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Executive Interviews: Interview with Michael Beer on Change Management
June 2007
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By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
Michael Beer
Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, Chairman and co-founder of TruePoint a research based consultancy.
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You have observed, "The brutal fact
is that about 70% of all change
initiatives fail. In our experience, the
reason for most of those failures is that
in their rush to change their
organizations, managers end up
immersing themselves in an alphabet
soup of initiatives." If this were the
case, why change management
initiatives at all? Are those initiatives
not required in the first place? Or is it
that these initiatives are to be guided
by more subtle and sublime
processes?
Yes, initiatives are required and are
part of all change efforts. There are a
number of criteria to be considered
when evaluating their effectiveness
that is implied in the quote above.
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These are spelt out in The Critical Path
to Corporate Renewal and Why
Change Program do Not Produce
Change, HBR, 1990. Are the
initiatives occurring in the context of a
broader change effort articulated by
the leaders and rooted in a shared
(with key people in the organization)
diagnosis of the organization's
effectiveness? Initiatives fail when the
CEO embraces a fad and imposes it on
the organization through a staff group.
Another way to state this is that
initiatives fail if they do not take place
in a context that prepares readiness
for change stretch goals, clarity
about why these goals are legitimate
and a high involvement process of
diagnosis and planning for the
initiatives. Ask yourself how
committed thousands of people will
be, if asked to go through a leadership
or quality program, have these leaders
not spent a lot of time involving
people in a dialogue about why
change is needed and have
involved key people in a diagnosis
Proactive change is a function of a gap between managerial
intent and there ality they see now or in the future. Leaders
who do not initiate proactive change will never build agreat
company like GE and Southwest Airlines
INTERVIEW 5
that led to the programs. Our findings
are that cynicism occurs and
commitment to the initiative is
reduced. A second major reason for initiative
failure, connected to these earlier
points, is that top-down programs
assume that one solution fits all subunits
of the organization. Leaders of
sub-units we studied, agreed with the
potential value of the initiative they
were being asked to undertake. They
were not committed to them and did
not aggressively implement them
because their diagnosis of their own
sub-units led them to see the
problems facing their own business
differently than leaders at the top
different sub-unit goals, strategies,
cultures, skills and readiness. In short,
one size almost does not fit all parts of
the corporation. When Jack Welch
initiated Six Sigma he did it with a lot
of involvement and it was in the
context of a broader change effort that
had been underway and accepted for
several years. Even so, my reading of
that effort is that managers did not
always feel that it applied to their unit
as well as it did to others. Does Six
Sigma apply in GE Capital as well as it
does in the Appliance business? Finally, because top management can
easily launch a top down initiative
they tend to launch too many in their
eagerness to create rapid change. The
result, our research shows, is
overload. None of the initiatives are
implemented with focus and
sufficient resources and none could
achieve the desired results. -
Why do you think some change
agents are successful while many are
not? For instance, Howard Stinger at
Sony. Even those who are successful
once (initially) are not consistently
successful. Why is it so? For instance,
Ed Zander at Motorola and Carlos
Ghosn at Nissan Motors.
Leaders succeed or fail due to their
personal skills, change strategies
chosen, as well as the degree of
favorability of the conditions for
change. I do not know the reasons for
success or failure in the cases you
mention, but I suspect that if we
examined carefully the situations
these leaders faced, we would find
differences the extent to which
circumstances made it relatively easy
to raise the level of dissatisfaction
with the status quo, the amount of
time the situation allowed leaders to
succeed, the support of the boards of
directors, the nature of the culture and
the extent it was entrenched. There
were probably also differences in the
change strategies and skills employed.
1.
Change Management Case Studies
2. ICMR
Case Collection
3.
Case Study Volumes
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