight.
I agree with the previous post that the first half of the book was better than the second half. There are so many examples that are counter to the authors examples, but I'll give a few here.
First, in the absense of fullfilment opportunity exists. While Wal-Mart may be an evil company for some of its practices it also provides people in developing countries with a job, where none may have existed before. If you have no food and someone gives you a scrap then you at least survive to move onto a larger portion. If those who are employed at Wal-Mart cannot find another job that pays more than minimum wage then I would suggest going to a library and start learning...it has free internet access...
Second, many of the arguments made throughout the book are based on a circular reference that is incapable of breaking down, when in fact it would break down. If a=b=c=d...y=z and z=a then for values of a-z that fluctuate so does the continuum. Every example given in the book relating to whatever currency units are give follows the same principle: that at some point, hidden beneath the guise of logic and play, energy will need to be expended that is not optimally or even close to optimally what any person would normally do in search of or in realizing the new renaissance. This breaks the whole model and I suppose it also degrades innovation at the same time.
Third, open-source software, though trendy, has limitations. Imagine a world where function a is performed via single open-source project composing of a single developer, then fast-foward t years where function a is now performed by 1000 different projects each with 1000 developers (who share the same egos), in the meantime you have some number of function a demand satisfied by 1000 projects so a/1000. All of the sudden you have function b that people just though of at t+1 days, but only a small portion like 1% of function a projects are compatible...but the developers of function a projects not wanting their egos to be crushed realize this and perhaps migrate over to the small % of function a projects that are compatible...leaving the other 99% of function a projects to be picked up by some developer(s), whos egos aren't as big, to try and work something out with function b compatibility. Now you have function a compatible projects with a huge number of developers wanting to make their mark with function b, but the 99% of the people who utilize function a and now function b must switch to projects that are fully compatible and relearn, etc. The point is that people want recognition, however good or bad that may be, but it's the truth...even authors put their name, photo, etc.
Fourth, I agree that understanding your "core competencies" are very important and understanding the "source code" and "patterns" is nice, but what really got me was how high people must be in order to realize that this is the path to eternal bliss or "play." I mean who in their right mind would choose to clean out a septic tank as a way of "playing" or even perform surgery on someone's brain...just for fun, when you know that someone's life depended on whether you were qualified or not. If you aren't qualified then doesn't that introduce a classe system of sorts? Who would regulate this...would this person think that telling someone they are incompetent was "playing?" It's clear that any system which qualifies someone as being able to perform a specific action, no matter how much fun they might have, is clearly old renaissance and the illusion of new renaissance is just that (not in entirety, but practicality).
Fifth, while some people prefer to solve challenging problems, others would rather just sit around surfing, etc. What do we do with those people? Where would they get their surfboards, wax, wetsuits, food? I'll tell you who...the people that have enough resources at their disposal to just sit back and ponder how the old renaissance is coming to an end in favor of the new renaissance.
Sixth, peoples faith often becomes a paramount influence in the actions they undertake. Some are at extreme ends and radicalize what is otherwise a very moral and just view of how things should be. These radicals often carry out actions against others because their convictions are so strong and so outside of the middle that even if the middle moves it will not be enough so enough will be "encouraged." This artificial skewing leads to others ultimately forgoing "play" in order to build a counter-trend necessary to prevent skewing that is non-organic. In the end you have a reduction in pure innovation (good) and an increase in pure existence. I'm guessing that the author was too busy contemplating whether or not we could he didn't think whether or not we should...
Seven, the book discusses how currency became the demise of society as it pertains to interest, greed, etc. However, in the Paypal example he exalts that business for being upstanding and trying this new thing, but it ultimately fails because of the banks...yada, yada, yada. Anyways, Paypal was earning interest on the float vs. charging money for its service. How is that new renaissance? If we take the banks out of the equation so that interest is no longer accrued then who pays for the hosting, data, maybe it's those people who like to play in data centers. But then, who builds the steel racks, elevated floors, servers, ethernet cables, routers, switches, supplies power, constructs the building, stays up all night trying to figure out why no interest is being accrued :)
Well, that was more of a rant than anything else. I'm glad this book cemented my ideas about open-source software and about how so many company executives are in such disrepair. Innovation...hmmm...whenever I have a bug in software I usually just open a debugging program that I purchased and print-out the portion of code via a printer, utilizing a driver, written by some person of gets off on that sorta thing...but would they do it for free if there other needs weren't being met...I don't think so.
There's a reason why doctors get paid so much money, there's are reason why people do jobs they wouldn't otherwise do, there's a reason why the new renaissance only exists in the imagination of Gene Roddenberry. The have's and the have not's exist today, and perhaps in the 21st century we can combat much of this gap; however, until everyone is content with their existence and opportunity for existence then we will not reach the new renaissance. Indeed, it will only exist where truly innovative ideas take place...our isolated dreams...
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Human Resource Planning, published by Human Resource Planning Society on December 1, 2004. The length of the article is 6762 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Current approaches to HR strategies: inside-out versus outside-in.
Author: Patrick M. Wright
Publication:
Human Resource Planning (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2004
Publisher: Human Resource Planning Society
Volume: 27
Issue: 4
Page: 36(11)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Strategy from the Inside Out
Ian Turner , and
Dominic Swords
Manufacturer: Int. Cengage Business Press
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ASIN: 1861521928 |
Book Description
This book provides a thorough step-by-step guide to strategic thinking. Designed to take executives and management teams through the strategy process in a logical fashion, the book is aimed particularly at managers in medium-sized businesses or in business units within larger companies. This book provides a thorough introduction to the concepts surrounding business strategy, enabling managers to develop their strategic thinking for business success. It includes practical examples to illustrate concepts as well as pro-forma planning sheets to record the results of the planning exercise as you go through.
Book Description
Business insight from a 24-year-old multimillionaire and CEO
Ephren Taylor founded his first business at 12, and was a multimillionaire CEO merely a decade later. In Creating Success from the Inside Out, Taylor explains how he and other multimillionaire young entrepreneurs think about success and achievement. This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme, but honest insight into the mindset and skills it takes to get ahead. Taylor believes that every person has what it takes to succeed, if they can find the inspiration and creativity to think about success in the proper way. It's not what they wear, what they read, or where they go to school that determines success for today's young entrepreneurs, but how they think. This book offers readers straightforward advice on how to tell if they're going in the right direction. Inspirational, motivational, and informative, Creating Success from the Inside Out is the smart and timely response to the typical book of business advice.
Ephren W. Taylor (Overland Park, KS) founded his first company at the age of 12, became a millionaire at 16, and was the CEO of a multimillion-dollar corporation by the age of 23. Today, he is one of the youngest CEO's to ever run a publicly traded company. He leads City Capital Corp. which manages diversified investments.
Book Description
Steel Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Steel Industry is a remarkable story. Christopher Hall recounts the great downfall of "Big Steel" in America and the emergence of a new, reinvented steel industry from the ashes of the old. Beginning with the failures of Big Steel to respond to a changing world, Christopher Hall analyzes the powers and drives behind this "most basic" of industries, revealing how the "Rust Belt" of the 1970s and 1980s was created and how the death of the traditional steel industry devastated cities such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Youngstown. Hall then examines how pioneering entrepreneurs and engineers rebuilt the industry by recycling large supplies of scrap steel, giving way to a minimill industry that ultimately saved what was left of the old Big Steel mills.
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Steel Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Steel Industry.
Christopher G.L. Hall
Manufacturer: See notes
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0333698452 |
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- Church and Ministry Strategic Planning: From Concept to Success (Haworth Marketing and Resources) (Haworth Marketing and Resources)
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- Consumer Behavior: Building Marketing Strategy, 9/e, (with DDB Needham Data Disk)
- Cruising French Waterways
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- Developing a 'feact-based' marketing plan: this article provides a framework for preparing a "grounded in the facts" strategy to mobilize your foundry ... - Part II).: An article from: Modern Casting
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